Some reflections on cisnormativity

One of the most frustrating aspects of being trans is being constantly called upon to justify your gender. As soon as we come out to the world, we are interrogated by people who demand that our genders are explained, as if they were questionable and possibly suspect. Sometimes our genders are simply denied while we hear things such as “You are a man/woman. Accept it!” or “you can’t change your sex!”. This situation is even more complicated to those of us who are nonbinary and must often deal with reactions of perplexity and incomprehension.

The answers that we give (when we have the patience to do so) to these questions vary, and they come from a process of experiences and reflections that are part of how we understand and accept our genders. They also come from reading and studying and from dialogues where we seek for answers and come in contact with the histories and reflections of those who also had to come to terms with their gender.

Cis people, on the other hand, are not used to be put in a position where they are demanded to justify their genders. When questioned about how they know that they are a man or a woman, the answers they provide almost always show that they haven’t reflected much on it. These include statements such as “I have a dick, of course I’m a man!”, “I have always been man/woman” or even “can’t you see it?”.

How can people who justify their genders with such explanations so frequently find themselves in the right the right to demand justifications for our genders or even to flat-out deny them? Such a situation is made possible because the way cis people experience their gender is socially understood as self-evident and not worth questioning while the gender experiences of trans folks are often seen as strange, suspect and in need of a justification.

Such a view of gender is part of the composition of cisnormativity, which is the system that places the genders and gendered experiences of cis people in a privileged position by making them the social norm. This position is maintained by a notion of gender that that sees a coherence in the genders of cis people that would be absent in the gendered experiences of trans folks. Part of that supposed coherence is based on two propositions are part of a sociohistorical construction of gender. These are:

1: Biological sex is binary and immutable, and this is a natural fact.

2: Gender is also binary and derived from sex. In other words: women are females and men are males.

These statements are often invoked (often with no further elaboration) to question and deny our genders. After all, how many times have we heard that trans activism denies biology? But gender is not confined to biology, and even within the realm of biology we can observe a complexity that isn’t present in such a conceptualization of sex and gender. Let’s then move to the first statement.

Human biological sex refers to a series of sexual characteristics that compose the human body. These characteristics include chromosomes, gonads, genitals, hormones and secondary sexual characteristics (breasts, body hair, fat redistribution, etc). The idea of sex as a binary presupposes that “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics are all grouped within the categories of “male” and “female” in a way that forms a binary where these categories never meet or intersect.

Yet, when we observe actual human bodies and try to classify them into a male-female binary according to these characteristics, we find out that many bodies escape such a classification. Among such bodies are many trans bodies and intersex bodies, which make up to 1.7% of the total population.

Therefore, it is not possible to maintain the notion of such a binary if sexual characteristics are not necessarily distributed in a binary in the actual world. The notion of sex as a spectrum has long made its way into science, and we can now find many articles in well known scientific publications as well as scientific studies demonstrating that sex is not binary.

Besides, many sexual characteristics are mutable and subject to changes. The process of hormone therapy that trans people often undertake, for instance, alters many secondary-sex characteristics.

With that clarified, let’s move on to the second statement, which affirms a direct relationship between biological sex and gender where females are women and males are men. A characteristic of this way of seeing things is that genitals usually acquire the function of the main signifier of sex/gender. This explains the incredulity often seen when one talks about women with penises and men with vaginas.

But a historical and anthropological investigation reveals that this is just one particular way of organizing gender, and that there are many other forms of organizing it that are not reliant of biological criteria and which do not form a binary. When Europeans arrived at the territory now known as North America for instance, they came across more than 130 different societies that recognized more than two genders, with some recognizing up to 7 genders.

Many of these cultures and alternative ways of understanding gender are still alive, and many traditional genders that escape the man-woman binary are relatively known worldwide. Some examples are the hijras from India and the fa’afafine from Samoan culture.

When we observe such societies we see emerge not only a wide array of gender categories but also many different criteria for organizing gender which demonstrate the arbitrariness of the gender notions that are used to sustain cisnormativity and which are reinforced by it. We also shouldn’t forget that these notions are themselves a sociohistorical construction that has changed and developed through time and which is at the moment being questioned, modified and subverted in many contexts.

Therefore, we shouldn’t put too much focus on justifying our genders and gendered experiences to cis people, although we can and should raise our voices and tell our stories. More important than justifying ourselves is the task of deconstructing the predominant gender norms that not only uphold cisnormativity but also many other forms of gender-based oppression which permeate our societies.