The cishet distraction

felixedwardrocketship:

queeranarchism:

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. 

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