#like idkkkkk clearly these hyperspecific labels are useful to some people! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

grimark · 2 years ago

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not that anybody asked but i do think terms like "cis+" or "cisn't", which i've seen thrown around in relation to the prev post, are a bit unnecessary. to me, it just seems like excessively atomising a fairly common experience, which is the desire to not be subject to the more uncomfortable and restrictive aspects of socially constructed gender roles. and sure, it might never even occur to a lot of cis people to do this kind of introspective analysis of their gender identities, and they might therefore be lacking some of the additional perspective of someone who has, but i don't think we necessarily need need a special new category for it. when you get down to it, "cis person who has previously questioned their gender" and "cis person who has never felt the need to question their gender" are both still cis, which in theory is a value-neutral description and a perfectly fine thing to be.

#this isn't meant as a criticism of people who like those terms or find them valuable or validating #it's more just. i don't get it and i don't really see the point of them but that's fine because they're not aimed at me anyway.#if you're cis but you want to add a modifier to encapsulate your gender journey then you do you.#to me just seems a bit patronising to tell cis people they're actually cis+ or whatever #like. aww you did such a good job thinking about your gender! here is a star sticker for you that says 'more evolved than other cis people'#instead maybe we can just trust that 1. people are the experts on their own identities and experiences #if someone says they're happy to continue identifying as the gender they were assigned at birth we can probably take their word for it!#and 2. accept that we all probably have a lot more in common than we might assume #it seems like a mistake to think 'this experience (gender discomfort and introspection) is exclusively a trait of x category of person'#'so if someone from y category has experienced it they must not actually be y‚ they must be something else instead'#which allows you to comfortably continue to paint people from y group as a wholly separate other with fundamentally alien experiences #and no possible point of overlap or common ground.#i see this a lot with the eternal thorn in my side which is posts about how The Neurotypicals Do This Thing #and also with a certain flavour of ace discourse #which presumes that 1. anyone who doesn't choose to identify under the asexual identity umbrella must necessarily be allosexual #2. there is a single unifying allosexual experience which can be equally applied to the rest of the human population #and 3. no allosexual person could possibly have a complicated or fraught relationship with sex and sexuality.#or if they did have any experiences in common with asexual people they'd naturally choose to identify as ace instead.#therefore these two identities must be wholly separate groups with no experiential overlap.#like idkkkkk clearly these hyperspecific labels are useful to some people!#but to me they often just seem to generate feelings of division and othering #or they're used as a way to claim a particular experience as exceptional to one group #when it's actually a pretty common feature of the human condition.

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