NakedFaerysThoughts

Being a cis woman and the realisations that come with it

If you’re like me, and you’re a newbie feminist navigating the blogsphere, you’ll come across some confusing, contradictory, blatantly racist and quite alarmingly bigoted messages. You’ll take a while to find your identity within the scope of feminism, and understand the implications of being what you are.

It can be quite an alarming discovery. There are so many different types of feminists, many with different ideas, many that make me quite frankly ashamed to call myself a feminist.

Don’t let yourself be drawn in by the smooth talking feminists who are getting their notoriety off the backs of other women that aren’t like themselves.

If you TRULY believe in feminism, in the rights of ALL women, you have to REALISE, UNDERSTAND, ACCEPT and internalise that this includes ALL women, not just women like you. Kinds of women that you may never have met or come across or maybe never will.

Women in Islamic countries who wear the veil, they have rights too.

And what’s inspired this post is the message that a lot of feminists, especially the ‘radical feminists’, don’t seem to be getting, is that trans women have rights too.

Look back into the history of queer rights, and realise that trans women did a lot of the legwork that got you the privileges you have to be thankful for. And as a cis woman, this can be a bloody difficult realisation. Particularly when you come across women that are openly offensive and bigoted towards trans women. Particularly because the role that trans women have played in queer history is continuously and deliberately underplayed and erased so that cis woman can take all the credit and think that queer history/queer rights are all about them.

Examine your privilege, look into it’s face and realise it for what it is. Accept it. You might resist it at first, thinking to yourself ‘well I’m not like that’. Well, realise that for one woman like you that may not be, there are probably at least 5 that are. Realise too that this isn’t something that’s going to happen in a day, or a week, or probably even a year. That you could spend your whole life trying to find every facet of your existence that is influenced by your being a cis woman.

The implications of this are far reaching. There are areas where your privilege shows and you don’t realise it. Transphobia goes beyond the blogsphere, into areas where womens LIVES are at risk. Look into the statistics and realise that transphobia means that women die, whether it be from lack of proper healthcare provision or the increased risk of being raped and murdered.

The only way I’ve come across it to fight it. And this means calling out the transphobia EVERY.SINGLE.TIME you come across it. Whether speaking to your cis women friends, or online, or even in an LJ community about make up (which happened to me recently).

Not because you’ll get a cookie or a special snowflake award. Not because trans women will look upon you as some kind of benevolent force. But because it’s the right thing to do.

Never think about giving up. That’s privilege. Thinking one day ‘oh I’ll let that one slide’ is YOUR PRIVILEGE.