Post by Deleted on May 17, 2015 0:03:46 GMT 8
Lauren McNamara (AKA "Zinnia Jones") has always been spot on when discussing gender-related issues. She's highly intelligent and eloquent, and I absolutely love her video blogs. I'm following her on Tumblr and thought I would send her a question on the matter of defensiveness and cis hate:
I see this recurring hostile attitude towards cis people by trans people, and it saddens me.
I understand why, and it's justified, but it takes two to tango. We be the better person. Their
ignorance doesn't make them bad people, and ignorance can be remedied. Not always, of
course, but nothing will change if we don't try. Of course, we shouldn't *have* to educate
people, but I think it's imperative that we try. Getting defensive when being misgendered
is just juvenile and unproductive. Thoughts?
This was her incredible response:
I think a lot of the difference in attitudes here comes from an inherent disparity in contact.
A given cis person might unintentionally misgender a trans person one day, but then that
might just be the only time they end up doing that over a span of months. That trans person,
though, is encountering cis people constantly, and it’s entirely within the range of experience
that they might have been misgendered half a dozen times that day.
To each individual cis person, from their perspective, it’s a drop in a bucket. To us, it adds up
to a flood - but they don’t see that. They don’t know what the big deal is, because to them, it’s
just one tiny forgotten moment. To us, it can be a constant reminder - particularly given that
many people misgender us intentionally, which unavoidably associates this with the general
hostility we face.
It’s not the same for all of us. For me, getting unintentionally misgendered is about a once-a-
year thing, like it might be for a cis person misgendering one of us. If the experience was always
as rare on our end as it is on cis people’s, this might not be quite as forceful a point of contention
as it usually is. Sadly, this isn’t so.
And consider the inverse: if a substantial fraction of cis people were regularly being misgendered,
daily and frequently, I’d expect them to be just as emphatic about the importance of this - regardless
of how many people found that to be “unproductive” of them. And they’d have every right to insist
on this point. Some things are worth getting defensive about.