(Foot)notes on Cisnormativity and Feminism

This work is the result of a careful reading that centers and pays close attention to the “marginal” zones of contemporary feminist production in Argentina, primarily to the footnotes. Too often, these are considered irrelevant for understanding the general meaning of the work, mere formal clarifications, necessary for writing but dispensable for reading. For this reason they tend to occupy minor positions in the geography of texts, have a different format with smaller font size, and are easily overlooked—at least on a first reading—if not outright ignored.In these peritextual elements, however, as in the fine print of a contract, important clauses are established, and fundamental decisions are made. In a certain way, the order of the world is defined in the footnotes.2. This work can also be read as a succession of notes. Taken together, they form a broad commentary in the margins of feminism. The aim is to open a reflective space that interrupts the flow of the cis norm.3. Cis, a Latin prefix meaning “on this side,” is the logical counterpart to the term trans. If trans people are those who identify and live socially according to a gender identity different from the one assigned to them, cis people are those who are not trans.This neologism began to be used by North American trans communities in the 1990s (Enke 2013; Aultman 2014). Since then, it has been adopted primarily by trans intellectuals, many of whom are referenced in these notes. This analytic marks what previously went unmarked, challenges the prejudice by which people who are not trans are considered “normal” or “natural,” and highlights that their perspectives are just as situated and partial as any other (Koyama 2002; Cabral 2009a; Aultman 2014; Cava 2016; Radi 2019). As a reading key, in its critical dimension, it reveals the limitations of the “gender perspective,” whose “absolute ontological dependence on sexual difference produces an immediate and persistent optical effect: this perspective only ‘sees’ cis women and men” (Cabral 2006).At the same time, in its constructive dimension, it constitutes a major contribution to research, especially because it contributes to adding complexity to the web of power relations: The extension of the concept of gender is not exhausted by cis people, and the map of subjects who oppress and suffer oppression on the grounds of gender can no longer be read exclusively in terms of “unilateral sexism,” that is, cis men oppressing cis women (Serano 2007; Pérez and Radi 2018). Along these lines, the work developed around the notions of “cis privilege” and “cissexism” provides a necessary hermeneutic key to analyze and dismantle the structural hierarchies built around the gender binary and sexual difference (Enke 2013).4. Research on privilege has emphasized that it is an extraordinary and unearned advantage (meaning that it is not accessed through effort, talent, or individual merit, but rather enjoyed, owing to a certain belonging or preferred status) that is exercised to the benefit of the one who possesses it and to the detriment of others, and that it is “invisible” (especially for those who hold it, who can afford to ignore that they benefit from an asymmetrical system) (McIntosh 1992; Robinson‐Wood and Howard Hamilton 2000). In relation to cis privilege, checklists have become popular, including examples of everyday experiences that privileged individuals take for granted, for instance, that all their identification documents “match,” that they are not denied medical care on the basis of their gender identity, or that their identity is legally recognized in all countries (Cedar 2008).5. The systematic privilege of cis people is known as “cissexism.” In her pioneering treatment, Julia Serano (2007) defined it as the belief that the genders of trans people are inferior or less authentic than those of cis people. Later analyses of this phenomenon have tended to emphasize its structural and “cis‐temic” character (Vergueiro 2015). Elsewhere I have characterized cissexism as “the system of symbolic and material exclusions and privileges structured by the prejudice that cis people are better, more important, more authentic than trans people” (Radi 2015b).6. Cis and its conceptual family are not usually adopted in feminist literature, at least not without resistance. And when they are, they tend to inhabit footnotes, lack further development or references (as if they were concepts that arose spontaneously from common sense or were the result of the writer's introspective reflection), and not impact the overall approach of the text.The epiphenomenon of the rejection expressed by cis academia toward these concepts and their instrumentalization has been thematized. B. Aultman (2015) notes that cis people consider the term “derogatory” and that discussions on the matter devalue trans people as epistemic subjects while giving prominence to cis people. Cabral (2014), for their part, asks whether the conceptA common argument in rejecting the concept of cis is that it would introduce an inadmissible binary. Apparently, the use of the concept of trans has no outside, or, in any case, the “trans/non‐trans” pair does not constitute any binary, so it has not warranted any critique.The marginal mentions of the concept, devoid of depth, references, and the capacity to permeate the approach of the work, correspond to what in English is known as “lip service”: a public declaration of adherence to a cause that is not backed by any action. Thus the appearance of the concept does not imply the adoption of the interpretive framework it entails. Paradoxically, or perhaps not, the critical analysis of gender biases and the production of false universals have not dismantled the cisnormative commitment of researchers.7. Greta R. Bauer et al. (2009: 356) proposed the concept of cisnormativity “to describe the expectation that all people are cissexual, that those assigned male at birth always grow up to be men and those assigned female at birth always grow up to be women.” These expectations are expressed through a set of institutions and values that privilege the straight line between a person's assigned sex at birth and their gender identity. Cisnormativity also refers to the corresponding system of punishments and rewards that occur at both the individual and institutional levels. Its functioning shapes social activity and forms a hierarchical system in which cis experiences are seen as natural, healthy, desirable, and socially expected, while trans experiences are seen as “other,” less legitimate, if not abnormal. Deployed as an analytical category, cisnormativity has enabled researchers to illuminate and question the assumptions about sex and gender that dominate many societies, including research itself, especially gender‐based research, and which remain difficult to identify because they are part of common sense. According to Viviane Vergueiro (2015), these assumptions include the belief in the pre‐discursivity of sex, its binary nature, and its permanence.8. Cisnormativity has a strong influence on social practices and institutions, such that the presence of trans people is generally experienced as an unforeseen and exceptional situation. The arrival of unexpected guests in cisnormative contexts generates a kind of social emergency that is usually resolved through two alternative and equally problematic strategies: They are either excluded in order to keep the norm intact, or they are included without making the necessary adjustments—for example, by maintaining the cisnormative framework and forcibly fitting trans people into it, or by referring only to an exclusively cis universe.9. The effectiveness of cisnormativity results in both the erasure and the simultaneous hypervisibility of trans people: Their experiences tend to be ignored and at the same time are those that must be marked (Namaste 2015; Baril et al. 2019). The practical and epistemic problems this generates are ubiquitous, which has led researchers to develop applied work on topics as diverse as the organization of shelters for homeless people (Pyne 2011), the vulnerability of trans people in prison (Rodgers et al. 2017), the strategies of health professionals in fertility clinics to provide care for trans people (Erbenius and Payne 2018), the criminalization of trans migrants (Collier and Daniel 2019), and compulsory military service (Losada 2019), among others.10. Alexandre Baril (2019) have focused on cisnormativity in academia, paying particular attention to gender and feminist studies departments. In this context, they evaluate the impact that affirmative action policies have on trans academics. These measures are based on the recognition of the influence that social inequalities (in this case due to gender) have on people's lives (here on their academic development) and aim both to overcome them and to break with blindness—that is, the belief that a person's gender has no impact on their professional growth opportunities. However, the cisnormative commitments of these measures result in serious harm to trans people, particularly those who were assigned female at birth. Baril writes, Let us consider the following example: on the self‐identification form sent to me by a few universities, I was given the option of choosing between either “man” or “woman.” As I am legally a man, I checked off “man,” a choice that erases the 27 years I lived with the identity of “woman,” which shaped the person I am today, as well as my career (e.g., the opportunities I was granted or denied). In short, this choice conceals the sexism I experienced throughout these decades, while dismissing the combined effects of cisgenderism and sexism. Does the following not constitute a double standard? Having experienced systemic sexism with potential negative impacts on their careers, two people apply for a job. One person (a cis woman) benefits from affirmative action, while the other person (a trans* man assigned female at birth) may not take advantage of these measures nor even indicate the cisgenderist structural obstacles impeding their career. (102–3)11. The problems of the cis norm and the design of affirmative action policies are felt across all latitudes, although they are often dealt with in the shadows. As we have observed in the various cases in which the Independent Chair of Trans* Studies (Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, University of Buenos Aires) has intervened, Argentina is no exception. In line with what Baril et al. (2019) point out, measures aimed at parity, the establishment of quotas, or the implementation of ceilings are often also expressions of cisnormativity.Frequently, the formulation of affirmative policies does not even acknowledge the existence of trans people and is limited to the pursuit of “parity between women and men.” Other times, trans people are part of the problematic diagnosis that justifies and necessitates the measure but are not reached by the solutions it proposes. Quotas that can be fulfilled only with cis people are an example of this second case. The same can be said about “ceilings for cis men.” After all, their implementation requires that institutions know who is cis and who is trans. Of course, not all trans people make public that they identify and live socially with a gender different from the one assigned at birth. They don't have to do so either, especially considering that revealing this information can (and indeed does) have very negative consequences on their living conditions, including their academic trajectories. Thus the “ceiling for cis men” policy places trans men in the situation of either making their transitional status public or forfeiting access to the benefit. The first scenario implies giving up confidentiality and therefore being exposed to the negative effects that this entails. The second leaves them outside the scope of the affirmative policy.12. The cis norm in feminism can also be seen at work in local scholarship on masculinities. Old and new masculinities, patriarchal and anti‐patriarchal, hegemonic and deconstructed, are always cis, unless otherwise specified. When definitions of masculinity and privilege are organized exclusively around the experiences of cis men, their practical stakes aim to recognize male privilege and renounce it. In this scenario, trans men once again face a logical trap (a catch‐22): They must renounce privileges they probably do not have and may never have had, or renounce recognition of their identity as men.13. Exposing these problems is not an easy task. After all, the cis norm is the lingua franca of social life and helps delineate its main sections and margins. Additionally, as Sara Ahmed (2012) notes, for some people, raising a problem means becoming the problem.14. Critical remarks about situations of hostility and internal discrimination within feminism are often met with responses such as “that is not feminism,” “there are many feminisms,” or “feminism will be intersectional, ecological, anti‐capitalist, anti‐racist, anti‐ableist, with trans, nonbinary, intersex people, insert emancipatory cause or it will not be.” This repertoire of ready‐made phrases sets the terms of the conversation: The subject to be preserved is feminism (which is always unblemished), while experiences of violence are perpetually treated as extraordinary.Wishful thinking distorts evidence by giving too much credibility to propositions one would like to be true and too little to propositions one would prefer to be false (Haack 2003). In these terms, feminism and violence function as mutually exclusive terms: The former is the Platonic idea of good, and the latter can be seen only as an extraordinary, accidental, and external deviation that does not taint the moral purity of the movement. But exceptionalization is an unjust mechanism: For many people, what is treated as exceptional is, in fact, the norm.15. In practice, wishful thinking also harms those who engage in it. After all, if problems are ignored, it becomes harder to solve them.16. Wishful feminism is often called “transfeminism,” a political expression intended to resolve the problems of feminist cissexism. This is a polysemic term. Some consider it to be the well‐known feminism but in a version hospitable to trans women (for example, Koyama 2003). Others understand it as a common front that challenges the traditional subject of feminism and, more deeply, its identity politics, calling on “bodies of diverse identities that rebel against a connected and multiple system of oppression” (Medeak 2013: 77). It is a formation that makes space for all thoseIt is clear that these are not equivalent projects. Perhaps they are not even compatible. But before considering their differences, even before contrasting these expressions of desire with concrete experiences, and without calling into question the good intentions of their advocates, it is worth noting this detail: The admission of trans people into feminism, far from being a means of promoting a social justice agenda, has become an end in itself. I will rephrase it pessimistically to make my point clear: The first obstacle to promoting that agenda is the very movement that ought to accompany it.17. The hostility of feminism toward trans people has been one of the driving forces behind the development of the field of trans studies. “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” considered one of the academic origins of trans studies, is a response to the infamous controversy against trans people that emerged within radical lesbian feminism (Stone 1991).This powerful essay by Sandy Stone resulted in the creation of the community she addresses and enabled a space for discussion about trans experiences as a literary genre. Connecting colonial discourse with the available meanings of transsexuality, Stone argued that just as (cis) men had theorized about (cis) women, the latter had repeated the story with trans people—whom she called on to disrupt existing gender discourses.18. The emergence of the interdisciplinary field of trans studies is often dated to the early 1990s in the United States. The disparity in political, academic, and institutional conditions of intellectual production has significantly influenced its developmental possibilities, as well as the opportunities for trans people to access, remain, and thrive in academia. Nonetheless, its emergence can be traced globally. In Latin America it has not yet received institutional recognition that would favor its growth and consolidation. However, it has proliferated within and outside academic communities, and its results have been largely reflected in legislative reforms as well as in the design of public policies that have received international recognition.19. Karine Espineira and T. Maud‐Yeuse (2019) have emphasized that trans studies is not studies about trans people. What has indeed engaged many trans academics are those investigations that make trans people their object of analysis (Namaste 2000, 2005, 2009; Cabral 2006, 2009c; Bettcher 2014; Raun 2014; Radi 2015a). In fact, based on committed readings, they have published advice on how to collaborate or not with these research endeavors (Hale Cabral In Cabral are thinking of research on trans intersex that case and to be and as would when an to recognize those of us who lived in that before arrival and acknowledge that we were not for to to it be said that this is a it is not for researchers who into this field to make serious conceptual owing to among other The epistemic phenomenon of is not In some it is a mere of In others, it is a The systematic of the of trans when topics such as transsexuality, or trans are what that is, a epistemic expressed as a of socially and available assumptions or of The of the in the of any about the social of Some references are while are Pérez has that policies in academia constitute of and of is a that among other to the of the even when with trans communities of belonging and intellectual among cis are often on to to by trans people but are only as they are situated within a cis intellectual may be a from other texts, but it be to analyze the terms in which the is out, without that when it to trans intellectuals, epistemic and are (Radi 2019). in these practices of epistemic the a of This work was by the reading and of and