(and why this made-up term is really bullshit made up by trans-centered and clueless transactivists. Julia Serano comes to mind, actually, as do her neophyte glomlings) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cisprivilege
Noun
cisprivilege
(LGBT, neologism) The social advantage enjoyed by those who are cisgender/cissexual.
Who uses the term “cisprivilege” and what does it mean to them? Transwomen use this term without having any idea at all how profoundly offensive it is to born-females. What transwomen mean when they say born-females enjoy “cisprivilege”
- You can grow your hair long and NOBODY questions you! omg!
- you get to wear dresses and pantyhose and paint your toes and nobody calls you a fag!
- shopping for high heels. srsly!
- having doors held open for you by chivalrous dinosaurs
- getting “dressed” in feminine clothing of any kind, especially little black dresses
- being a cheerleader, or Hooters girl.
- going to a bar and having all your drinks paid for, and cigarettes gifted by, your orbiters
- lipstick and gloss and sparkly blush or eye shadow…so girly!
- sweet sixteen parties! why can’t boys have them! so unfair!
- all-girl slumber parties! #ragenvy
- vaginas! and boobs!
- being Daddy’s little girl and getting a new Camaro for your seventeenth birthday. Wow!
Here is an incomplete list of the social “advantages” of so-called “cis” sexual females.
- having the Amber Alert system named after you!
- FBI rape statistics. Look them up!
- female-only rape shelters
- being a college-aged woman, going for a walk in the woods with a politician boyfriend and never being seen again
- female genital mutilation
- foot-binding
- wife-burning
- being acid-splashed or beheaded by your father for failing to obey Shariah
- being hunted down and killed by your brother or cousin, as an “honor killing” for dropping the hajib and dating Western men
- “want some candy, little girl?” says the creepy pedo in the Buick pulling up alongside a fourth-grade girl walking home from school
- being abducted out of a shopping cart by a ball-cap wearing man while mom is in the next aisle over, and disappeared, never to be seen again
- losing your virginity to your Dad, Uncle, Grandfather, brother or cousin
- first period, (menarche) occuring during the first class of the day in junior high! is that blood on your desk chair?
- periods, period! cramps, water weight, swollen ankles, swollen abdomen, weird food cravings and aversions, being “pissed-off” (all freakin day!) moodswings, aunt flow, blood clots, ew! pads or tampons laydees?
- the morning-after pill. The condom broke he said, time for Plan B, girls!
- creepy gynecologists and your pelvic exams!
- being locked into your father’s basement from age twelve to age twenty-two, and bearing or miscarrying one or more of your Daddy’s rape-babies.
- being sold by your family – works for royalty, all the way down to the peasantry
- having asshole MALES scream at you and shove pictures of feotuses in formeldahyde in your face as you walk into an abortion clinic to terminate a rape or otherwise unwise or unwanted pregnancy
- ectopic pregnancy. ouch!
- PCOS. how do you like my Captain Morgan and my she-goat? hey transwomen, got the name of a good electrologist?
- dying while giving birth. it still happens in this country and it was once a very common way for women to die. Still common in underdeveloped countries.
- being killed or having a male stalk or attempt to murder you, for becoming a feminist. It’s more likely than you think, right trans?
- Being the exclusive prey item on a sociopath, psychopath or narcissists serial killer murder spree wanted list: Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Donald Neilson, Gary Leon Ridgway, Dennis Rader, and my personal favorite, Gentleman Jack the Ripper, stalker and killer of prostitutes
- Being a widow, with no surviving family, forgotten and alone in your house at the end of a street.
- being homeless and pregnant, or pregnant and headed to prison!
- not having medical pros or law enforcement take you seriously when reporting medical or criminal events
- being mansplained to by males in your family, friend circle or professional peers
- and so much more!
What transwomen mean by female “cisprivilege”: “omg, you totally get to be feminine and nobody questions you, your sexuality or your state of mind! plus boobs! and vaginas!” what females understand as “cisprivilege”: femicide, sexism, rape and oppression
Plastic Girl 
As far as I could work out, “privilege” is simply the reverse of a problem. In a liberal narrative, A has a particular problem but B does not happen to have that problem. In an intersectional narrative, B has privilege over A on the axis of that problem.
The narrative has value, in that B can declare A’s problem insignificant while not even trying to understand A; the answer is “check your privilege”. The narrative also has a danger in it – as in, if B has privilege over A, some activists conclude that B is oppressing A, creating conflicts where there should be none. The problem also leads to the concept of “more/less privilege” aka “oppression olympics”.
As a typical example, if A is a black man and B is a white woman, then A has male privilege over B and B has white privilege over A. In different situations A or B will be disadvantaged; for example, a racist killer will likely target A, while a rapist will likely target B. But for the toxic version of this narrative, people will argue whether A or B is generally “more privileged” – which is plain nonsense. The reason for that argument will be to find out if A oppresses B or B oppresses A. Which is more nonsense…
Ditto “cis privilege”… I honestly think it is misnamed and conflates two issues.
One is “external gender conformance privilege”. Any person who does not conform to the gender corresponding to the sex they are perceived as will have certain special problems.
The other is “internal bodily congruity privilege” which is basically a form of able privilege.
im just going to reply to the last part.
the idea that “internal bodily congruity” is a “privilege” just does not sit right with me.
on my terminology page i defined gender dyphoria. trans* assert that dysphoria over gender performance is what helps drive the decision to transition. yet non trans also experience issues over gender and do not transition. no one has yet explained the difference between gender dysphoria as it is experienced by trans or non trans.
so i feel it is with internal congruity. a lot of women feel at odds with their female biology. women can dislike or even despise having breasts, periods and a vagina.
men too can feel at odds with themselves hating going bald, having a small pecker, being short-statured or gangly instead of buff.
heck i have astigmatism. at times ive hated my lifer sentence to wearing spectacles and “felt” i should have always been normal sighted.
I’ll follow your example and concentrate on the last paragraph as it can explain things well.
In the intersectional narrative, people who have good eyesight without glasses do indeed have privilege, a subset of able privilege. It does enable them to ignore the problems of people who require glasses/lenses.
I’m in a similar boat here as I have issues restricting what I can eat. I see that those who don’t have the issues have visible privilege – they can eat wherever they please while I can feel pretty bad in a suburb filled with fast food outlets, having to choose between staying hungry and risking a penalty from my body for eating what’s on offer.
The people owning the fast food outlets feel free to ignore problems of people like me by not having safe options available. That is a case of privilege. But it would take more than that to get to “oppression”.
And in a lot of other cases I have privilege and can – unless I wanch what I say or do – end up ignoring other people’s problems.
See where I’m getting?
i see where you are getting, and I won’t deny there is something to that…
but i’ve been trying to frame or figure out why it still bothers me, and I think I have managed to pin it down today.
the whole oppression oneupmanship (sp?) game that plays out in these kinds of discussions, always trying to gauge what level of oppression someone is coming from, delineating all the variations, (able priv, subset able priv, white woman priv over woc, male priv over female priv) it all reeks of something that I am going to go to great risk at naming.
the very fact that we can sit at our desks and give +s and -s and score our various oppressions against each other, the whole game of “uh oh, if i am not careful I will trample over someone else’ oppression reeks of…privilege!
to use your example of normal sighted privilege over not-normal sighted privilege, it is something we can only contemplate due to time on our hands.
there is a huge gulf of difference in non glasses-needing-privilege vs something like male privilege
my thoughts are always casting back to ancient times, like Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Medieval, etc
those people, basically anyone not in the leisure class, had brutal lives. everyone was oppressed together against floods, famines, droughts, invading clans,
worrying about “non glasses wearing privilege (assuming they had been invented) was an impossibility. privilege then was, who had food and shelter and clothing, and who didn’t. who was a slave, and who wasn’t. who was going to tribal war, and who was staying home. the…severity of their lives, the immediacy of their needs and trials was so unlike what we have here in Western Civ (that’s a gross overgeneralization and not entirely accurate by far, but…)
the idea of someone in 1000 BC bemoaning, or calculating someone else’s “internal body congruity privilege” is so laughably ludicrous. it takes a privileged trans person to balk on social media about how a female has internal bodily congruity.. maybe im not making my point very well…
skipping ahead..
Francois Tremblay nailed it with this comment, which is so perfect, it could stand in for my entire post here
are you getting that?
To respond to your point in bold, my point is that privilege, as such, does not HAVE to be caused by exploiting.
Things do get blurred if we use white or male privilege as examples as in those specific cases exploitation does occur on a mass scale.
Able-bodied privilege, however, is not caused by most able-bodied people exploiting disabled people (though some able-bodied individuals excluding considerations about disabled people from their decision-making process do contribute). Yet, able-bodied privilege exists.
I would not use “cis privilege” as no one really knows if one is truly cis; perhaps I’d rather speak of “gender conforming privilege” which encompasses the remnants of “straight privilege” plus “cis privilege”. Gender conforming privilege makes things easier for people who externally conform to the gender that corresponds to their externally perceived sex; exactly what the gender means is strongly culturally dependent. Basically, in some cultures being “straight gay” (as in “normal”-looking and with a stable partner who also looks “normal”) is now considered gender conformant, though this is a recent development.
This privilege, like the narrower straight privilege, is caused by xenophobia rather than exploitation. Plus there is the matter of bodily congruence which is basically a medical matter, thus we’re talking of a subset of able privilege here.
One does NOT equal the other. For example, a butch-looking lesbian does NOT benefit from gender conforming privilege, even if she is exactly that and not a trans man. But, not being a trans man, she often does have bodily congruence (one could say she has more of it than your average young woman because she knows not to give a d**n about being conventionally beautiful).
As for the Ancient times argument – well yeah, disabled people were generally left to die, and trans people often did not fare much better (except in cultures that happened to include them in some form). And as far as I am aware, nobody made a fuss about race because one did not need some justification for enslavement – you got defeated, you’re a slave, whatever your skin. And the ways for a woman were either to obey or, in some rare cases, to take power by the sword – not by politicizing about women’s rights.
So, yes, there was no time for discussion of privilege back then because the strong ruled, end of story. I am not exactly sure how it is relevant to the current situation, except in a broad and rather distorted “we all are so small compared to ancient giants” way.
Just to let you know, ramendik is a male troll who has been trolling Russian radical feminists for years, and he is banned from all of even remotedly feminist/gender-critical discussion spaces. I just thought you should know that before continuing the talk with him.
ty. i appreciate the tip. i have a spot picked out for his husk near the remains of Hexy if he maabs it up big time. fwiw he has been a gentleman behind the scenes (ie emails) to me. and he does know some interesting political stuff. i let it slide for those reasons. and because his name gives me a smile
“As far as I could work out, “privilege” is simply the reverse of a problem. In a liberal narrative, A has a particular problem but B does not happen to have that problem. In an intersectional narrative, B has privilege over A on the axis of that problem.’
A privilege is not just “the reverse of a problem.” The fact that person A has a problem and B does not, does not mean that B has privilege over A. The word “over” is the operative word here. For B to have privilege over A, there must be some way in which B, as a class, is exploiting A, as a class.
White people have privilege over POC. Men have privilege over women. “Cis” do not have privilege over “trans”; transgender people’s problems are not caused by the exploitation of transgender people by “cis” people.
I reject class theory that ascribes exploitation to a class as a whole. It did not even work well in Marx, let alone in the huge expansion that is intersectional theory.
As an example, a poor white man does not usually have any way to exploit a rich black woman. But he still has white and male privilege over her, which only means that in certain specific cases he is still safer.
An example closer to the issue would be other forms of able privilege. If someone is wheelchair-bound, their problems are not caused by you or me (I’m assuming you are able-bodied; I apologize if this is not the case) somehow exploiting them. Yet we have physically able privilege over them because we can move in many public spaces where they can’t.
Likewise, transgender people’s problems are not caused by exploitation of transgender people by cis people “as a class”, but only because “as a class” generally does not work.
Many of the problems are indeed caused by actions by some cis people, *including some cis women*. While cis women very rarely use physical violence against trans people, there is a significant amount of political influence some cis women wield that does significantly contribute. Some of these cis women are conservatives, others are radfemists.
as for the last part…you may not be understanding the degree to which transpolitics are an invasive species for women’s rights. this is very close to war – war of ideaology, thought control, colonisation, displacement, erasure,
in war, you use the resources you have to get the result you want. just saying, if I were a politically powerful woman with a desire to keep females (and myself!) safe from erasure, I would use what I had available and not feel bad about it, especially if I (we) win!
Your post is hard to understand, as you seem to be mixing up issues of class with issues of intersectionality. Your example doesn’t work because white people, as a class, are exploiting black people, as a class. The fact that a specific person is situated lower on other hierarchies does not erase the fact that they benefit (as an individual) from their privilege as a white person.
The point I am making is that he is not “exploiting” personally, even while he is “benefitting from privilege” personally. And I don’t really believe in “exploiting as a class”.
Issues of ableism are a better example as able-bodied people don’t generally get to exploit disabled people, yet do benefit from privilege over them.
“And I don’t really believe in “exploiting as a class”.”
So basically you’re stating you don’t believe in reality. There’s not much I can do about that.
“Issues of ableism are a better example as able-bodied people don’t generally get to exploit disabled people, yet do benefit from privilege over them.”
Okay, now I KNOW you are completely out of touch with reality. Wow.
I grew up under a class theory ruling a country (the Soviet Union) and I know how well it works with reality. The experience left me a hardened individualist.
Class theory is part of radical theories almost by definition. If you reject class theory and embrace individualism, then you’ve made your mind completely useless philosophically on the basis of a grudge. That’s… dumb.
Individualistic theories completely fail to explain systemic features of society which arise because… society is organized in systems of thoughts and institutions, and not just a bunch of disconnected individuals that act in a contextless void.
Oh any by the way, if you can give me an academic, verifiable definition of a “class” and of “exploiting as a class”, and prove using that definition that able-bodied people as a class do exploit disabled people as a class, THEN we can look at whether any class exploits trans people as a class (however that class is defined).
I can help you with the first part. According to Vladimir Lenin, “Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated by law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and their mode of acquiring it”. (English translation not mine, but I did study this definition a lot).
Lenin (and Marx before him) is the very root of all radical class theories. The very basis upon which Bolshevism operates is that a person’s objectively determined class determines their interests in other words, *objective class interests are the interests of all persons in the class, even though they might believe otherwise*. The people, quite possibly the minority, of a class who do grasp its objective interests correctly and are ready to act upon them are the “vanguard” of the class, and, however small they may be, their actions REALLY represent the entire class and – provided the actions are indeed in line with objective class interests – benefit the entire class.
Recognized something very familiar yet?
“Recognized something very familiar yet?”
Yes, this is all familiar. Why don’t you get it yet?
CIS privilege does not exist for women. There is NO privilege to be had for ANY woman when it comes to gender. For us, it’s a no win situation; you conform, you get abused, you don’t conform, you get abused.
***The ONLY way someone can think that being a feminine (gender conforming) women is a privilege, is if they believe that “feminine” and all that goes with it, is an appropriate, even natural, way for a woman to be. They would have to see the female gender role (feminity) as positive, desirable, a social and personal good that should be upheld, even celebrated. Obviously, this means they are not just accepting of the female reality, but also of our oppression, as our role is the basis of our oppression.***
Again-
If a woman conforms to the gender role designated, by society, for women, she gets abused for it. If she doesn’t conform, she gets abused.
While the actual oppressive acts may appear to differ between the two, it’s all the same in practice: objectification, economic coercion, harassment, threats, rape, assault, murder. Whether a woman conforms or not, the male violence will still be targeting her. For being a female.
Thus, use of the word “CIS” confers nothing but contempt for women, even though it is frequently done unwittingly by other women/libfems. Not only is there no privilege in CIS-ness, the use of the term also says that the woman is OK with her gender role! I am not the only woman that thinks “I am NOT OK with the means of my oppression!”. It’s an insult to be called CIS, not just a easy way to label someone “not trans”.
What about the (trans) MEN???
When M2T are abused, discriminated against, assaulted, or raped, it is because they are taking on attributes of the oppressed class. To be feminine is to be abused. I know that trans suffer dangers due to their non conforming actions, and this is reprehensible and should stop.
*The abuse of M2T does NOT show that women have privilege! If MEN get abused in high numbers when they take on the FEMALE role, doesn’t that prove that the female role is the target for oppression? So, on what planet would the original “owner” of that role have any advantage at all?
Actually, I agree with some of what you say. If you are not ok with the feminine gender role you are not cisgender, end of story. You do NOT have cisgender privilege even if you force yourself to conform externally, if only because you are ultimately *forced* to conform, it’s coercion, not identity. Slapping the label “cisgender” on you sounds like collusion with that coercion, and that’s not cool.
However, I know some women who are ok with the feminine gender role in their culture (sometimes qualified by “subculture”). These women are cisgender. You are not.
Unfortunately that is where we are likely to differ, judging from your nickname. The position that a woman can genuinely be ok with something you see as oppressive is probably unacceptable to you, as that is the very basis of “sex positivism”.
Also, the M2Fs (and I will use the accepted medical terms, not the ideological jargon of radfemists) who do not pass are generally abused for not conforming to the male gender rather than for conforming to the female one. In fact this abuse is often conflated with homophobia. I’ve seem more than one homophobic image where the target is a cross-dressed male, often with lipstick on, and the accompanying text is about “faggots” and the like.
Thank you for this post. I am a woman who refuses to call herself “cis”. I don’ even feel a single item on the FIRST list is remotely appealing or pleasant. They’re a bunch of stereotypical expectations that most women find to be quite a DRAG. The only thing I DON’T mind is having a vagina.
You are very welcome! I do occasionally like getting a mani or pedi, and yeah, I grow my hair long. But I recognize many of those elements as rituals of the Patriachy (i.e. do it for the menz). And I love my vagina. 🙂
Thanks for weighing in and reading my stuff. Take care.
Reblogged this on graceaware.
Reblogged this on You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you..
The reality is, when trans thinks of cisprivilege, they want to be a cross between Hot-for-Teacher, nerd-girl, and the women of Sex and the City. That is what they aspire to. Have your cake, and eat it too.
What transwomen do not want to transition to, is an obese disabled woman stuck in a wheelchair. they don’t want to die in childbirth. They want, some of them anyway, like Andrea James for example, to be red-carpet hotties.
they would not willingly switch places with an undocumented immigrant Mexican woman who works her fingers and back all day as a housekeeper or janitor.
They don’t want to live under Shariah.
They don’t want to be a Sudanese woman, and get whipped for wearing pants.
They don’t want to be medically experimented on against their will, or carry a rape baby, or any of that stuff.
That’s why transgender appears fetishistic. They want to be a Maxim girl, be smart, beautiful, wear dressups and have the corporate job or be a small business owner or whatever.
They don’t want to be a homeless woman, pregnant and abandoned. They dont want to walk through prolife protestors on the way to an abortion clinic. They don’t want to be domestic violence victims. They want to be a clean, sexy, fantasy of a woman. A male fantasy or fetish of what women’s lives are like.
But in reality, from the moment a female is born, the greatest threat to her well-being, physical and mental health, and survival, is all the men in her life.
I’m afraid this argument simply doesn’t wash. Let me show you what it looks like.
Let us assume I am trying to prove male privilege does not exist (note: I am NOT actually making the statement, I am using this supposed argument as an analogy to show where yours is flawed). I would then state that the pesky middle-class feminists want the “privilege” of the rich young white man.
They would not want to swap places with a homeless old chap. They would not want to be forced by the economic situation to work long hours carrying heavy boxes. They would not want to be conscripted into an army where they will be hazed and then possibly forced to fight people they don’t care about and quite possibly being killed – the fate of most men in many countries of the world.
Thus, I would conclude, they just imagine there is a “male privilege” and only a small part of the male population actually have it good. They “want to have a middle-class woman’s fantasy of what a man’s life is like”.
Have I really proven that male privilege does not exist? No, I have not. Thus, a similar argument that many cis women have it bad does not prove that cis privilege does not exist.
i dont disagree with what youve written here, but the entire comment misses the mark
biological and socialized males that trans gender, are seeking unquestioned acceptance and inclusion as *real females* based on copy-catting ritualized submission behaviours that many women, especially feminist women are conscious of what it really is
so, two kinds of “cisprivilege” to wail about
women can dress up unquestioningly femme..therefore has femme dressups privilege
and
women naturally grow breasts, has breasts privilege…
which we can take apart fairly easily
**applause** I didn’t read the replies, I just saw this comment and had a “lightbulb” moment. I’m sure there are some M2T who want exactly what I’ve got, a het monogamous + 4 born out of me children. I’m white, middle class, living in a first world country. It’s cosy, acceptable and challenges no one. What people transitioning are unlikely to want is the sexual assault and harassment I was on the receiving end of for years working as a waitress to put myself through university; I doubt they want my auto immune disease that affects more “cis privileged” women than people born male; or the 3rd degree scar on my perineum due to a botched forceps delivery. Fetishistic is exactly what I was reading, generally, into the choices made, again generally, by prominent M2T people. Just because you chose, with your endless privileged wealth to have your genitals surgically removed – that pain you paid to endure – doesn’t give you the right to call me “cis”, nor does it give you a free pass into my space.
hey there. thanks for commenting. i am sorry for your suffering. putting on dressups and affecting certain mannerisms, and claiming these behaviors constitute an “identity” that is female, without actually going through — the suffering — that is often part of being female, is freakishly entitled and appropriating.
and then they claim extra extra extra special suffering when a man or a woman misgenders them for looking like or acting like, a man in a dress. Die In A Fire Cis Scum!
they are a third sex, and they’re a collection of male fantasies of what they think women’s lives are like.
if you told a prospective middle class AGP transitioner that he has three options for female life:
Victorian Era Prostitute
Roman Era House Slave
Immigrant Day Laborer
he would balk!
even more, if you said, sorry, you can be female, but no dressups. You were a buzzcut, wear a Mao suit, and live in a commune with 100 other females all dressed and looking the same, he would balk and be like, “wtf?”
because deep inside a good many of them want to be Maxim girls who make fat bank with their STEM careers and get their pic listed at Lynn Conways place as “successful transwomen” without actually having to go through the shared girlhood oppression, the sexism, the gendered media from chidlhood, the mansplaining, the female-specific ailments…
Have your dwessups, get an “F” on your license, make it a thought crime for people to misgender you, and keep your male privilege too.
disgusting!
How better to erase a whole existence of oppression that to name it a privilege? Simultaneously they become both the victim AND the get to dictate what “woman” is. And , also, as a bonus, they get to silence anyone female who, by daring to name womanhood, is attempting to own it and wrest back control of said womanhood from patriarchy.
hey there, welcome to the Plastic Girl
and um, yeah. trans is totally out of hand with this nonsense. They are clueless and insane and a line has to be drawn, “this shit stops here, now”
Reblogged this on Critiquing Trans & Gender Identity Doctrine.
I agree with this except for the part where you fetishize and bash women’s biology: there is nothing inherently painful or weak about menstruation and mood swings and cravings are misogynistic stereotypes with no basis in reality (men talking about mood swings in women when they snap and start beating/killing people all the time is SUPREME IRONY).
SO yeah, don’t talk about shit you have no experience of. Especially if you are going to be such a misogynistic prick about it.
forgive me. i meant no disrespect. i would gladly endure your period for you, if i could.
i have an artificial cycle loosely timed with the moon’s waxing and waning utilizing progesterone,
i personally get crying jags, sometimes puffy ankles, swollen and tender breasts and odd food cravings.
thank you for commenting. have a nice day and please come again
Damn, this is so very sad and yet you’re comedic delivery just gets the better of me. Another brilliant post, PG.
Also, I missed the part where you fetishize and bash women’s biology. Do I get to be offended now that you dared mentioned that periods can be nasty business? Welp, I’ve had a period since the age of 11 and the idea of bleeding out of one of my orifice’s for several days still strikes me as crazy. What the hell was nature thinking when she came up with that arrangement? My husband still makes jokes about banishing me to the woods once a month. Goodness! Was that misogynist of him? Should I divorce him now because he thinks periods are gross like most men do? I really wish people would get a grip.
eleven years old! i think, honestly, if that happened to me at a young age and i had no idea what it was, or why it was happening, and blood just started seeping out, i would be in mortal panic. or at least terrified i was dyinh somehow…
and if i knew some of the details at such a young age, say 11-13, i would be slightly less terrified, but also sad!
“oh, that blood clot isnt a clot. its part of my uterus falling out…goddess save me!”
“he thinks periods are gross like most men do”
Honestly I don’t get why most men do, and I’m a man. I mean, it’s just biology. Ideally, just some bleeding.
It happens sometimes to involve a lot of blood and to be painful, but then it’s a medical issue – all and humans get medical issues, our bodies are like that. Women generally don’t get grossed out by men getting prostate check-ups and sometimes rather tricky surgery, so why should men get grossed out by the possibility of periods going badly?
I also don’t get why men are sometimes afraid of childbirth, and yes, I happened to be present once. My big fear was that I would introduce infection. So I rubbed my hands and arms with antiseptic gel like I was in some movie about doctors. Thankfully there were no complications to get afraid of. But I hear some men, when invited to a birth, get all so nervous and scared even when complications are not involved – why?..
Pooping is just biology too. You still wouldn’t want to lay next to a steaming pile of crap.
Look, conceptually speaking, periods are gross. I’m not going to pretend that men shouldn’t be grossed out by it, simply because their bodies don’t do what mine does. I was present at a live birth and thought all the fluids and poop were gross. Scared me out of having kids myself–well, that and the fact that I just don’t like kids. But gross is part of life and you get used to it.
my mother may not have prepared me because she was was well trained into female bio stuff shame by her mom and religion. so id have ended up like carrie…
My mother taught me about sex when I was seven. My parents were never uptight about that sort of thing. She even got me the funniest little book about getting your first period, so when the day finally came I was like, ‘Pfff, welp I guess I’m doing this ting now.’ I was actually kind of excited because I really bought into that whole business about having a period meant you were ‘becoming a woman.’ At the time I had 0 idea what it meant to become a ‘woman’. Little did I know that ‘becoming a woman’ was code language for ‘ripe for fucking.’ Yeah, that’s pretty crude of me, but that’s essentially what these ‘right of passage’ rituals are about.
very interesting perspective, MW. you were fortunate that your folks gave it to you straight – without uneccessary baggage. i remember when my parents explained to me the “birds and the bees,” it sounded so awful that i couldnt imagine either men or women even bothering! a year later my dad gave me a shorter, condensed, and de-yuckified version that sounded far more appealing…
regarding periods, (assuming i got them) i would have wanted my mother to frame the experience as becoming a life-giver. i like to imagine she would have told me pagan fertility folklore, or faerie tales regarding the moon, lycanthropy, and moon-rituals, and shaman stories that hinted at, alluded to, or metaphorically expressed the entire experience – the entire cycle -as a female power men can only wonder about, and be in awe of.
the idea being when i got my first flow, i would recognize it as something both natural and sacred. something i couldnt wait to tell my mother proudly about when it happened. i dont know that i would havd had any better ideas of what it “means to be a women” either. but i sure as heck would know i was on my way to being an adult female
and if i had my own daughter, that’s almost certainly how i would prepare her.
I got my first period when we were on a camping holiday deep in Wales. On a Sunday. This was 30 years ago, and finding somewhere to buy sanpro was extremely difficult. The whole place closed down.
My father took my two brothers, both younger, aside to explain what was happening and why we had to go shopping. Don’t know what he said, but it must have been pretty upbeat as there were no “yucks”, in fact they seemed pretty impressed. We endured an endless drive in the rain looking for a shop. Then, when we got home, we had a special dinner to celebrate that I was now a woman, able to have babies. My parents made us all feel this was a lovely thing. Bit like a birthday. My mum made a short speech. I was very touched. It removed some of the disquiet I felt at what seemed an ugly intrusion. Later I came to feel kinda special and powerful when having my period. I am woman. hear me roar 🙂
My parents are special people. They’ve been married for 60 years, and very happily. My mother calls him “my best friend.” My dad was a family doctor and obstetrician. He told me women are the superior sex, that we are more logical and see the big picture. We are the stronger sex, we create both families and society. He thinks women should rule the world. This was a good way for a girl to grow up.
I’m a widow with nearly grown kids. My husband looked after them and the house while I built my own business. There are men to whom it never occurs that women could be anything but equal. My sons are among them. Finally things are changing.
My experience as a female has been good on the whole, but I find this idea of cis privilege laughable. It’s basically blaming saying it’s our fault that M2Ts aren’t female. Being female is not a privilege. We’ve suffered millennia of oppression. Periods are a pain, but not as painful as the rapes and harassment I endured as a young woman, or the lower pay. It’s still a man’s world and for certain M2Ts to try and tell us who we are is such typical entitled male behaviour. I like what therealthunderchild says:
“How better to erase a whole existence of oppression that to name it a privilege? Simultaneously they become both the victim AND they get to dictate what “woman” is. And , also, as a bonus, they get to silence anyone female who, by daring to name womanhood, is attempting to own it and wrest back control of said womanhood from patriarchy.”
I read that some extreme transactivists are *demanding* that lesbians find them sexually attractive. The concept of the cotton ceiling. OK, it’s a tiny number – the lunatic fringe – but I find that jaw-dropping. How would anyone think sexual attraction works like that? If these guys wanted to have sex with females surely it would’ve been a whole lot easier to stay male? Do they not understand that lesbians are attracted to females? Females react to sexual arousal in complex beautiful ways. Creating a replica by medical means just isn’t the same. It treats females as objects that can be defined by constructed body parts. The idea that my clever lovely complex genitals can be recreated surgically on a male body just doesn’t wash. It’s insulting.
I loved this. 🙂
while I am attracted to guys and i think there are positive things that can be found appreciated about “male energy” for myself, part of my attraction to females is energetic. Healthy adult females with good spirits, or good “prana” have a positive spiritual energy, and I am attracted to women with good souls.
Men, while useful in a lot of ways, can, as I am sure you well-appreciate, be a bit of pain in the rear sometimes. Women generally do not oppress each other or men, on the basis of sex. It’s like,
oh, you have a vagina, that means you are ripe for abuse, assault, and exploitation, for our pleasure, sorry about that, -signed, menz
“How would anyone think sexual attraction works like that? If these guys wanted to have sex with females surely it would’ve been a whole lot easier to stay male? Do they not understand that lesbians are attracted to females?”
Right? It’s like trans is saying, “hey, i got these plastic tits, this neo-vagina (or ladystick) (!), and F on my license, you are supposed to like and sleep with us. that was our expectation when we transitioned, so hop in the sack with us,”
and speaking as a woman, if I were a lesbian, I would be like, “dood, I appreciate that you have this neo-identity as a woman, and all, and that you may have gone through some personal, physical, social and financial pain for that. however, you spent your first forty years as a MAN. and that means, you’re just not my type. for all the patriarchal reasons listed above, and that lack of shared girlhood, and shared female bio-life, fears, and oppressions. Sorry about your socialization.”
loved your sharing. thanks so much for visiting. 🙂
thank you kindly, MW.
And I don’t think periods are gross at all but yeah, I wouldn’t lie next to a pile of poo. My kids don’t think periods are gross because they’ve grown up with a mother who doesn’t hide the fact she’s bleeding and in fact has had to sort out small fighting children who all want to be the one to get a pad for me. But then I also take them along when I get blood work done and doctors’ visits and was fine with them being there, if they wanted to be, when their younger siblings were being born. You think periods are gross, try a late first trimester miscarriage or a simple full term birth. ALL THE BODY FLUIDS.
And I don’t find many adults I like so I wonder why I had children because they’re just going to disappoint me and grow up into adults. Adults are fucking weird and mean and nasty. Give me my kids any day. Kids are in your face honest.
after reading your comment i felt i should add:
even though my hybrid body sends me body-messages urging me to get pregnant, if i could concieve, i would feel a dilemma of sorts.
bear only daughters, like a good Bene Gesserit sister, knowing she has a life of facing the malevolence of male violence and other forms of female suffering (like heavy periods and birthing conditions like fistulas and preeclampsia and gestational diabetes).
or have a son. a son that could become a statutory rapist, a date rapist, a deadbeat dad, or a misogynistic “pick up artist”, concerned mainly with adding notches to his sexual conquest bedpost, or a man that indulges in buying the cheap services of under-age prostitutes.
do i birth sommeone who will be socially groomed by his peers and culture to be an oppressor? or one of the oppressed…because vaginas.
a hard choice all the way around.
No. I don’t think periods are gross. My point was I can see why men would find them gross and why they may be happy not to go through menstruation.
I don’t think miscarried fetuses are gross. I think it’s sad. My mother had a miscarriage when I was a little girl and it was a very sad thing for her to go through. Partial moles, however, are a different story. Imagine believing you’re carrying a baby inside you only to be told that something went wrong and that what was really growing in there is just a useless clump of cells.
AT- I don’t hide menstruation from my daughter, either. It’s going to happen to her, anyway, and I feel powerful when I’ve got mine as well. There’s just something about it. I’ve had incredibly heavy periods, and painful, but my friends and relatives don’t understand my negative feeling about menopause. I need the hormones, and I *feel* them. Maybe PG can understand that!
I also worry about my daughter PG, as you wrote about feeling if you had a daughter, and I did not want sons at all. I’ve had multiple miscarriages and my other daughter died at 3 1/2 months. My six year old daughter has Down syndrome, so I’m double and triple scared for her. If I had a son, and he raped a woman (or anyone), I’d be devastated.
My daughter is only now becoming potty trained; most kids with Ds take longer. I don’t hide my periods from her because it’s all bathroom related stuff, and she could get periods really young, so she needs to know about all of this stuff.
in reply to AD,
i totally *get* what you mean by feeling your hormones. truly.
i think if i could select the sex of my baby, i would choose female. id rather deal with her emotions and dramas than have a son who will mature to feel entitled to everything, including sex. by force.
Hi PG-
I can’t seem to reply directly under your comment. Hopefully, this makes sense!
I would always choose daughters. It’s not even that I don’t like men. I was the girl who cursed young and didn’t mind all kinds of “icky” things, including playing with garter snakes or even boa constrictors. I had a lot of male friends, even after we moved out of 2 different neighborhoods where I was the only girl.
I fear every single day for my daughter. I have had to ask her school teachers to not encourage her to hug or climb on men, and I’m not wild about her being encouraged to just hug any classmates, including boys, without also stressing that she doesn’t *have* to hug anyone. She’s got Down syndrome, so people expect her to be more friendly and hug everyone. As a little girl, I was forced to go kiss all the male relatives and they would open-mouth kiss me with tongue, and I begged my mother to make them stop. I also got entire butt cheek pinches that would leave me sore. This was late 60’s/early 70’s and I’ve not seen anyone touch my daughter like that (or he’d currently be dead). But I am very worried about her having to grow up with porn-sick little boys, as it’s starting younger and younger for kids, when they see porn.
But my daughter makes sense to me. She’s only now learning to talk, we sign with her, but I feel a sense of things being linear. What scares me about boys is that one day, even the piggish ones are somewhat reasonable. But those teen years frighten me. I think I’d never really know a son. I’ve seen so many men who adore their mothers and take their side in family disputes, who then brag about getting women drunk and assaulting them (“she asked for it,” of course). Those same men go to strip joints and feel entitled to see unknown women spread out for them, and I think, “Does any woman really know a man? Does his mother?”
It’s that disconnect from women and mothers that makes me not want a son.
thank you for sharing, AD.
you are amazing. you are a super-mom. to so lovingly care for your daughters well-being in spite of whatever challenges she faces.
the porn thing.. yea. its gotten out of hand. the situation was best summated by an episode of Southpark. i dont recall its name but i think (Stans dad?) went through pornsickness overload. fapping away to increasingly lewd or debasing imagery for visual-oriented sex machines causes dehumanization of thevsubjectmatter. namely us…
that teen boys can achieve the pornsick overload virus soon after contacting the internet is a problem that filters and netnanny software can not abate.
its literally infiltrating their sex selection software, turning them into jaded fapmachines in search of a higher and higher (sicker and sicker) means to get off.
even moar delicious “cis” privilege. jus primae noctis
Allow me to give you my mom in spirit, PG. She loves mothering everyone anyway and she’s been into feminist occult history, myths, rituals and folklore since the early 70s. Unfortunately her explanation of menarche wasn’t as mystical as you would hope. She laid it out as a pretty mundane thing. When I cringed at the thought of being in pain, she remarked that pain is a woman’s business, so had better get used to it. Men have to actively seek out pain to strengthen their endurance. A woman has little choice in the matter. Most often pain just happens to her, whether it’s due to menstruation or pregnancy or menopause.
We’re not weaker for it, though. Just the opposite. Whether men get that or not, I couldn’t care less.
You don’t have to publish this comment, btw, since it’s so off topic. It’s mainly for your eyes only.
thank you so much. i kept this comment for myself only, until now. are you still here? am i safe? can i stand down now and retire peacefully? please tell me you’re alive and here with me. i need someone. im scared.
Pingback: One Cissie’s Take on Trannies, Mis-Gendering & Passing | The Feminist Rag
continuing with the Carrie theme, there were times when my mother behaved within a few degrees of Margaret White.
she also bears a resemblence to my mother. her religous-based oppression of her own daughter reflects Mary Daly’s assertion that women often become agents of the Patriarchy, hurting their own children in the name of God-the-Father.
even more lolcis privilege explained with song by an actual female (omg how dare she name female vulnerability and lived experience as oppresssive. someone call Serano up immediately so Emilie can check her cisprivilege!)
it is completely and cat-astrophically cluelesss for male-born to assert that so-called female gen-dur is any kind privilege and constitutes any kind of internal ‘identity’ to be dysphoric about. its absolutely ludicrous that males would even think that being a socialised woman is a privilege of any kind.
oh… another prime example of the damage of ‘femininity’ training for girls. (this is the femininity that Serano thinks should be “celebrated” like only an AGP can, I guess.)
anyways… moving on to my example.
as i was getting off the bus about six weeks ago, maybe less, i saw a young chinese girl, she had to be between fourteen and sixteen. she had large, and gross bunions on both her big toes, which bulged out of her pointed toe flats she was wearing. so, she is going to school, with damaged feet, and nasty looking, too, in shoes that are not meant to conform properly to the human foot. i thought to myself, what a trooper. she already has suffering for fashion training down old school.
that’s insane. really.
after my stint as a prostitute, i had to wear different shoes to rehab my ankles from wearing high heels.
that’s more delicious cisprivilege for you, right Julia?
i smell burn-t toastersss.
too funn-e
Pingback: Women Do Not Have ‘Cis’ Privilege | Mancheeze
Just some thoughts…
what is really at stake here.
imagine, if you will, that there is a lady’s loo.
and in it, is Queen Elizabeth, Michelle Obama, Hilary and Chelsea. And. Lisa Vogel.
Now then, in comes Dana Dhaddy Lanefootfetisffuck wearing my StripOrDare(mightgetkilledf!)-hookerware as his identity crisis.
The Queen says, “Get out, at once” with the finality and command of “Got it?”
Dlt, instead of complying, instantly, actually turns to her, looks down sternly at her, and pRoceeds to mansplain how his dikgirl status and his fetish of my mefacing javk the ripper clothing makes him female.
How would that end?
plus hate comments from asholes from btardville spew obscenepornsicKnessoverlad filth into a healing space.
i use to service guys like him.
i know a rapist when i smell one