Another interesting essay by feminist theorist and journalism professor Robert Jensen (UT Austin). Noting that "cisgender" means "people whose internal sense of gender identity matches their biological sex," Professor Jensen explains why he is not at all cisgender:
As a male human, [the culturally dominant] patriarchal conception of masculinity is not my “chosen” identity, nor do I believe it is my fate. As a short, skinny, effeminate child — when I show people my church confirmation picture taken at age 14, they often assume it is a photo of a much younger girl — I never felt very masculine. As an adult with feminist politics, I reject and struggle to overcome the masculinity norms in patriarchy.
You can get a sense of the need some have to indulge in mindless gendered stereotypes from this twitter thread regarding Professor Jensen's earlier essay we noted here. It really should be disqualifying for getting a PhD in philosophy to assert that gender or sex (or race etc.) excludes one from offering reasons in support of a view (especially a perfectly cogent position like Professor Jensen's).
An unrelated oddity about the use of "cisgender": given that 99.7% of the population does not suffer from gender dysphoria, why would one think one needs any special label to describe the statistically normal condition? Add to that the fact that it implies something about men that is often false, for the reasons Professor Jensen identifies, and it seems positively perverse. (The same is true for "cis" women, as one of Professor Stock's original essays correctly pointed out.)
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