This is a pet hypothesis of mine, nothing more. There is absolutely no empirical data to back this up. But I think it explains my observations fairly well.
One of the big things we talk about, in trans feminism, is the concept of “gender identity”– the subjective internal sense of oneself as male, female, or nonbinary. Trans people are people whose gender identity doesn’t match their gender assigned at birth; cis people are people whose gender identity does.
But the thing is… I think that some people don’t have that subjective internal sense of themselves as being a particular gender. There’s no part of their brain that says “I’m a guy!”, they just look around and people are calling them “he” and they go with the flow. They’re cis by default, not out of a match between their gender identity and their assigned gender.
I think you could probably tell them apart by asking them the old “what would you do if you suddenly woke up as a cis woman/cis man?” If they instantly understand why you’d need to transition in that circumstance, they’re regular old cis; if they are like “I’d probably be fine with it actually,” they might be cis by default. (Of course, the problem is that they might be a cis person with a gender identity who just can’t imagine what gender dysphoria would feel like. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to stick random cis men with estrogen and find out how many of them get dysphoric.)
(I’m noticing some similarities, as I write this, to what I’ve read about what being agender feels like– although of course agender people are not cis. If my agender readers could confirm or deny the similarity, that’d be helpful.)
I think this would explain a lot actually. There are a lot of cis people who feel the need to come up with absolutely ludicrous explanations for why trans people (particularly trans women) are trans. The “trans women are self-hating gay men.” The “trans men want to gain male privilege.” The “trans women fetishize themselves as female.” The “nonbinary people are making it up for attention or for queer streed cred.” The “trans women are agents of patriarchy appropriating womanhood in order to invade women’s spaces.” These explanations aren’t just dumb, they’re obviously dumb. Very, very few people would put up with everything from gatekeeping to violence for the sake of their boner.
However, if you don’t have a gender identity, and you assume that your lack of a gender identity means other people don’t have a gender identity, then trans people’s behavior is ludicrous. Why the hell are all these people deciding they’re women or men or something else? And when people appear to be doing something for no readily apparent reason, other people tend to grasp at straws to explain it, including obviously dumb straws.
Obviously, this doesn’t excuse the blatant transphobia of those explanations. Generally, when people are doing something for no reason you can understand, it’s safe to assume that they have a good reason that you just don’t know about. Ask them why they’re doing the thing they’re doing before you conclude it’s about whatever ludicrous thing best fits your prejudices.
Nevertheless, if my idea is correct, then it offers some hope in combating that sort of transphobia. We simply have to explain to cis-by-default people what a gender identity is and that they don’t have one but other people do before they get lured in by the fuckwitted explanations.
Any thoughts?
For what it’s worth, I experience my gender identity more as “not woman” than as “man.” I call myself a trans man but it’s more out of convenience than anything else, since I don’t have a strong sense of what I am so much as a rejection of what I am not.
I also understand my need to medically transition as separate from my gender identity altogether. I was never able to conceptualize my breasts as being a part of my body; they were just completely alien things that I was always surprised to see in the mirror. A masculinized musculature, deeper voice, etc. also fit with the way my brain wanted my body to look, and getting my period was always a deeply miserable and humiliating experience. On the other hand, I really don’t care what my genitals are like. It’s neat that they’re larger, and I’m frustrated that my vagina doesn’t work properly, but it’s not the same as the burning loathing that some trans people have.
I’m sorry to keep nitpicking, and this’ll be my last comment in this since it’s pretty off-topic, but
this is just not true, or, at least, there is no reason to think it is true. There is no evidence that gay men experience attraction in pretty much the same way as each other or straight men, nor is it necessarily directed at cues of masculinity rather than femininity.
It look me a long time to sort out and come to terms with the fact that I’m non-binary, and I think part of that is for reasons that relate to “default” ciis- identity.
Once I worked past the homophobia I’d learned (partially by having all of my more feminine impulses quashed as unacceptable), I could see not only my bisexuality (more accurately polysexuality), but also that, if I’d been acculturated with a positive, rather than a negative view of homosexuality, I probably would have sought out “same sex” as well as “opposite sex” partners.
Similarly, I could see myself as female (easily), even as I (for most of my life) thought of myself as male, and dreamed of myself as hermaphrodite or fluid. I use the word “hermaphrodite” rather than androgynous because my truest sense of self isn’t “can’t tell”, but instead “clearly both.”
In short, I never thought in “cis by default” terms (not even when I was struggling with self-loathing homophobia), but I think I can see that perspective from here.
Typical mind and gender identity | Slate Star Codex
Actually, most of the transphobic people I’ve dealt with seem extremely attached to their sex and gender. Not to say that some transphobes couldn’t have the mindset you describe, but that seems more people who are ignorant of trans issues than people who actually take the time to be hateful and threatening. Not incidentally, all of the worst transphobes I’ve met have been men who seem to think that their masculinity is a thing that’s constantly in danger of being taken from them.
Personally, I think your explanation is much like mine. This is why I love the term genderqueer, as I think it better umbrellas all non cis gender people. In that queer is defined as unusual or not like the normal… my gender is queer is how I explain the term. I realize that this implies that might be something wrong with us, but that is later taken care of by embracing differences as blessings rather than issues. if the human race can evolve to these two places we will be rolling in understanding and likely equality.
… and we will flee from it?
(note: This only accurately describes me for the time period after I learned detailed information about transgenderism and transexuality.)
I’m cis, and very, very, very not cis-by-default. (incidentally, my conceptualization of gender seems to be different from most people’s and have much less baggage, but it is very much there.) I am very conscious of my gender. This has for me become entangled with a sort of counter-queerness involving a view of one’s own sexuality and gender identities as fixed, self-imaged, self-protected, and willingly subordinated to the commands of an enlightened society. (Currently, society at large is insufficiently enlightened.)
Verlaine: Yes, and I was proposing this not as a cause of all transphobia but as a potential cause of *one* particular kind of transphobia: the kind where people come up with ludicrous explanations for why people are trans.
I recognize myself in the cis-by-default description, though I would note that since both cis and male are unmarked, I think as a cis man I would have no real occasion to be specifically aware of my gender.So if I were female xor if I were perceived as female, I would be aware of my gender identity and gender, but I maintain that if I were female and perceived as female I’d be aware of that in ways I’m not aware of being male.
Weird thing is, even though I don’t personally have a strong gender identity, I do still find myself having a different type of attraction towards different genders. Like there’s different things that I find attractive on different genders. But then sometimes I feel like I’m just attracted to a certain type of masculine femininity. And right after typing that I realize that doesn’t even make sense to myself.
Then again, I tend to overanalyze things. Sometimes I think that I don’t really care about gender in others, but that there’s some kind of social programming or conditioning that makes me think of different genders differently, and sometimes I think that maybe I just want to be able to disregard gender in others because I can’t personally feel strongly about my own gender. I don’t know, it’s hard to figure out because I don’t actually know if I’m the same person tomorrow that I am today.
I think you could probably tell them apart by asking them the old “what would you do if you suddenly woke up as a cis woman/cis man?” If they instantly understand why you’d need to transition in that circumstance, they’re regular old cis; if they are like “I’d probably be fine with it actually,” they might be cis by default.
Would it be TMI to say that I have fantasies about exactly that? “Autogynephilia” as a theory of MtF transsexuality is, as far as I can tell, nonsense, but sexual fantasies about being the opposite gender is, apparently, a thing.
Like Hershele above, I see myself in Ozy’s description above, but am unsure if it’s about having a weak attachment to my gender identity or just this-is-what-cis-male-feels-like. Interestingly, though, I am attached to my sexual orientation (straight, therefore also non-marked). I can’t imagine being attracted to men; the idea of waking up as a cis lesbian woman doesn’t freak me out, but the idea of waking up as a cis straight woman does. I do think the concept of “gender identity” needs more rigorous conceptualization.
Well, for what it’s worth, I think you are correct that there are cis-by-default people, and I’m probably one of them. I remember as a child my concept of gender was that I was a spirit that happened to be in a girl body, and people called other people who were in girl bodies “women” and the ones in boy bodies “men”. And I didn’t really have a problem with that so much as that people kept buying me Barbies when I really wanted dinosaurs, and I couldn’t understand why people made such assumptions based on what my body looked like when we’re all just spirits (and I frickin’ told them I like dinosaurs so wtf grown up people). I didn’t think anything would change about me if I woke up a boy the next day.
Now I have to say, I would be very unhappy if I woke up in a “male” body tomorrow, but not really because of the equipment. I don’t feel any sense of horror at that, but I would have a social anxiety meltdown. I’m very quiet and reserved, and not remotely aggressive or dominant, and I guess I feel lucky to be born as the gender where that’s usually seen as a good thing, instead of a figurative “kick me” sign. Also my current body meets Acceptable Societal Beauty Standards and I am afraid of losing that because it goes a long way towards making up for clumsy social skills. Also depending on whether my sexuality flips along with my gender or not, I’d either have to deal with partners generally expecting me to be more dominant in sex (which is actually the most terrifying part*), or I’d be gay and have to deal with the crap that can come with that.
I don’t think I’d transition though because I wouldn’t want “a female body” so much as “my old body”, and surgically altering the new one would never achieve that.
So yeah, gender dysphoria took a while for me to get my head around, and the idea of people who don’t feel dysphoria but still have a gender identity that doesn’t match their body is taking longer still. (I don’t mean that in an “I don’t believe in your identity” way, just an “I can’t fathom what it feels like to be you” way).
I hope this comment is not too much Cis People Feelings for your blog.
*believe it or not I actually think my sense of myself as dominant or submissive is way stronger than my gender identity or sexuality. Wake up as the opposite sex? Sigh, guess I’ll have to get used to it. Sleeping with someone of my not usually preferred gender? Well…not usually doesn’t mean never. Trying to imagine myself taking a dominant or sadistic role during sex? OH GOD NO NO NO I want to cry and have a panic attack.
it is a privilege I enjoy that I don’t have to think about not having to think about feeling natural in my body, and with the broader cultural narrative that surrounds my place in society as a member of my gender. I understand that is contrary to the trans (and queer) experience of having to stake out and defend territory outside the norm and as such you may spend more time contemplating what your gender/sex/orientation/whathaveyou really means, but I don’t think people who haven’t done that level of leg work are somehow not really what they claim to be.
some people just have an easier time finding what works for them, most people are ok with accepting the cultural narratives as what they want to do. I don’t think it makes someone any more or less of their stated identity depending on how much angst they have had over finding and exploring it.
anyway, TealDeer: it’s rude to run around claiming most people in the world are Really Truly one way or another if only they would think about it more. (be it Mormonism, bisexuality, vegetarianism, or any other lifestyle choice that ties into identity) I would expect that a person without a deep internal tie to their assigned gender would be more indifferent about trans people than anything else.
I definitely think this is a thing. Count me as another cis male who sees himself in this description.
Two thoughts on the subject:
1. I feel like I’ve gone along with a lot of maleness defaults despite the fact that I don’t really feel like my gender is a big deal. I wonder if that is actually a case of having gone along with the defaults or whether it’s something more intrinsic. I don’t know how I would tell, but thinking about it makes me very curious.
2. This feels like it may be a subset (for me) of having a fairly low body identity. My body just doesn’t feel like that important a feature of who I am. I pay attention to it and take care of it and stuff because it sends me insistent signals if I don’t and because it’s a big part of how other people react to me, but I just don’t feel like a lot of my identity is wrapped up in it.
Cis woman who sees herself in that description pinging in Ever since my first entrance into trans* spaces, I was weirded out about gender – because if the only definition of gender is identity, and I don’t actually feel like anything in particular, what does that make me? I really like “cis by default” as a label, adopting it.
If you’re trying to explain dysphoria to a cis-by-default person, in my personal experience what works is to find a group that they strongly identify as – pretty much everyone has one – and ask them to imagine a life where they were forbidden to act as or not recognized as a member of that group.
For me, the first thing that made me understand was geekdom. I’m a geek! And while there are multiple stereotypes and list of what a “true geek” is, and I don’t necessarily meet most or all of them, I know I’m a geek because when people talk about geeks I feel they’re talking about me even if I never liked Dune or D&D.
I have a friend who is apparently both cis AND straight by default, and the only explanation I could use to make it work relied on her Judaism; she said she didn’t understand why a trans girl’s parents wouldn’t try and make her into a boy because that would make life easier for her. I asked my friend to imagine moving to a heavily antisemitic country, where being Jewish made you subject of violence and oppression, should her parents then have taught her to pretend she wasn’t Jewish? She got thoughtful and said yes, she understood why that would be wrong.
Okay, Facebook conversation: My sister apparently learnt right now that it’s called “cis” and not “sic” as she had previously thought. A colleague who, just like her, knows stuff about chemistry helpfully said “it’s just like different kinds of fats… you know how there are cis fats and trans fats depending on whether the hydrogen atoms are situated at opposite sides or the same side of a double bind in the coal chain”. And then he went on to ask whether there are people who are neither cis nor trans, just like some fats are neither? I said that I wasn’t certain, but maybe agenders are neither cis nor trans? So colleague responded that perhaps one might call a person who’s neither cis nor trans “saturated”.
Seriously though, if you’re agender, do you count as a kind of trans person?
I’ve been watching old home movies, looking for more insight into my gender identity and presentation. I was the twee-est, fey-est prancing-est little fairy as a child. I’m a cis-woman and I definitely feel like a girl. Most of my life has been spent hating myself for being a girl, for being weak, for being stupid, but I never once thought, “And what’s worse is that I don’t even identify with this stupid gender!” My self-hate was born out of a feeling that I am a woman down to my very soul, and there is no escaping it.
(Don’t worry, I love being a woman now! Thank you, feminism!)
I LOVE your concept of cis-by-default. Two of my best friends probably fit this definition. They’ve both told me, “Sometimes/a lot of the time I don’t really feel like a man/woman.” Neither feels any need to transition or even inhabit a more fluid/ambiguous gender presentation. They just think it’s weird, all the expectations heaped on their personalities based on genders they don’t strongly identify with. Well, I shouldn’t speak for them….but I’d just like to say this framework helps me understand better what they might have been talking about.
@Dvärghundspossen: “Seriously though, if you’re agender, do you count as a kind of trans person?”
I’d wager that most of us do because it’s still a case of our socially-determined gender being different than our internally-determined gender. In my case, I am assumed to be female when I do not identify as such.
There are a number of identities that go under the “non-gendered” umbrella as well, agender and neutrois being the predominant two. I’m still learning about the differences, but I think that neutrois people experience more dysphoria and are more likely to seek out surgical/hormonal methods of reaching that non-gendered “neutral” point. Agendered people seem to be more “neutral” mentally and presentation-wise. It’s also apparently A Thing that non-gendered folk seem to be much more likely to be on the asexual or aromantic spectrum.
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Another thing I’ve realized about the “switched body” question from the OP is that another layer of MAKE-THEM-THINK could be added by modifying the question a little: “what would you do if you suddenly woke up as a cis woman/cis man with no secondary sex characteristics?”. If there’s anything I’ve learned from hanging around the Literotica “Fetish and Sexuality” subforum (which, IMO, is just short of an insufferable shitty mess), is that there are a lot of cis people that would be totally fine waking up as the “opposite” gender… but only if they were extremely attractive as per their own preferences, to others’, could be read as sufficiently masculine/feminine, and otherwise had no complications engaging in heterosexual sex. Oh and autogynephilia/autoandrophilia seems to be a hallmark of those cis desires. But ask a straight cisman what he would do if he woke up the next morning as a woman without breasts, and I’m sure the answer would be a resounding “fuck that”.
To keep the literalists like myself at bay, imagine that waking up to find yourself of the “opposite” gender is a semi-common event and there is some form down at the DMV that you can fill out and retain your legal identity, bank accounts, passport, etc.
That was my first reaction when I read that question: “Oh god, I’d have no legal identity.”
Aside from that I have to admit that curiosity would take hold. Living in a new body isn’t something one gets to experience very often.
The change in sexuality would be… Odd. As a Kinsey-0 sitting in a man’s body it is hard to imagine the resulting Kinsey-0 sexual attraction to men from “my own new” female body. If my sexuality DIDN’T change the new body would be odd, but overall less shocking. In either case the draw of a slough of entirely new experiences would prevent me from seeking surgery to get it turned back, and in general I would probably just learn to live the new life and get on with things.
Huh, that might say something about how I view my own gender “easiest to just get used to it.” Or perhaps something along the lines of “my gender is a thing I live in, and not so much me.”
My maleness is a thing I live in, but I assume that’s because I don’t get my attention drawn to it every time someone calls me “ma’am” or uses female pronouns about me, rather than because it actually isn’t part of my identity. Like a faint odor.
Is there anyone else in this thread who feel like I do; that they’d probably transition if it was really easy to do so, but since it’s complicated in the world we live in it’s easier not to? Lots of people have said that they wouldn’t really mind if they woke up with another body, but that’s not really the same thing as having a wish to do so, even if that wish is fairly weak.
You (all of us) should read the book “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” by Judith Butler. I wrote a “book review” of it on my wordpress blog jollycarolyn.wordpress.com. Hope you find that, and Butler’s other books, helpful. –C.J.
Dvar: That’s actually my position about non-social transition. To get a neutrois body, I’d have to fight with doctors, lose my ability to pass as cis, and become far less attractive to straight men (who make up most of my dating pool). If being genderqueer were more routine, I’d almost certainly physically transition.
believe it or not I actually think my sense of myself as dominant or submissive is way stronger than my gender identity or sexuality.
That’s really interesting. In contrast, I don’t really think of sex as inherently being about domination/submission at all. To me it’s 95% about exploring sensations.
My sense of gender identity is a lot like my sense of handedness, as is my sexuality. I accept that I have a hard time doing things with the “wrong” hand, but I don’t see any particular reason that’s so, and sometimes it bothers me. My hands even look almost exactly the same, apart from being mirror images. Why can’t they do the same things?
Do you have a gender identity? Want to find out? » Zinnia Jones
As seems to be fairly common in these comments (surprisingly so to me), I’m another person saying that I see a lot of myself in this “cis-by-default” idea. However, I’m also going to add that identifying as cis has always made me uncomfortable and I don’t really understand why.
For background, I’m AMAB, male-presenting (well, lazy-presenting and that includes hair on my face but not the top of my head, so basically male-presenting), and I possess several strong personality traits traditionally associated with femininity. Also I virtually always make my avatar female when given the choice in a video game, but I don’t know if that makes any difference to this.
I’d like to put in here a description of my upbringing and/or gendered childhood behaviour, but I honestly don’t remember it at all. As far back as I can actually remember my own feelings (a little more than a decade) I haven’t felt any sense of identification or connection with the idea of gender (or any particular gender), and the primary reason I’ve never had much confusion about the idea of transition is that I’m extremely used to my own feelings being subtly different from those of others, so I have no trouble accepting that other people (even almost everyone) feels something I just don’t (or don’t recognize that I do). I’ve always viewed transition from what I now call a transhumanist perspective, namely that any kind of body modification (including neural and hormonal) is up to the individual and their reasons for it, while possibly interesting, are not a significant factor in whether or not they should be allowed to do it.
I prefer not to identify as a gender unless my gender is somehow relevant to the topic of conversation, and I identify as male when it is relevant on the primary basis that I know that is how I am read in person. I do not identify as trans*, agender or non-binary, as I feel that any of those identifications would be co-opting the valuable narratives that many people have fought long and hard, and continue to fight for. In other words, my sense of self as “other” interferes with my identification. For a while now, however, I’ve been confused about my gender identity, largely because I can’t seem to attach the words other people are using to relevant feelings in my head, but I also can’t tell whether this semantic difficulty is a linguistic or a cognitive block. To restate, I am probably either nonbinary or cis-by-default, but I can’t tell which.
L: “How would you feel if you lived in a world where there was no socially constructed gender and the only pronoun available was “they”?”
I know you weren’t asking this of people in the thread, but I thought I’d answer anyway. My answer is “somewhere between massively relieved and downright giddy.” Any observations on what if anything that might say about my gender identity?
d…: Are you me from yesterday by any chance? Everything you said in your posts here fits so very well with my own self-observations it’s eerie.
As per usual I’m a bit late to the party, but here’re my thoughts: I generally tend to go with the idea that the more hateful/absurd explanations for trans identities come from people who have the most invested in their own cis identity. Same goes for any normative identities who’ve come up with hateful explanations for non-normative identities. I think this is even more the case when you’re talking about the assumed threat of trans* individuals to cis individuals (i.e. trans women are trying to invade feminist spaces). There is an element of fear and threat in that sort of explanation that suggests the people who perpetuate it are actually quite heavily invested in their own identity as cis women (even going to far as to refuse to use to the term “cis,” because they think they are “natural born).”
I think where you probably get a lot more cis-by-default among people who think that trans people are just confused. I totally think there are people out there who just do not understand the concept of trans* because they do not have any subjective sense of themselves as a particular gender. But I think you’re less likely to find the hateful and fearful stereotypes from people who are cis-by-default.
@Yiab: Nope, sorry. That’s yours to define. And I’d also like to point out that, as far as non-binary identifications go, “agender” is on the more privileged end of the list. What usually gets in the way most with that is your orientation and your birth designation. I guess it could be argued that not having an “A” or “X” gender option available on forms is oppressive, but aside from affirmation, it doesn’t actually matter IMO. Oh and it’s also a bit mistaken to think that all non-binary people suffer and struggle and fight every day of their lives. Some of us definitely do have it a lot better and our identities don’t generally cause us any serious problems. So… don’t let the “not ____ enough” bullshit stop you from identifying how you want to identify.
@A.M.: “believe it or not I actually think my sense of myself as dominant or submissive is way stronger than my gender identity or sexuality.” It’s the same way for me too, though probably because an identity that orients me in [i]a direction[/i] is going to catch my attention more than one that’s not making me gravitate towards anything. My kinks and paraphilia wind up taking over for my gender, sexuality, and most times even my romantic orientation. It’s obvious that they’re working overtime.