How troubling: Just when queer and trans theory remind us that gender and sex are made and have no a priori stability (“one is not born a woman”), cisgender arrives to affirm not only that it is possible for one to stay “a woman” but also that one is “born a woman” after all.
A. Finn Enke (2012)
Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (TPIB) makes a critical intervention into the eponymous but not necessarily synonymous fields of study. Rather than shying away from tensions between feminist and transgender studies, the essays attempt to facilitate a productive dialogue while embracing the impossibility of cohesion. I will analyze and provide contemporary context for A. Finn Enke’s “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies,” which constitutes chapter 4 of TPIB. Enke focuses on trans-exclusionary practices in and around the field of gender studies in higher education by outlining the disciplining effects of the use of ‘cisgender’ and ‘cis’ as a trans-ally identity category primarily within the academy.
At this year’s iteration of the UBC Pride Collective’s yearly academic conference, Queer U 2016, one of the panels was entitled “Claiming Our Bodies: Destabilizing Normalcy in Sexuality.” Both of the presenters made a point to draw attention to their positionality as cis women. The second presentation on the panel was called “’Jilling Off’: How Cisgender Women Internalize and Subvert Heteropatriarchal Scripts through Masturbation and Sex Toys.” This paper presents a pertinent example of the ways in which assertions of cisgender qua identity category “[doesn’t] so much acknowledge as reinforce this privilege by enacting a distinction between cis and trans” (Enke 2012: 69). By designating cisgender women as the object of study within the presentation, Cvoric claims ‘jilling off’ (a play on the colloquialism ‘jacking off,’ suggesting Jill as the female opposite of the male Jack) as a pastime that only women who are assigned female at birth are capable of performing. As Enke writes, “Cis’s peculiar ontology erases location and effects through time and space: To preserve the statis of cis as non-trans, trans must never have been or become cis but instead be consistently trans across all time and in all spaces” (Enke 2012: 74). Thus even (transsexual) women who have received gender affirmation surgery and have the anatomy upon which ‘jilling off’ appears to be predicated are defined within Cvoric’s epistemological framework not by the gender or sex that they live, but by the sex they were assigned at birth.
In a recent episode of “The Roundtable” of the Dartmouth College Radio News Department called “Erasing My Identity: Male or Female,” first-year Chinedum Nwaigwe identifies herself as a cis woman and the moderator of a discussion with two self-identified cisgender students and one gender non-conforming student about transgender issues at Dartmouth and in the United States more generally. Notably absent from the focus group are transsexual or binary-identified transgender students, even though there are current students at Dartmouth who exist within those positionalities. In addition, the word ‘preferred’ is used several times to designate the genders and pronouns of transgender people. Although the participants are generally articulate and reasonably well informed, the discussion would have benefitted from more transgender participation. Near the end of the discussion, one of the participants looks forward to the 2016 POTUS candidates’ plans for healthcare “…because I know that that’s a huge issue for transgender people is whether or not their sex change procedures [sic] will be covered by their insurance” (Dartmouth College Radio 2016). This statement reveals that even within circles of trans-friendly allies, A. Finn Enke’s argument holds water when they claim that
Despite the fact that the majority of transsexuals will have no transition-related surgeries in their lifetimes (due to lack of access or desire), medico-juridical transition continues to be a defining feature in the constitution of trans as a category, and never more so than when trans is elicited by cis. By announcing it own sex/gender consistency, cis makes the across (n.) that trans crosses over refer to the ‘line’ between ‘male’ and ‘female,’ as though we agree upon what and where that line may be as well as on what constitutes male and female. (Enke 2012: 73)
To be sure, I would not disagree that insurance should pay for gender affirmation surgery. However, transition cannot be reduced to ‘sex change procedures’ that most transgender people do not even receive.
While cisgender may be used as a trans-ally identity category, it may also function as a signifier of privilege from which those who hold that privilege may wish to distance themselves. In fact, some cisgender people feel the need to indicate ambivalence or apathy toward gender pronouns when asked to provide their own. Whether in classroom introductions where participants are asked to offer their gender pronouns or in daily conversations where trans people dare to reply to the everyday questions of “what should I call you?” or “what are your preferred pronouns?” by responding to their interlocutor in kind, many non-trans people seem to feel the need to dissociate themselves with the pronouns with which they identify and are identified. However, using any pronouns for a cisgender person besides those associated with their sex assigned at birth will most likely elicit an equally incredulous, if not more violent, response. According to Enke, “It is…clear that many people object to being interpellated as cis because cis is generally conflated with normativity, and they do not think of themselves that way” (2012: 62). In response to this curious disidentificatory phenomenon, Assigned Male, Eli Erlick, and Sophie Labelle have created this graphic (Erlick, Labelle and Assigned Male 2015):
Because so much of society is eager to misgender us, transgender people must constantly assert the use of the pronouns associated with our gender identities. We do not have the privilege of being able to express ambivalence about pronouns and still have our gender affirmed. Vocalized ambivalence about gender pronouns is a way for non-trans people to disidentify (in the sense theorized by José Esteban Muñoz) with their gender identity and resultant cisgender privilege. To quote Enke one last time, “The presumption of cis as non-trans will continually effect the marginalization of trans existence, requiring trans to appear through an ever narrower set of signifiers” Enke (2012: 76). While cisgenderism and cisgender privilege may be useful as theoretical and activist tools of intervention, the effects of cisgender as an identity category tend to belie the often trans-friendly intentions of its users.
Works Cited
Dartmouth College Radio: “The Roundtable”. (9 February 2016). “Erasing My Identity: Male or Female.” Retrieved from https://dbroundtable.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/erasing-my-identity-male-or-female/
Enke, A. Finn. (2012). “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies.” In A. Finn Enke, ed., Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Erlick, Eli and Sophie Labelle and Assigned Male. (2015). “Dear Cis People.” [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/transstudent/photos/pb.260550494016200.-2207520000.1456815460./936627926408450/?type=3&theater