There is a minority of persons in my community who agree, and feel that almost all labels should be wiped out. Transwomen, t-girls, i-girls, etc. should be “women,” and transmen, transboys, etc. should be “men.”
This works OK if your involvement is casual or passing. But once you get close to the community, issues with label removal develop. For example, if a straight cisgender male wants to date a lady with sex in mind, in almost all cases whether she’s a woman or a transwoman is going to make an enormous difference to the male. Intersex people like myself can sometimes be very militant about being a third sex/third gender/none of the above. What gender do you call someone with a penis, natural-grown breasts, and ovaries who otherwise looks like a young lady? And many hijra do not like being considered part of the transgender community; rather, they consider themselves “third sex,” separate from male and female (as opposed to transitioning from one to the other).
Scientifically speaking I agree that I’m not “normal” in that the average person is not an intersex transwoman. But “normal”, for better or worse, has collected a large amount of implicit baggage which means not being “normal” is akin to be crazy, weird, perverted, or alien.
If you don’t mind me asking - I assume you are from the generation after most of my friends/community I learned terminology from (18-25 range, say). Do you think this is a generation difference in play?
Googling “feminism privilege” gets me this as the very first link and even has the phrase in the context as the OP used.
If they want to tell me to shut up and go away, they can do so using words everybody understands. (Such as: “shut up and go away”.)
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Personally, I’d far rather be told to “shut up and go away” than be handed some line about “privilege” that makes it sound like what the person would really like to do is shoot me in the head for being one of the Evil Oppressors. Calling someone who isn’t rich or powerful (and may well be impoverished or oppressed) “privileged” is about dehumanizing them. It’s a way of saying that you don’t need to care if they are poor or starving or sick or about to be killed; they are “privileged”, and therefore deserve anything that happens to them as rightful retaliation.
I’m not in favor of eliminating labels, per se, rather I think that those who use them need to be conscious of the audience. To use your examples, I think within the community there are nuances between those labels that may be of importance, but they’re nuances that are more likely to be important within the community than outside of it. Similarly, in your dating example, chances are a man who cares about sex in a relationship, particularly if he intends to have kids, differentiating between various nuances don’t matter to him, he only cares if she can have sex and have kids.
I understand and agree that that baggage is there, but I also think that it’s a really unfortunate thing that this is has turned out this way. So I can understand that perhaps calling the majority normal isn’t ideal, but I don’t think terms like cisgendered or heteronormative help with that issue precisely because the people it is intended to describe are the least likely to have the context to understand what that all means. So, in that way, it seems like it’s a solution doomed to fail from the start. I don’t have a better solution either, but I mention it mostly because through my own admittedly significantly less divisive minority aspects, I can at times lose that perspective, that something that I deal with on a daily basis and need very precise ways to describe is obscure to an overwhelming majority of people and utterly indistinguishable from things that have significant and meaningful differences from my perspective.
It’s seldom if ever used like that in real life, and virtually never taken to mean that by the target. It’s used as a way of dismissing whatever problems or suffering someone faces as not mattering, at all. It’s a way of saying “You aren’t Us, you’re Them, therefore you are evil and undeserving of any sympathy or consideration whatsoever.”
Some of the mentioned labels seem to have migrated from the specialized literature or the in-group jargon, and sometimes may not be really the best fit, or not even really necessary, for casual colloquial use . In everyday casual circumstances I’d refer to someone like Una simply as a woman, as she has herself said may be sufficient in those circumstances; but I’d go into specifying a trans identity *if *it became relevant to the conversation. Myself I’m also someone who has not had the need to refer to “cisgender” in casual conversation, but was able to understand it when encountered in writings about the subject (OK, so I remember some of my Latin prefixes) and when relevant to the discussion it seems fine to me.
Not even my grandchildren will see the day we do not feel the need to define in-group/out-group, that seems hardwired; but maybe we can progress to the point there’s a consensus on mutually acepted terms and definitions. (BTW while we’re at it, by the time the group acronym grows into LGBTTQQIAAetc. one begins wondering – or worrying – who may be left out)
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Those of us who do not go around believing that privilege means being rich and/or powerful, nor that in turn that makes “Them” be Evil Opressors who deserve being shot in the head in “rightful retaliation” with no sympathy or consideration, do not get anxious about that being the underlying message when told to check our privilege. And in the cases we find someone with that attitude, as long as they don’t actually try to act upon it, we’ll dismiss it as crackpottery.
In other words, a tiny minority. “Privileged” is what you call the people who live in mansions, the people “who’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes”. And the people who use the term typically make it quite clear that they are using it to justify a complete disdain for the lives, needs, rights or desires of the people they are applying the term to. And I’ve seldom seen people who have the term applied to them take it any other way.
As I recall, the last time I had a conversation on this subject on the SDMB, I ended up arguing with a poster who was insisting that rounding up all the men in a town and killing them doesn’t qualify as sexism, because you can’t be sexist against men. That’s what slapping ordinary people with a “privileged” label is about: dehumanization. It’s about deciding that an entire group of people deserves collective punishment and doesn’t deserve to be treated as human.
And if that’s not how you mean the term? Pick another word, because you’re just going to be misunderstood.
I think labels like “cisgendered” are great. cis is the opposite of trans, so while it may at first be a little confusing, it makes sense to have a value-neutral way of describing both.
That said, I’ll probably not ever describe myself as “cisgendered”, unless someone asks me explicitly (I could be wrong. People are much more likely to self-describe as heterosexual than I would have expected a decade or two ago). That’s (a small part) of what you might call cis-privilege. I’ll never have to ask someone to call me “he”, because that’s what they’ll default to. I’ll never have to feel like I have to choose between hiding part of my identity or explicitly drawing attention to it and risking that the person whose attention I draw may react negatively.
This. It’s a weapon. It’s a term that dismisses the supposedly “privileged.”
Last time I heard the phrase it was from a third generation American (great-grandparents from somewhere in India) with Harvard undergraduate and law degrees, who was pissed off that he’d been challenged in a conversation about some social issue or other. He hurled the phrase at a guy in the group (sitting around a table at a pub having a few beers) who was a blue-collar worker barely getting by these days.
Check your privilege, cis scum. It’s OK, I’m cis scum too. We can call each other that.
Even older. It seems OK for politics and media in general, but when it comes to memes and lingo I swear the Dope is in a time warp. Yo guys, I just found this hilarious site with dancing hamsters.
I think the thing that bugs me the most is the dehumanization aspect that you describe. If you point one group out as “privileged”, no matter how tenuous or theoretical that privilege may be, they’re then set up to be somehow taken down a peg, disrespected or otherwise demonized in some fashion.
Also, a lot of what’s called “privilege” isn’t so much a positive deviation from the norm on behalf of that person or group (what I’d actually call privilege), but rather just the state of being the norm by virtue of being the dominant group.
That’s a misleading usage, and highly contributory toward hard feelings when they’re not necessarily warranted.
For example, let’s say that the average college admission rate is 30% of applicants. Some privileged group (rich, white, blue eyed, etc…) gets admitted at 50%. That’s privilege, or something close to it.
However, if the average is 30% and some group is admitted at 10%, that doesn’t make the groups being admitted at 30% or higher “privileged”, it just means they’re not getting fucked in some way, not that the other groups are privileged.
But many people claim just that, in some perverted version of the “crabs in a pot” problem.
The annoying thing I find about the whole ‘privilege’ usage is that it has been hijacked by blowhard bloggers who want to dig deep to find any small way they are ‘disadvantaged’ and use that as a sounding horn to basically brag about how oppressed they are.
You have angsty teenagers who have a lot of internalized anger/isolation, but they are middle class white kids that realistically don’t really have much to complain about- “first world problems”. They are made aware of the concept of opression and privilege, but oh bummer, they are white and middle class and aren’t special snowflakes.
So they dig deep down and find something to feel oppressed about. Maybe its that they are into anthromorphized animals “furries”. Or they think they are really a fairy/wolf/demon/etc in a human body “otherkin”. Or they have an imaginary friend and/or schitzophrenia that they feel is perfectly normal and exists “tulpa”.
These things give them something to hang on to which allows them to speak from a perspective of oppression and vent their internalized anger into people who criticise them. There’s no reasoning with them- you either agree with them 100% or are just more “cis scum” to be dismissed. They aren’t really interested in having debates about what they go through, or admit that any of their problems are in any way self-inflicted. They just want to feel good about being able to call someone else a racist.
I see this as a big problem, perpetuated by the annoying hugbox nature of the internet. Their ego grows with followers and people who want to play along because they feel lonely. Then you have actual victims of oppression, people who have had to deal with actual racism/prejudice/bigotry for years on end being treated as though what they are going through is no big deal. When you have a person enter the blogosphere completely unbiased, how are they going to be able to take real racism and sexism seriously when the blogospheres are bloated with angsty teenagers talking about how they are victimized by their parents because they are not allowed to pee in a diaper at 23, or how their alternate personality which is conveniently the same as some anime character is TOTALLY REAL GUYS?
Let’s be honest, this didn’t start with the internet, and it’s not isolated to teenagers. There are plenty of fully grown adults who love to try and pretend they’re persecuted and hated - “War on Christmas”, anyone? Or how people think they’re being discriminated against because gay marriage is legal in some places. Or how it’s really whites who feel the effects of racism, or men who feel the effects of sexism. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s pretty damn close - not be part of a disadvantaged group, but take the concepts, ideas, and phrasing of that group as your own to show you are the one being hurt, of course.
The idea of co-opting discrimination and claiming you’re really the one being discriminated against is as old as dirt, and at least in the larger culture, is pretty well accepted by society in some cases.
I’m betting most people have no idea the people you’re taking about even exist. And the minority who do feel exactly the same way you do about them. So I’m not seeing this as a big problem at all. You are talking about fringy people who are into fringy things. They will never be in charge of hiring/firing anyone, managing people, or shaping society in any meaningful, lasting way. So it seems to me they are pretty easy to ignore.
One thing I have noticed and that I’m a bit concerned about is the politicization of medical labels. It used to be that people would say they have a specific disorder and you’d know what they were talking about. We have all gotten kinda-sorta accostumed to using and hearing people first language. Now there’s an abbreviation to pigeonhole every symptom, lots of disorders are being conceptualized as spectrums and confusing “syndrome pluses”, and the word “disorder” is being replaced with “difference”. I have noticed people referring to themselves as “Asperger’s” and “Tourette’s” instead of saying “I have Asperger’s Syndrome” or “I have Tourette’s Syndrome.” I have come across the label “neurodiverse” as a way to describe people who are everything from mildly clumsy (dyspraxic) to people who are profoundly autistic. With “neurotypical” reserved for all the folk who don’t have their own labels…yet.
I’m sure all of this is a manifestation of a lot of positive things coming together. It really is confusing and irritating sometimes, though.