27 March, 2016

Gender Identity & Cis by Default

I mean the other kind of cis/trans distinction.
I've been having a lot of thoughts about feminism lately, but hadn't written anything on my public blog because a friend asked me to refrain. Later, when I felt it was appropriate to post thoughts, I ended up writing a number of drafts that I just can't justify posting. I keep cringing at whatever I write, even ten minutes after writing it. This is probably indicative of my needing to think even more deeply about these issues.

But there's at least one issue for which I feel certain enough to be able to post my thoughts: my personal gender identity.

I don't have a strong sense of my own gender in terms of internal mapping. But I do have a moderately strong sense of my male gender as a social construct that I've latched onto.

If I awoke tomorrow, finding that I was female, and everyone just already thought of me as female, so that there were no issues with respect to the change itself, then I don't think I'd particularly mind. I don't have any internal drive that tells me that I should be a man, but I also don't have any kind of feeling that I should be a woman. Neither do I have any stake in the concept of being agender. When it comes to gender, I just don't really care one way or the other.

So I'm cis by default. I was born male, so I "identify" as male, but I have no strong internal mapping saying "I am male".

Yet: at this point, I have lived so long as a male that I identify strongly with my maleness in regard to social situations. I feel about my maleness the way I do about my skills with percussion: If I were reborn as a horn player, I wouldn't think to myself that really, I'm a percussionist at heart, but I'd still lament the fact that all that time was wasted perfecting percussion when now I'd have to don a trumpet.

It's not just that I'm familiar with my own male identity, but that I have invested in my male identity such that it feels like home to me. When I dream, my dream identity is male. (And wears glasses.) But I don't feel strongly that it is important to be male. (Or have glasses.) When I play rpgs, I choose a female avatar as often as a male one.

But maybe all of the above theorizing is mistaken, and the reason I don't feel a strong sensation one way or the other about gender is because I am cis. As in, maybe the whole reason that my gender preference doesn't occur to me is the same reason a fish might be less aware of water. But I don't think this is the case. I think that at heart, I don't really care about what gender I happen to be, and am cis not because I feel like my gender is correct, but because cis is just the default thing to be in our culture.

Meanwhile, I am fascinated that there is an internal experience of gender that lots of other people are having that I just don't seem to have at all. I feel sort of similar to how I feel about tetrachromats; I'm apparently missing out on an internal experience that others have. But unlike tetrachromats, the number of people with an internal gender identity seems fairly high. I don't know of any research that verifies this, but anecdotally, internal gender identity is much more common than I'd previously suspected.

All of this is to say that finally I have a post I can write about a feminism-adjacent topic that I don't feel hopelessly stupid for writing some ten minutes after composing the initial draft.

2 comments:

  1. Why would you let someone else dictate what you write about in your blog? Unless it's literally about them specifically, they have no right to ask you to avoid writing certain things.

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  2. Why would you let someone else dictate what you write about in your blog? Unless it's literally about them specifically, they have no right to ask you to avoid writing certain things.

    ReplyDelete