Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Thoughts on "Die Cis Scum"

friendzoning-ninja: Maybe it’s a good thing they’re being exposed to different types of people, but there is one thing that really bothers me: people’s first exposure to the term/prefix “cis*” is going to be having it used as an insult. People are going to associate “cis*” with a negative meaning, not see it as the neutral term it should be. This is a problem, because people have been working a long time to have this recognized as the neutral counterpart to “trans*”. It’s extremely vexing to see people use the term as a joke.

That’s the problem with being a deliberately ignored minority: since we’re being ignored deliberately, we’ll be given attention deliberately as well. It’s no coincidence that everyone is paying attention to “die cis scum” who previously had no intention of spending 2 seconds thinking about trans issues. It’s not just that they passively don’t want to pay attention to us, it’s that they actively want to continue to not care about us. As the gatekeepers for public attention, they give us two options:

  1. We can beg and plead for compassion and mercy till our faces turn blue and still be ignored.
  2. We can become angry and have people focus on that anger to the exclusion of the message behind it.

This is not on us. Trans people are not to blame. Any efforts to pick apart each others’ strategy which ignore the harsh reality of those 2 options above is completely missing the point. We cannot “win” this game by attempting to play by the rules, because it’s rigged. We need to turn the criticism toward where it belongs, on the cis-supremacist agenda.

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