la violette pensée

More Commentary on Trans Disclosure

Cis people who like to believe they are reasonable, intelligent people often make value judgements about the behavior of trans people without accounting for the fact that we live in a society which from top to bottom is guided by normative rules of behavior designed specifically to reinforce the supremacy of cis people. By ignoring the immense disparity between the levels of power and cultural influence and acceptance enjoyed by trans people as compared to our cis counterparts, they promulgate the false assumption that our behavior in celebrating, advancing, and defending our own existences is unreasonable, unfair, and unwarranted. Trans people cannot logically or morally be held to the ciscentric standards of a society whose very most fundamental tenets seek our elimination, our utter destruction, and to ignore this is to engage in willful denial of the reality of our lives, our position in society, and our very humanity.

Every single aspect of our society is imbued with the purpose of erasing every point of view that does not align with ideas of an immutable and binary construction of sex and gender. Even the accepted language of discourse made available to us is controlled and corrupted in its entirety by this influence. Cis people define language, force labels and notions of correct usage upon us, and give us no latitude to speak in a voice which validates our identities, except in relation to a posited “norm”. In response to our feeble attempts to carve out some form of communication which demonstrates the equality of our rights, we are told that we are denigrating cis people, coercively labelling them without their consent, and the fact that it was their othering language which first created the necessity for a balancing distinctive is summarily ignored. It is little wonder that they, lacking the necessary insight into the origins of their assumptions, or the tools to deconstruct them, fear what we represent: their own uncertainty, their own insecurity, embodied, writ large in blood that they will at all costs seek to dehumanise and ignore.

Trans people, we are told, are required to accept that it is the right of the cis majority to accept or reject us, to define us, to control us, while we are denied volition over even our own bodies. Nowhere is it accepted in the philosophy of human rights that the rights of one human being precede those of another, yet time and again, we are told that it is only “natural” that trans people accept that our rights are inferior to those of cis people, that it is always and ever our responsibility to ensure the ongoing comfort of cis hegemony, because after all, we are inferior in number, and the will of the majority must prevail.

Make no mistake, this argument is not about whether or not there exists any situation ever where a trans person ought to disclose their status. What this argument is about, in reality, is refuting the idea that there could ever possibly exist a situation when a trans person would not be morally required to disclose, because the existence of even one scenario under which that would be true is enough to shatter the cis delusion of fairness. Cis people, it almost need not be mentioned, don’t like having their mirrors shattered.