{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "content": "To start out, cis/trans is literally a binary – cisgender means not transgender,\nand transgender means not cisgender. I mean this in a step removed: whether\nsomebody is (or will be) trans or cis is not set at birth or at any other time\nin somebody's life. Instead, it is an interaction of somebody's inner feelings\nand how they relate to society.\n\nBefore I continue, you should go watch Philosophy Tube's most\nrecent (edit: well it was when I started writing) video, \"[I\nEmailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British Healthcare\nSystem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8)\". The whole thing is worth\nwatching, but I'd like to specifically reference \"Chapter Nine: You Don't Have\nTo Be Crazy To Transition But It Helps\" (about 1:04:45). My starting point is\naccepting Abigail's argument that \"gender dysphoria\" is a made up diagnosis, and\nwe can infer that its purpose is to uphold and protect the gender binary (and\ngender roles) by what this diagnosis actually does in the real world.\n\nShe argues that \"gender dysphoria\" is the \"sum of [sadness, anxiety, jealousy,\nyearning, regret, envy, shame, discomfort, grief, dissociation, trauma, love of\nblahaj], and cis people also feel all those feelings.\" She goes on to discuss\nhow cis people can feel those things in ways that we'd recognize as gender\ndysphoria, although (to summarize in my own words) it's not in the direction of\nbeing transgender.\n\nTo think of it in terms of maths (although this isn't a topic that lends itself\nto easy to calculate numbers), we can add up all those things and project it\nonto a spectrum (a *non binary* spectrum) between \"gender assigned at birth\" and\n\"any other gender.\" If the result is close to a person's assigned gender, they'd\ncall themselves cis; and if it's sufficiently close to another gender, they'd\nlikely call themselves trans.\n\nThe area in between is what's interesting.\n\nMy whole reason for writing this post is that I think the threshold for\n\"sufficiently close to another gender\" depends on all the factors outside one's\ncontrol – societal acceptance, legal barriers, availability of healthcare and\nother resources, family beliefs, and more. In a more accepting society, we'd\nprobably see a lot more people be a little bit happier with their life by\nidentifying as trans; but, in this society and culture, that little bit happier\nis not worth the challenges and risks.\n\nAnd I think that coming out and transitioning is also a matter of both learning\nthe magnitude of the sum of dysphoria factors, as well as understanding (and\npossibly changing) the sum of societal barriers.\n\nThis shouldn't be taken as an argument that some people who are \"more trans\"\nare more deserving of rights or acceptance or healthcare or anything. Any person\nshould have access to whatever transition care they want. And nobody is required\nto take any specific steps to be trans, besides identifying as a gender other\nthan their gender assigned at birth.\n\nI don't think I have a strong conclusion here. Maybe just that we should make it\neasier for people to explore the space between trans and cis, so the world can\nhave more happy trans people and fewer sad cis people.",
  "createdAt": "2023-04-10T00:00:00.000Z",
  "slug": "cis-trans-false-binary",
  "tags": [
    "trans"
  ],
  "title": "cis/trans is a false binary"
}