Comments on: Entertaining a second definition for cisnormativity

By: … even the term… | I'm Such an AFROholic

… even the term… | I'm Such an AFROholic — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 15:40:37 +0000

[...] –Comment by Carto on “Entertaining a Second Definition for Cisnormativity” [...]

By: The Femisphere: Trans Feminist Bloggers (Part 2) : Ms. Magazine Blog

The Femisphere: Trans Feminist Bloggers (Part 2) : Ms. Magazine Blog — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:03:07 +0000

[...] do we navigate trans issues within feminism, and how can we better deal with those who ascribe to cisnormativity/cis dominance within the feminist [...]

By: Carto

Carto — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:09:53 +0000

Good post – I’d just like to add that even the terms “trans” and “cis” derive from cisnormativity: one could speak of bodily configurations and legal sexes and recognised genders and so on without much need to divvy up people into “trans” and “cis” at all. Plus, both “trans” and “cis” bring in the notion of sex assigned at birth into the equation as a determining agent, which it obviously is, but only within the context of cisnormativity. I’d much prefer to lose the connection with the (coercively) assigned sex completely. I feel that, my bodily history being what it is, that I stopped being trans the moment I realised that:

a) the people assigning me a sex at birth were wrong (both in that the assigned sex was wrong and that assigning people into two and only two mutually exclusive sexes is wrong), and

b) that I don’t have to define myself by their mistake. Trans, to me, is something that happens to me when other people try to cling on to that mistake.

http://cartographies-of-my-interior.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-instability-of-trans-and-cis.html

By: Rebecca Hammond

Rebecca Hammond — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:19:30 +0000

Thanks for referencing the article I co-authored! Indeed, it was a struggle, not even 2 years ago, to get a peer-reviewed publication to accept a term that never previously been use in such formats. However it seemed necessary to properly make sense of the experiences of exclusion described by our participants. Subsequently I wrote about cisnormativity a great deal in my MAsters thesis available online for free from the Dalhousie University archives. I had been playing with the term for several years prior to these publications on my old blog site where I think people thought I was crazy for making this word up! It’s exciting to read your work and see how far my ideas have come! Thank you!