The treating of cis and trans as two mutually exclusive categories and that everyone falls into one or the other.
Nonbinary? If you don’t consider yourself cis or trans, you’re somehow convinced that all nonbinary people aren’t trans. You get told “well, the white stripe stands for nonbinary people” as if you didn’t already know that. People say “this is really offensive to me as a transsexual enby” or “if someone tried to tell me I wasn’t trans I would deck them” as if your labels are an attack on them specifically. “So you think nonbinary people are basically cis?” even if you said you’re not cis either.
Multigender? You want to call yourself both cis and trans? That’s not allowed. After all, you weren’t assigned multigender at birth. So you logically have to be trans. Transness and cisness are of course only determined by birth assignment and nothing else. And even if you think of yourself as a cis man + a trans woman, or a cis woman + a trans man, you’ll never be thought about that way. Always as solely multigender.
Intersex? Where do I even begin with this one? You’re not allowed to choose. People will straight up just tell you whether they think you’re exclusively cis or exclusively trans, always based on your completely meaningless AGAB. Or, if you won’t share that, whatever they can assume your AGAB is through stereotypes. And if you’re too unclassifiable, you are just ignored because you don’t fit their worldview.
Detrans? Say you want to call yourself both cis and trans because you identify as your assigned gender, but had to transition to it. Say you want to call yourself neither because you don’t relate to either the trans or cis experience. That’s not allowed. You’re just cis. You’re a cis person who experimented. Which, “experimented” seems almost intentionally designed to evoke someone who tried out different pronouns for a month. Not someone who lived as trans for years. You object to how others label you and it’s “oh, so you don’t want to be called cis? what, you think it’s a slur? I knew you were a TERF all along just like the rest of you”
Plurality? Once again, where do I start? “Well, it’s complicated because two headmates fused, a cis headmate and a trans headmate-“ “Well, it’s complicated because of how introjects and exomemories work-“ “It’s complicated because we have to work out whether we’re transitioning the shared body-“ “No, no, I’ve heard enough. You’re just a faker trying to roleplay. Shut up. Plurality isn’t real and what you’re describing isn’t how transness works. We don’t need to consider you.”
It feels like the only time you’re allowed to be between cis and trans is during the questioning process. Which is supposed to be eventually over. It goes on for too long, and other people choose your identity for you.
I don’t remember when (sometime recently) but I saw someone try to divide cisgender and transgender by saying that transgender was the social class term for people oppressed by transphobia. What? What are we even doing? We make fun of TERFs because they try to define women by oppression. We talk about how they define “being a woman” by the worst parts of it, and how stupid that is. Why are we doing the same thing? In a world without transphobia, would trans people not exist? Is that it? Because that is what you’re implying.
This is transphobia, exorsexism (particularly transmultiphobia), varsexism/intersexism, and pluralphobia.
Cistrans/Trisgender people exist and deserve to exist.
A lot of the points I touched on in my transfems AFAB and transmascs AMAB post [link] could honestly just be slightly rewritten and applied here.
All of the reasons why a person in that post might identify as trans can similarly be a reason as to why they might identify as cistrans.
