In response to my flip description of myself "being an anti-militarist anti-racist anti-sexist vegetarian democratic socialist gender-queer aesthete," a reader "Steph" asked:
Do you mean it, when you say that you're genderqueer? If you do that's fine, but nothing you've said prior to this has suggested that to be the case to me. I bring it up because appropriation of gq identities by cisgender people is actually something of a problem. You're not engaging in busted behavior here, but if you are cisgender I'd appreciate it if you'd find another way of phrasing what you're getting at in the future. If I'm wrong on that count, you can just ignore this comment, I don't want to police your identity or anything.
To this I replied:
I began to use the term genderqueer as a designation in 1992 [added, in case anybody's interested: this was when I was working on my MA thesis in the Philosophy Department at Georgia State on connections between queer theory and technocultural theory of the time] -- but I was rather late to the party in discovering the term cisgender just two years or so ago.
I always used the term "genderqueer" as a political/ disciplinary designation indicating my commitment to gender studies over just "women's studies" as a way of affiliating with anti-patriarchal/ queer work in the academy and activism but also in my own selfhood.
If genderqueer has acquired a fixed connotation in intersex/transsex communities and activism and criticism I won't use it anymore, knowing how terms alter in usage over time after all and also knowing how key practices of identification/ dis-identification are to the dignity of queerfolks under compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy in general -- although I don't think the charge of "appropriation" seems exactly appropriate given the actual chronology involved here!
Given that I disapprove both the sexual and gender binaries as absurdly inadequate taxonomic gestures in the face of the vicissitudes and varieties of gendered and queered morphological/ identificatory/ dis-identificatory practices, and definitely I disapprove any hierarchization of sex-gender or gender-sex (given that either term can assume foundational force in projects of policing the other term into a falsifying stability), I must say that I am a bit anxious about some aspects of this admonition.
When "cisgender" is explained to me as, say, a designation of one who comfortably inhabits a birth-assigned gender I have to say that term "comfort" is awfully freighted in my view. I would not claim to "have" an intersex body and I am not in transition in ways that take up the legal-medical complex, and I strongly agree that it would be wrong to imply otherwise since I don't, but I hesitate to affirm that this is tantamount to "comfort," especially given the life-enabling irony, to say the least, with which I have long inhabited the sex-gender norms in which I am presumably most legible, to the extent that I am. Heck, that's why I've been queer rather than gay or whatever since '92.
Is there a worrisome restabilization of sex-gender vocabularies inhering in the very notion of "cisgender" on the usual construal? Given the comfort-in-discomfort and the desired-undoing-of-doing-gendered-desire that I have long regarded as an emancipatory queer-transsex continuity I wonder if "cisgender" risks wrongly assimilating some varieties of queer selfhood to heteronormativity.
The link you offered me is plenty to make me stop using the designation, simply because I do not want to contribute harm to the folks testifying to harm by my use of it -- these things matter to me -- but I must say that there are lots of assumptions about the motives, history of the term and its assumption by some queerfolks and its various freightings that don't exactly ring true in light of my own experiences (very much including decades of affiliation/ interaction with lgbtipqq folks and communities and colleagues), and while I strongly sympathize with the aspiration to "recognition" through a policing of the term -- especially where recognition names specifically the vitally important legal-medical choreographies in the face of profoundly precarious selfhood-practices -- I am also suspicious of the gesture of policing around negotiations of sex-gender systems whenever it becomes too unironic or naturalizing or castigatory.
The exchange continued with this next, very interesting and helpful post by "Steph":
I'm not using 'cisgender' here in the sense of birth assigned gender-comfort, which would make it something like a synonym for cissexual. Rather, cisgender is properly used (in my opinion and in the opinion of some others I am frequently in conversation with) as the opposite pair of genderqueer, which is to say someone who is cisgender is someone to a binary gender description is apt for. This isn't the same as compliance with or comfort with the binary gender as a construct across the whole of society (many people with what can be described as binary genders understand the harmfulness of the gender binary), but rather a matter of personal positioning with regard to the gender binary.
This is separate from transsexuality, with which you've confused the issue slightly. While you are correct in observing that the sex/gender distinction is a slippery and often unhelpful distinction, the key distinction is that transsexuality is marked by a dissonance with the body, and a corresponding dissonance with social aspects of inhabiting a body that society insists on nonconsensually assigning a sex-gender to. Measures can be taken, in this case, to render the proper sex-gender of the individual legible, as long as the transsexual history is not known. If a transsexual history is known, then this becomes grounds for ignoring the actual sex-gender of an individual. This is pretty much the defining oppression of transsexual individuals within the kyriarchy.
On the other hand, genderqueer (in the more modern usage) signifies individuals for whom their true sex-gender can never be made legible, due to the way that the legibility of sex-genders for cisgender individuals is built upon the gender binary: an individual can be legible as one or the other of the binary genders, but if you are neither then your true gender is unknowable within the context of current society.
These are not exclusive categories: there are genderqueer people who are cissexual and there are genderqueer people who are transsexual, which roughly translates into a distinction of whether or not the dissonance that one experiences is rooted in the body or not.
You raise the issue of queered gender expression and it's legibility in society, and there's something there, certainly, but it's of a different nature, which is to say that being a different sort of man renders you illegible in certain ways, registering instead as a man who is doing it wrong, more or less, but you maintain a basic acknowledgement of 'man'. This is different from a situation in which being recognized as 'man' is actually an act of misgendering and activates a dissonance. The issue for genderqueer people is when being recognized as 'woman' is also dissonant.
Which is not a perfect description of how genderqueer people relate to the gender binary (and in fact, my own personal relationship to the gender binary is fairly complicated and doesn't look very much at all like what I've described here, but is similar in that it generates a similar dissonance as I try to position myself within and with respect to the gender binary), but it gives an idea of the distinctions I am making, and of the areas of experience sketched out by these words.
That said, from what you've said your usage here has been not at all appropriative, and I believe you on that. This usage of the word, while I don't know the exact history of it, is certainly much more recent a coinage than 1992. Your worry that by labeling cisgender individuals as cisgender we risk erasing the complexity of the lived experiences being subsumed under that label is misplaced, and is actually a version of an argument that has been mobilized against cisgender/cissexual frequently and from many different quarters, and which results (I would say) from a confusion of categories. Gender is different from gender variance is different from transsexuality is different from genderqueer. Being cisgender says nothing about and individual's positioning with regard to these other categories.
Please be careful in your explorations of cisgender/cissexual as a term in this way. As part of the project of decentering the experience of being cisgender/cissexual they are absolutely vital, and they are subject to frequent attack in a way that comparable de-centering terms (white, heterosexual, etc) are not. (These attacks take several forms: One is the one you've raised here, more commonly given by certain types of radical feminists who argue that women are not allowed to be at ease with their bodies/genders under Patriarchy, and thus cannot be labeled cisgender/sexual. Another very common attack, which I don't think you would ever be in danger of using, is that cissexual/gender is "too academic", despite the fact that it has seen very little uptake in academic writings so far and is in fact a product of the community). I say this to you because I have a certain amount of good will towards you built up over the lengthy period I have been reading your blog. Most people I would shut down much more harshly on this matter.
To this I went on to say:
Certainly I will be careful about my terminology here -- I actually have a lot of ethical and political commitment around such care in general, and alerting me to my obvious ignorance here is quite enough to change my behavior. I'm happy to be alerted about such mistakes and confusions because I'm eager to learn while at once not invested particularly in declaring myself "learned." To be honest this attitude has always been tied very closely to my own experience and practice of my queer selfhood and desire.
That said, do you really mean to say that "radical feminists who argue that women are not allowed to be at ease with their bodies/genders under Patriarchy, and thus cannot be labeled cisgender/sexual" are necessarily engaging in "attacks" of a kind that may need "harshly" to be "shut down"?
I will confess I don't yet grasp completely how the supplement (if that's what is afoot here at all, I'm not yet clear about it) of cissex and cisgender to the categories sex and gender is doing different work from their queering in earlier "queer theory" interventions and in the context of intersex and transsex activism of the last twenty years or so with which I am at least somewhat familiar and invested.
If it does not try your patience too much I would honestly welcome more clarity about your claim that "gender is different from gender variance is different from transsexuality is different from genderqueer." I find that very interestingly provocative, but I'm not sure of what the differences actually consist from category to category in this formulation. I hope that question doesn't induce eye-rolling -- I know being asked to explain something the millionth time to some clueless person can be a trial.
I regard gender as an abyssal performative that is differentially substantiating but never securing. This makes me wonder about your assignments to some negotiations of sex-gender system(s) as straightforwardly "apt," "proper," or "true."
Now, I would be the last to deny the valorization of some normative practices and morphological signatures nor the compensatory costs imposed in the precarity and abjection of so many queer lifeways otherwise. However, since for me "the body" is always the "socially legible body" and such legibility is always an abyssal performative in regard to that which is posited as its sex and its gender and the regulatory relations obtaining between them I do have a committed politics around refusing to grasp too readily any claims about "experiences... rooted in the body or not." Given that, I also do not yet adequately understand the political claims being made here in relation to more familiar arguments and positions I have already been deeply invested in (just call me Grampy McArtfag!) that would facilitate non-abject radically democratizing lgbtipqq agencies -- that's lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual-intersex-punk-queer-questioning, in case you're curious about the alphabet soup.
Your comments may indeed be the intervention that causes me eventually to junk or radically transform those commitments in favor of different ones, but I just don't know yet.
But when I say "I do not understand" do please hear just that in what I am saying. I think you are raising questions which my usage has indeed signaled I needed to be alerted to. Again, I appreciate that very much.
I hope the clumsy efforts that likely proceed from the work to understand will not seem too reactionary nor cause harmful humiliation in conversational partners. I hope you will believe me when I say I certainly have intended no attack on queer allies through my customary theoryhead interventions or terminological usages, and I hope that the moratorium I will immediately issue myself in respect to the "genderqueer" term until I understand much better the current politics of these usages will go some way to reassuring you about that.
I will say, though, that even a cursory glance at the popular and academic usages connected to these terms still seems to suggest some of this is in real flux right now and hence generosity about intentions is probably a good idea until a person reveals themselves upon further exploration to be a real asshole around the issue (as, in my experience, assholes usually do without too much prodding).
Thanks for all this, you've given me a lot to think about and you've already changed my tune.
It's a great conversation -- very helpful for me -- and I welcome others to jump in if they have anything to add.
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