(no subject)

[la_vie_noire]

Via voz_latina, Is Cis A Dis? And other air castles to storm…. Cis people who can read English? Go. Read. That.

And that’s even assuming that a transperson intended the prefix “cis” to mean something bad, which of course it doesn’t, but it’s your option as a cis-person to choose to even recognize any intention there at all. As a cis-person, you will never, ever have to worry about that intention beyond the mere personal hurt feelings you have about that. Transpeople are always, always having to be keenly aware of the intentions of cispeople, scrying into our words like fucking tea-leaves to see whether we are going to fuck with their human rights. So to construct this artificial world where all things are theoretically equal, to erase that very real oppression that transpeople must live with — whether you are paying attention or not — simply so you can somehow draw a parallel between the momentary twinge of discomfort you might have felt at having a word used to describe you, and the vast yawning abyss of crushing oppression that transpeople deal with, is infantile entitlement at best, and intentionally silencing at worst.

And here’s another thing: Most cispeople don’t even know what the fuck that word means. By and large, they’ve never heard of it. It only exists in the vernacular of a very small segment of the progressive movement, and that in itself is informative: That’s how de-voiced the transgendered populations are. Their words have not even approached the public consciousness. They are still in the very early stages of building their movement and ciswomen like me can live their whole lives without ever having to worry about what the “cis” part of that means. That’s fucking privilege.

[...]

Nuclear Unicorn and I have come to the table of friendship together because 1) we like each other, and 2) we recognize that we are stronger in our struggles together than apart. I am so grateful everyday that I can pick up the phone and call her and we get each other. I don’t have to explain to her what time it is. But here’s the thing: I have a loaded gun that the Patriarchy has given me. I am a cis-person; it was issued to me at birth. That gun sits on the table between us. It is a gun that, if I ever chose to use it, could totally destroy her life, or at least injure her grievously. It is a gun that I will always have forever, even if we leave the table of friendship. If, 20 years from now, Nuclear Unicorn and I have long since parted ways and, say, she goes on to become some famous author and chooses to not be out about her transition, I could cock and fire at her with a few strategic phone calls… or just casual careless babbling to people I don’t know well. There is nothing that will change that until society chooses to take the bullets out of that gun by giving Nuclear Unicorn her full human rights and social dignity, so that if I decided to pick it up and fire it at her, it will have no bullets in it, and I will look just as stupid and offensively bigoted as KKK members seem to us today.

Going to sleep.

ETA: AND. The author showed her ass in the comments. Oh, well.