Tag Archive for "cissexism"

Posts Tagged cissexism

“I find this offensive”: How “offense” discourse traps us into inaction

No, you do not have a right to not be offended. Concomitantly, we need to stop using “offended” as a synonym for “structural harm” or “oppression” in everyday political discourse.

By Jos Truitt • 11 years ago

The shameful, unacceptable media coverage of Chelsea Manning’s transition

When Chelsea Manning announced yesterday that she is transitioning and wants to be referred to by the name Chelsea and with female pronouns, news organizations scrambled to figure out what to do. Many published articles with bizarre headlines like, “Manning Says He Is Female and Wants to Lives as a Woman.” Which is ridiculous, because Chelsea made it very clear how to refer to her: “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female… I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun.”

NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, the Boston Globe, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Politico, the Telegraph, Reuters, and the Los Angeles Times all used masculine pronouns ...

By Jos Truitt • 11 years ago

Skewed priorities mean Smith is not currently fulfilling its mission as a women’s college

On Saturday, Gina de Vries, Elena Rose, and myself brought Girl Talk: A Trans and Cis Woman Dialogue to Smith College. Girl Talk is a multi-media performance show promoting dialogue about relationships of all kinds between queer trans women, queer cis women, and genderqueer people. We were brought to Smith in the wake of this women’s college rejecting Calliope Wong because she is a trans woman. Our comments focused specifically on the issue of trans women’s exclusion from spaces like Smith. This was followed by a question and answer session in which we dove deeper into some of these issues and offered a lot of ideas for organizing strategy. This post is a slightly edited version of my presentation ...

By Jos Truitt • 12 years ago

Enough with “I date women and trans men”

I’m traveling on the east coast right now, which has thrown me back into the kind of queer, mostly female assigned community that exists in the “I date women and trans men” frame (I’m not saying this doesn’t happen on the west coast – but I’ve found alternatives way more easily). This is a big part of what my Girl Talk piece was about, but I want to address this particular issue really directly.

“I date women and trans men” is the definition of cissexism. It’s basing your frame for sexuality on the gender coercively assigned to a person by their doctor at birth, not on that person’s actual identity. In this case, we’re talking about folks who were assigned ...