It’s not like there this is no circumstance in which cisgender lgb people can use ‘cishet’, although really, ‘cisgender and straight’ would be more accurate because it is important to recognize that they are two seperate parts of an identity and two seperate forms of privilege.
It’s just that I do NOT want people using ‘cishet’’ for everything they hate while ignoring their own cisgender privilege and the amount of transphobia that exists in LGBT+ spaces. If you acknowledge that cisgender privilege is a thing, acknowledge it all the time, including when you look in the mirror.
If you want to look at it another way, take two other seperate forms of privilege, like sexuality and gender. You probably wouldn’t want white woman to constantly complain about ‘white men’ while denying her own white privilege and ignoring racism in women’s spaces, would you? That would be hypocritical. Same with cisgender lgb people who use ‘cishet’ but never face their own cisgender privilege and their own transphobia.
There is also a side issue of people using ‘cishet’ to exclude asexual and aromantic people from LGBT+ spaces. Those people are horrible aphobic shitheads.
AND there’s a side issue (often overlapping with the aphobia issue) of liberal LGBT people presenting ‘cishets’ as a coherent enemy who is irredeemably evil, as a way to keeps us boxed in, focussing only on our own group instead of creating bonds with people we have a lot in common with.
So if our group is trans people, liberal identity politics has us rooting for rich powerful trans people but not for the cisgender disabled man next door, even though that guy has experiences of oppression that are a lot closer to ours than a trans celebrity ever will.
If we’re going to create real revolutionary change we need cross-identity solidarity. Presenting all ‘cishets’ as inherently evil both erases transphobia within our own ranks and keeps us away from groups who we could work with to make this world better.
QueerAnarchism 