Go reread what I wrote. I’ll even copy-paste it here for you.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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 