I'm sorry, I did that thing I do sometimes where I assume that if I think the person I'm talking to agrees with me about an opinion I don't need to say that I hold that opinion. Which turns out not to be the case, and I should know that by now, because this has come up a bunch of times before. What I should have started with was: it is obnoxious and problematic for your texts to not discuss the lives and experiences of trans people because you exist and matter and are important. And what I should have included in my comment was: you are not living your life as an experiment in gender for people to learn from; you are living your life as, you know, a life.
The thing I meant to say was that I think trans and trans issues are also personally relevant to cis people, because many of the forces which trans people run into around gender and sex and how those are thought of and how they are enforced also have considerable impact on cis people. It's just that for cis-people, they're often ego-syntonic (fit how we're* more-or-less comfortable thinking of ourselves anyway), and so either go unnoticed or are ascribed to some other source. And so it is very important for cis people to think about what formed our gendered and sexual identities, and this has a major intersection with feminism and feminist theories. So my point was that it doesn't make sense to think of it as a "pet" issue, because the ways in which transphobia has affected and hurt you have also, in a much less-noticeable way, affected the lives of everybody else, too.
It's not a new idea, I suppose; holding prejudice and privilege harms the people who hold them. Not as much as the people who are denied the privilege, and people who have privilege do benefit from it, but there is a cost, and the cost is important to think about.
* I'm going to say 'we' for cis because it's more true than not, but... stuff
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-18 05:15 pm (UTC)The thing I meant to say was that I think trans and trans issues are also personally relevant to cis people, because many of the forces which trans people run into around gender and sex and how those are thought of and how they are enforced also have considerable impact on cis people. It's just that for cis-people, they're often ego-syntonic (fit how we're* more-or-less comfortable thinking of ourselves anyway), and so either go unnoticed or are ascribed to some other source. And so it is very important for cis people to think about what formed our gendered and sexual identities, and this has a major intersection with feminism and feminist theories. So my point was that it doesn't make sense to think of it as a "pet" issue, because the ways in which transphobia has affected and hurt you have also, in a much less-noticeable way, affected the lives of everybody else, too.
It's not a new idea, I suppose; holding prejudice and privilege harms the people who hold them. Not as much as the people who are denied the privilege, and people who have privilege do benefit from it, but there is a cost, and the cost is important to think about.
* I'm going to say 'we' for cis because it's more true than not, but... stuff