Cisgender LGB people: I see a lot of you speaking about ‘the cishets’ with some kind of bitter taste behind it but never acknowledging your own cisgender privilege and how much transphobia there is in the LGBT community and I want you to know that you’re not fooling anyone.
Ewwww… cis people using the term cishet like that is awful, why would they do that? It’s a term for people who are both queer and trans to talk about our oppression, not for cis queers to distance themselves from their transphobia and transmisogyny.
Yeah, the reasons:
–
to distance themselves from their transphobia and transmisogyny.
– to replace the way they have talked about ‘the straights’ as a coherent group when they didn’t want to consider that other people might face any kind of oppression
Pretending that ‘lgbt’ and ‘cishet; are coherent blocks that have all experiences in common is a convenient way to ignore their own transphobia, transmisogyny and cisgender privilege all while providing a tool to exclude people.
Vocal acephobes do this the most, accusing asexual and aromantic people of being ‘cishet’, resisting any kind of solidarity with other issue groups because it would bring the lgbt community in contact with ‘the cishets’.
It’s gross and it is so obviously holding lgbt/queer movements back, keeping them trapped in debates about who is ‘cishet’ when they so desperately need to be building a strong wide resistance to the rise of neofascism.
I wanted to add:
if you create a strong enough ‘us vs. the evil irredeemable cishets’ mentality
this can be used to avoid all accountability ever.
Don’t like being confronted with your racism? Target all your racism at a cishet POC who did something homophobic once. If a POC from the lgbt community calls you out on it you can call them ‘divisive’, you can accuse them of collaborating with the evil ‘cishets’, you can ask them why they hate gay people, etc. etc.
If enough white lgbt people with a similar mindset support you, you can create a culture where racism is okay as long as the target it not lgbt, and this will drive away persky lgbt POC who might talk about white privilege and other uncomfortable topics or who might at some point catch you just being plain old racist to everyone.
Don’t wanna be confronted with your ableism? ditto.
QueerAnarchism 