auntyorthodox:

Is there such thing as cissexism? And if so, are radical feminists cissexist?

No, we don’t even like being called cis. We are just womyn.

Radical feminists have been arguing there is no such thing as cisgender, being that gender is an artificial concept anyway, and so how can there be a default gender state? They say there can’t be—gender is imposed by the Patriarchy™ so the only gender states are accepting gender roles or rejecting them: there is no cisgender.

Gender is imposed by the Patriarchy™ AND the transgender crowd. You forgot an imposer there.

But if there has been a credible radical feminist attack on the concept of ‘cissexual,’ I haven’t seen it. Radical feminists usually lump ‘cisgender’ and ‘cissexual’ together, stepping around any of the differences between the concepts. Cisgender is such a weak idea that they hope they can push cissexual in the same barn when they burn it down.

So you are saying the problem is that cissexual and cisgender are very different? I disagree. Here are the definitions put forth by trans theorists:

cissexual: “people who are not transexual and who have only ever experienced their mental and physical sexes as being aligned” - Julia Sarano

cisgender: “individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity” - Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook

The only major discrepancy I see here is the ‘have only ever experienced’ and 'gender assigned at birth’ but this is still missing the point.

The trans community has made up a bunch of new genders and slapped some of them on womyn who are struggling to overcome a worldwide, 6,000+ year long oppression; we’re not too excited to have a whole new gender to deal with on top of 'feminine’ and all its lovely trappings.

If you truly understood feminist theory, this would be evident to you. I wouldn’t even have to say this.

The ideas are different, however, and I’ll concede that if gender is only socially imposed then cisgender is a silly idea. And even if gender has some biological origins (as seems likely from the evidence), gender isn’t so regimented that one sex has a monopoly on any gender behavior. A boy who plays with dolls is not “transgender,” nor is a girl who plays with trucks. Cisgender—what a peculiar notion.

Very peculiar.

But cissexual? It’s the opposite of transsexual, isn’t it? A transsexual is someone who has “gender dysphoria” (which itself is a unhelpful term) severe enough that they need to physically transform their birth sex. A cissexual is simply someone who is unburdened by feelings of gender (really sexual) dysphoria. There is no definite proof of what causes gender dysphoria, but there is enough medical evidence that transsexuals are physiologically distinct from cissexuals that it’s likely a cause will eventually be identified.

You may be right there. Psychopathy and Schizophrenia can now be seen on brain scans. The medical industry keeps evolving.

Radical feminists deny the evidence, arguing that without proof, evidence is meaningless. Radical feminists say that gender dysphoria is purely a psychological condition, one that’s caused by some paraphilia, self-hatred, or delusion. Or it’s caused by people rejecting gender roles enforced by the Patriarchy. It is anything except for what transsexuals assert it is—an innate sense that the sex they are born with isn’t the right one.

My grandfather truly believes at times that he is Cleopatra or Jesus. This is no joke. He once broke into my mother’s house and called the police to report that someone had broken into his daughter’s house. He tried to pay his bill at Denny’s with his driver’s license and thought that his grocery shopping receipt was a winning lottery ticket. He tried to sell his beat-up old car for 14 million dollars and tried to get my aunt to take him to the airport to help him find the gold beneath it. The color green makes him angry.

He believes with his whole heart and soul in those moments that what he perceives is reality.

Would I be hateful to suggest that perhaps his reality isn’t accurate? What about when he is really happy in his reality? What about when he thought his sister was the Big Bad Wolf and chased her around the house with an ax?

What radical feminists are trying to say is that the trans movement is damaging to women’s liberation. Whether or not your reality is the real reality is not the question. The question for us is when will womyn all over the world no longer be enslaved by men, and how do we accomplish this?

This attitude is demonstrative of cissexism. Why? Even if there isn’t a biological root cause of gender dysphoria (although there probably is), the medical community has determined that it’s real to the people who suffer from it. The medical community, through over sixty years of therapeutic research, has discovered that a combination of transition, HRT, and sex reassignment surgery helps relieve the symptoms of it. Researchers have found that most of us feel better and lead happier lives after transitioning. When radical feminists and other people with similar conservative attitudes say that one’s sex is set at birth and cannot change, and that nobody in their right mind would want to do so, what they are really saying is that the therapies that relieve the condition should not be offered, or that the therapies are snake oil. They are denying the severity or existence of the dysphoria.

No, I wouldn’t suggest that people who are suffering not be treated. I am only asking that the treatment not perpetuate a system that subjugates others. This would mean that a man cannot become a woman, because the notion of men becoming women hurts female human beings by undermining our status further in a system where we are already at the bottom.

What they are saying is this: transsexuals are crazy. The purported therapy is fraudulent. They deny they have the condition they claim they do; they deny the treatment is valid. Thus, transsexual people do not have valid condition, nor do they have a credible treatment. Or very simply, transsexual people are not credible or valid people. Cissexism.

You are just not womyn. That’s all. What you do hurts our hopes of liberation.

A cissexual person may experience varying degrees of body dysphoria, but not like a transsexual person does. For a cissexual, rejecting one’s birth sex is literally inconceivable. Critics of transsexualism, instead of trusting that a transsexual’s experiences are genuine, apply their skepticism and substitute their own rationale. Transsexual women? Easy—men who are trying to invade women’s spaces. Transsexual men? Easy—women who have been victimized by the patriarchy. It’s so simple, but so wrong. When pre-operative transsexual women use public locker rooms it just reinforces cissexist prejudices. That is a different discussion, however.

No it scares the crap out of us that there is a man in the women’s locker room. Many of us have been raped by males and don’t want to undress near one we don’t trust. We live in a Rape Culture and men do 99% of the raping, so we have valid reason to be frightened.

Is there such thing as cissexism? At the very minimum, denying the validity of a transsexual person’s condition and treatment is cissexist. Are radical feminists cissexist? The ones who are skeptical of transsexualism are definitionally cissexist. There are some radical feminists who acknowledge the reality of the condition but still delineate transsexuals as a different class from CLE women, and I think for valid reasons. Trans activists are sometimes too demanding of entitlements they will never earn, but tensions between trans activism and radical feminism does not excuse cissexism. Answering a wrong with a wrong is, well, not right.

You know what? I don’t even care right now. Here’s the thing. Feminism is about the liberation of women. We’ve got billions of men with their boots on our necks. They’ve had their boots there for thousands of years. We focus on women. Women are the class of people who have been oppressed for thousands of years. You wanna call cissexism? I am not even cis. I am a woman. Stop trying to erase my existence by slapping yet another BS gender on me. You do not define us. WE define us. You wanna call me a man-hater too? Cause this is all just the same old argument used by men. When women insist that we will put women first, we are accused to failing to think of everyone else too. We have spent most of our time here on Earth thinking about everyone but ourselves. We are not doormats. We are not responsible for you being born with gender dysphoria. I am sorry you have to deal with that. But. Feminism is about women’s issues, not the medical conditions of some men. MRAs have a whole new outfit.