A thing I keep getting stuck on is that a lot of the unlearning of bad shit – a thing that we all do when we deal with our privilege – takes place either in silence or in coded words.
For example: we know that we’ve been brainwashed into seeing cisgenderedness as beautiful and we know that unlearning that takes more than just reading that one sentence, it takes actual work unraveling your desires, taking them apart and rebuilding them.
But no one goes out and says “so I am cisgender and I was raised to be cissexist and now I’m not attracted to transgender people unless they have this specific set of features that is idealized as ‘passing’. I’m trying to unlearn that. Here’s my experiences so far.”. And it makes sense not to talk about it that way, because if you start talking openly about not being attracted to trans people you will say a lot of hurtful shit. But for many people it’s the truth, the shitty hurtful truth that needs to be unlearned. So instead people either deny their shit, pretending that their desires as inherent, or they talk in code, either talking about ‘unlearning cis privilege’ only in the abstract, or only in the positive as something ‘achieved’, about how much they’re appreciating trans beauty now (not creepy at all…)
So when cis people spend time unraveling their brainwashing and learning to truly appreciate non-passing trans beauty (and it’s rare that they do that work at all), that work is largely done in private. Which is, obviously, less productive than doing it in a conversation with other, with access to feedback and to other people’s experiences. That’s true of every learning process.
So what would it take for that more open process to take place? A radical acceptance of confessions of cissexism? That would be a pretty big burden on trans people, who would have to hear that shit and hide all their emotions in the interest of cis spiritual growth. Not a nice idea. An all-cis environment where there are no trans people to hurt? That could be potentially terrible.
I really don’t have an answer to this. Unlearning cisgender beauty standards is just one example. You could name a thousand more, from unlearning the coding that tells us to see gay displays of affection as inherently more sexual than straight ones to unlearning seeing white people as inherently more professional, etc. We’ve all got a LOT of shit to unlearn. How do we talk honestly about that without hurting people by showing them the shit inside us?
QueerAnarchism 