this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex... But in talking with cis people I actually think it's something else. I think the vast majority of cis people's experience of gender only comes from external influences... I have met cis people who recognize what we're talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it's actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who's entire experience of gender is performance based... So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand... But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
I don't think it's that they don't have an internal gender identity, I think it's just hard for them to tell. Ask a cis woman how she knows she's a woman and she'll probably say something like "because I have a woman's body", but I don't think that means she has no internal sense of her gender, it just means it takes a lot more introspection and nuance than she's spent to get to that than it takes to go "boobs, check, vulva, check, I'm good". She doesn't have a disconnect, so she's never had to really consider it, doesn't mean she doesn't have it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think research indicates we aren't special because we have a gender identity, but because of what it is.
I don't know who (Abigail Thorn? Contrapoints? ...Vihart?) but someone was talking about how sometimes that's the case, that they really don't have a sense of their own gender. That they're "really" something like agender, but that it's just too much of a bother to worry about correcting people. But there are also plenty of cis people deeply invested in their own gender, who really do have toes to it and identify as that gender, but when you ask them how they know, they put it all on external things rather than internal.
That's not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.
But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we're talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people's. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?
Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don't really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don't fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people... But otherwise on their own those things don't make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.
They also don't seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don't tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.
I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don't actually mean anything to them on their own.
Change the question slightly and they think about it differently. Ask them how they'd feel if they lost some of those features. A cis man with hairy arms and chest probably doesn't say he feels a great joy when he thinks about them, but would probably feel some real discomfort if he couldn't grow body hair any more. They assign a neutral value to them because they consider it "default". And of course not everyone feels the same way about these things, cis or trans, but I think most cis people really do value their genders and sexed bodies because those things match, even if they wouldn't say so.
Either way, I think we're both speaking anecdotally and I don't plan to go look for the research on gender identity right now.
That's the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it's root in other people's perceptions. There's a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project "manliness" as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces...but doesn't well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.
It's a difficult knot to dig down to it's source but I think it's a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it's so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.
To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn't really happening because cis people don't really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don't really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can't just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate... And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.
I don't know about that. I think the reasons they give would sound external like that, but they can sound that way from a trans person too. And ask about something more significant, like
A cis man would be pretty affected by that, and he wouldn't attribute that to societal pressure. I contend that at the very least there is some misattribution when most cis people put the entirety of their gender identity on external factors.
Either way, I fully agree that it's something that research can answer in a way discussion never will. Whether and to what degree that research has happened, is happening, or ever will happen I can't say.