I don’t know. I’ve just always felt like it was weird to come up with a term for “normal” people. I don’t understand why it was necessary
Would you be fine with a straight person saying “I’m not straight, I’m normal” then?
Or would you realize that by choosing one aspect of the human experience to label as normal, instead of actually having a name for it, you are automatically labeling the others as abnormal — which means they’re not just a naturally-occuring human thing, but something that’s disordered or wrong or unnatural? If you decide to label being trans, but just call cis people “normal,” then that’s the implication.
Moreover, “cis” is a label for understanding a way of identifying regarding your assigned gender at birth, same “trans.” I really don’t see how it makes sense for it to be okay to have a word for one option — trans — but not the other. If it’s okay to have a label for one option so we can accurately communicate about it, why isn’t it okay to have a label for the other one, just because it’s more common? That doesn’t make sense. We have labels for all sorts of common things. Moreover, having a word that designates someone as not-trans is extremely useful for linguistic clarity: now instead of saying “normal” and having to infer from context in what respect the person is “normal”, since that could refer to a million things, cis gives us a way of actually saying what we mean. Scientists label both common and uncommon options for things all the time.
Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m getting old, but I don’t understand the obsession with labeling everyone and putting them in a well defined box… Can’t we all just be ourselves without the labels?
This talking point always hurts me deeply. Taking away the words and concepts we use to understand ourselves and communicate with others about that, find common ground and community and understanding, is the perfect way to erase us. That’s why conservatives and TERFs so often say the same thing.
Unlike for conservatives, labels for the LGBTQ community aren’t about putting everyone inside a well-defined box at all. Unlike conservatives with their traditional gender roles and expectations, our labels are actually not rigidly defined like that, they’re fuzzy, socially constructed, often with multiple shades and versions of meaning and ways they can be understood. Neither are they supposed to be normative — if you associated with a label once, that doesn’t mean you have to always do so (or have to have always done so), and if you don’t perfectly fit a label, that’s totally fine, you don’t have to “live up to it.”
(Except, I guess, in terminally-online Tumblr “discourse.”)
And the fact that labels, at least how the queer community uses them, are not “boxes to put people in” is a function of how we use them: they’re crucial tools to be able to communicate aspects of the incohate mess that is our experiences to others, and therein find community and solidarity with others, to know you’re not alone because there are others that share those experiences, who can comfort you and even guide you, and so you can use those words that helped you make people able to finally understand you as a rallying point.
We need the words to describe ourselves.
Taking away our language, the language we need to explain some important part of who we are or the lives we life, is fucking horrible.
Do you know how painful it was to grow up without labels like trans and cis so I could understand what was happening to me and why I was different from others? The first moment I found a word that seemed to describe what I was feeling, even though it was a wrong one (crossdresser), I clung onto it desperately. And then, when I finally found the word to describe what I actually was, it was a watershed moment.
Have you stopped for a moment to listen to the queer people who will tell you that finding out there was a word to describe what they were going through was one of tbe most powerful moments in their lives? Remember, without words for things, its difficult to have concepts for things, and that means its almost impossible to think them.
Would you be fine with a straight person saying “I’m not straight, I’m normal” then?
Or would you realize that by choosing one aspect of the human experience to label as normal, instead of actually having a name for it, you are automatically labeling the others as abnormal — which means they’re not just a naturally-occuring human thing, but something that’s disordered or wrong or unnatural? If you decide to label being trans, but just call cis people “normal,” then that’s the implication.
Moreover, “cis” is a label for understanding a way of identifying regarding your assigned gender at birth, same “trans.” I really don’t see how it makes sense for it to be okay to have a word for one option — trans — but not the other. If it’s okay to have a label for one option so we can accurately communicate about it, why isn’t it okay to have a label for the other one, just because it’s more common? That doesn’t make sense. We have labels for all sorts of common things. Moreover, having a word that designates someone as not-trans is extremely useful for linguistic clarity: now instead of saying “normal” and having to infer from context in what respect the person is “normal”, since that could refer to a million things, cis gives us a way of actually saying what we mean. Scientists label both common and uncommon options for things all the time.
This talking point always hurts me deeply. Taking away the words and concepts we use to understand ourselves and communicate with others about that, find common ground and community and understanding, is the perfect way to erase us. That’s why conservatives and TERFs so often say the same thing.
Unlike for conservatives, labels for the LGBTQ community aren’t about putting everyone inside a well-defined box at all. Unlike conservatives with their traditional gender roles and expectations, our labels are actually not rigidly defined like that, they’re fuzzy, socially constructed, often with multiple shades and versions of meaning and ways they can be understood. Neither are they supposed to be normative — if you associated with a label once, that doesn’t mean you have to always do so (or have to have always done so), and if you don’t perfectly fit a label, that’s totally fine, you don’t have to “live up to it.”
(Except, I guess, in terminally-online Tumblr “discourse.”)
And the fact that labels, at least how the queer community uses them, are not “boxes to put people in” is a function of how we use them: they’re crucial tools to be able to communicate aspects of the incohate mess that is our experiences to others, and therein find community and solidarity with others, to know you’re not alone because there are others that share those experiences, who can comfort you and even guide you, and so you can use those words that helped you make people able to finally understand you as a rallying point.
We need the words to describe ourselves.
Taking away our language, the language we need to explain some important part of who we are or the lives we life, is fucking horrible.
Do you know how painful it was to grow up without labels like trans and cis so I could understand what was happening to me and why I was different from others? The first moment I found a word that seemed to describe what I was feeling, even though it was a wrong one (crossdresser), I clung onto it desperately. And then, when I finally found the word to describe what I actually was, it was a watershed moment.
Have you stopped for a moment to listen to the queer people who will tell you that finding out there was a word to describe what they were going through was one of tbe most powerful moments in their lives? Remember, without words for things, its difficult to have concepts for things, and that means its almost impossible to think them.