I wanted to write about transphobia to explain cisphobia, but as I floundered to find the words to explain transphobia, I realized that I can’t. Transphobia is an irrational fear that’s entirely crude, baseless, and demeaning. It’s xenophobia, in short. It’s a distinctive othering: “what the hell are you?”
Cisphobia isn’t a true phobia. What we call “cisphobia” is a rational fear and skepticism of cis people in reaction to the ways they have humiliated, discriminated, marginalized, demeaned, beaten, raped, and murdered transgender people. Cisphobia does have irrationally exaggerated components, but I read a metaphor yesterday that explained this clearly:
“Plenty of snakes are totally harmless, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to go around trying to pet ones that might be venomous. You make a generalization about snakes for your own safety.”
I’m not suggesting that I’m completely paralyzed by a fear that someone is going to physically assault me. I’m just extremely hesitant because I don’t know who the nasty people are and who the nice people are, and because even the nice people can smile, smile, and be a villain. There are these radical feminists with “women born women” beliefs that are completely ignorant of the basic concept of “transgender”. They claim to love and accept and support trans people as allies, then they kick them in the face by inviting trans men into exclusively female spaces or by excluding trans women, which is insulting to both trans men and trans women.
I can’t tell you how much it’s hurt me to deal with health insurance in the last year. As Junot Diaz suggested, it transforms people enormously when they’re confronted with the fact that society doesn’t acknowledge that people like them exist. Health insurance policies willingly ignore state laws on gender nondiscrimination, which tells trans people explicitly “you do not deserve the same level of care that ‘normal’ people deserve”. That we’re somehow less than human.
They refer us to mental health care, because they feel we must be crazy to go through this. Before you condescend, “Isn’t it a good idea to make sure people are stable and thinking through their decisions?” I challenge you: “Isn’t that a good idea for any major life event?” Is therapy required during cancer treatment? It’s strongly recommended, certainly, but it’s not absolutely required for treatment. I’ve been referred to mental health by administrative staff more times than I can count (which, to be fair, is like 4). When I submitted a new grievance recently, I received a phone call from–you guessed it–mental health.
So, thank you, health care industry, for claiming to be so welcoming of LGBT, then failing to treat trans people like human beings.
But I digress. The point about cisphobia is that cisgender people are the #1 source of danger in my life. Cisgender people are the #1 cause of death for trans people. Cisgender people are the reason why it’s something like 60-80% likely that I will be raped, beaten, or murdered–and that’s aside from the ways that trans people are oppressed without physical violence.
People frequently ask, “Isn’t cisphobia as bad as transphobia?” I’ll again quote some anonymous trans person:
“I will agree that cisphobia is as bad as transphobia when [cisphobia] causes cis people to be misgendered, kicked out of their homes, denied employment and housing, harassed, assaulted, abused, fetishized, systemically pushed to the fringes of society, stripped of legal rights, almost universally reduced to a punchline in media, erased from 99% of every discussion ever that isn’t specifically about them, spoken over, mistreated by the medical system, and generally stomped all over by the rest of the world.”
You say, I just want to be nice and welcoming and accepting, and why can’t you appreciate that? I do. I really, truly do. That being said, imagine holding a snake in your lap if you’ve been bitten by venomous snakes before. No matter how much you learn about snakes to understand that this species is not venomous, no matter how much your friends tell you that this is a safe and friendly snake, and no matter how many times you’ve held this snake before, you can’t help but worry that maybe they were wrong, and maybe at any moment this snake will rear its head back and fill you with venomous suggestions that you’re not a “real, biological woman”, that you should accept and love your body as it is, that they have a gay friend so they totally understand you.
It doesn’t take courage to transition. It takes courage to look cisgender people in the eye after being hurt so many times.
Transilhouette 
So basically you’re saying that you’re now incapable of associating with any of “those cis types”* most of whom have never wronged you or caused you harm, based on the actual or imagined actions of a few?
*This is a direct quote from one of your other blogs. Certainly made me feel warm and fuzzy.
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I’m sure you’ve known women who have been raped by men and suffer through years of Rape Trauma Syndrome. They go through stages of hostility and anger towards men, they struggle to develop meaningful social relationships with men, and they avoid intimate contact with men. Eventually they become comfortable around men, but they do hesitate to enter new relationships with men and they hesitate to become physically intimate with men.
I don’t hate or fear all cisgender people, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I feel anger and hostility towards cisgender people as a category–not as individuals. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I sometimes want to lash out and say nasty things like “you cis types”.
Largely, my feelings are directed towards cisgender heterosexual males. I’m relatively comfortable around most friends, but I do feel anxious and defensive around people who are unaware of their privilege (whether cisgender, heterosexual, male, white, affluent, etc.). We all have privilege of one kind or another, but we need to be aware of it as much as we can. I forget how privileged I am to be educated, apparently white, have at least half an income sometimes, have health insurance that mostly helps me, be relatively able-bodied with good hearing and vision, and many others.
Just like rape victims experience with men (well, mostly men), it has nothing whatsoever to do with you.
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