so I was thinking... there used to be this Leeds postcard of a woman being handed her baby by the midwife who is saying "congratulations! it's a lesbian" and I want to open up a discussion.
here goes - I'm not keen on this idea that there is no link between sexual orientation and gender orientation.
If cis means a congruence between the gender expectation a person is assigned at birth, and the gender orientation they have now, then it implies that if a midwife picks female for you then there is one universal female you are going to orientate to or not.
so I was thinking that this does not account for the experience of being queer - by being queer you commit gender crime; you take liberty with the gender norms you were expected to stick to by the heteropatriarchy
- being a dyke really does not go down well with the gender police for example.
My gender and sexuality are one thing - I feel a societal gender dysphoria with the female I was expected to become, but I also feel a lot of congruence with the female I became
- I am not trans
- I am not cis
- I'm ok with the label of nontrans
- I'm not willing to go quietly into another binary.
Monique Wittig asserted that lesbians are not women because outside the binary of men/women then woman ceases to exist...
I happen to identify as a woman but this is similar to how I identify as an anarchist:
in patriarchy I identify as a woman - in kyriarchy I identify as anarchist: these are my positional political lables in systems of power.
I could follow this and identify as cis in much the same way as I identify as white perhaps...
This doesn't feel right to me: I don't feel it is 'transphobia' (an interpersonal prejudice) that oppresses trans people but rather heteropatriarchy (a system of domination) - thus queers and/or transpeople are always kindred...
I'm happy to think more...
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