Today I learned something. Cis-het is a thing, a phrase, that means something along the lines of, a person who happens to be born physically into the gender they identify with. I’ve never felt so, well, labelled! I used to simply identify with heterosexual white middle-class male, but now I can add yet another identifier to the mix that really only serves to isolate me from others, that being cis-het, or male-gendered both in identity and the shit that hangs from my legs that I happened to be born with. Good going, sub-segment of the LGBT community! This is definitely how to endear yourself to society at large. You don’t have to worry about me, I’ll always love ya – no, but seriously, from that perspective – get a clue, peeps! The fact hat Facebook had to add 50-someodd words to their gender category when they decided to branch out from “male” and “female” is really NOT a step forward. I say this of course from my own humble perspective.
Wow. You can deconstruct your own privilege in under a second?
Some humans seem to continually eat the menu, confusing it for the meal. Then they tell others how to order from the menu, because they know what all the food tastes like. If I try to describe to them what they are doing, they generally respond by occluding their critical faculties and insulting me. Therefore, I never pay them any mind.
That should tell you something right there. If GIDWatch supports something a trans woman rights, it is bad bad bad.
He’s actually right about one thing. Jumping on someone who’s making an honest effort and gets it wrong is kind of shitty and doesn’t help the cause. There’s a lot that’s confusing about trans terminology to someone who hasn’t been educated already.
Yeah, from a bigoted transphobic shitbag. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
And some people use “lesbian” as an insult, but that doesn’t mean it is. I am cissexual, because I’m not transsexual. That’s a simple statement of fact. It would be pretty ridiculous of me to get offended about it.
I know full well who she is. The reason I put the link here is that she is praising the article. What does that tell us about how useful the article is to ‘our cause’?
Remember that old saying “Don’t feed the trolls” ?? I never heard of this byatch until today. You are responsible for that.
Does RuPaul really need protecting from some netpimple? Or are you just feeling surly and decided to rain some brimstone on one of the millions of insensitive clods on the net? That’s fine, but you can surely do that without giving any of these immature vipers a free advertisement.
Only in 2014 would anyone find the time to criticize members of their community that are working towards the same goal. The Internet has ruined everything.
I like your last three sentences about loving everything.
Too bad hate is not much fun. 
We have a winnner!
Ah yes; attacking people for making an effort will surely make everything better.
That comment by far cuts most to the quick of the underlying issues of this topic.
It is a clearly sarcastic comment but at the same time appropriates the nuances of behaviour attributed by both sides of the ‘argument’.
It is a sarcastic, faux-caustic and supremely ironic encapsulation of the difficulties at hand.
And therefore wins.
Let’s hope you’re right; I read it as a completely unironic putdown.
I could sit here and talk eloquently about the issues raised both in the article and here in the comments but I feel there are too many people involved that would prefer to fling their own shit at each other than stop and listen to reason so I’m just going to quote Homer J. Simpson and say: You’re all nuts.
Why must everyone share your hurt and neurosis? I’m gay, but I still find a bundle of twigs funny.
I read it in a sarcastic, sassy, RuPaulish tone, personally. 
I have a ton of thoughts about this.
We’ve had a long history of trying to dismiss RuPaul and other drag performers using language that is seen by other Trans* communities as demeaning or even insulting. This has to end. Calling someone who is Trans* “she-male” or whatever other term of the week comes up “just for fun” is insulting and offensive.
I have no problem with seeing Drag as part of the broader Transgender community, but with that comes an expectation that they will treat their peers with respect. Saying “well it’s just RuPaul” (or whomever) is not acceptable.
While I don’t like the hate-fest that is erupting over this debacle, there are a lot in the Trans* community who are becoming increasingly worried about the effect that the utterances of the Drag world are having on the ability of other Trans* groups to speak and be heard for their political interests.
When RuPaul snidely quips that the difference between a Drag Queen and a Transsexual is $20,000 and a good surgeon, he ultimately engages in a form of erasure that makes it much harder for the transsexuals to lobby for needed and appropriate medical treatment to be available to them.
We cannot just give a “free pass” because “drag is all about high drama” and “being outrageous”. No. That is not acceptable.
The Trans* community is not a social community, with shared social objectives. It is fundamentally a political community - one where the groups have some shared political common interests. I think the incident with RuPaul has more to do with showing very clearly that there are limits to those shared interests.
RuPaul is merely the public lightning rod for this because of his visibility on the public stage and some outrageous actions taken on his show. RuPaul is famous for arguing that the Trans* community is “overly sensitive” - perhaps for him it is. But he is overlooking the collective trauma of being treated as a political football. Those who need access to options like surgery find themselves equated with sexual predators, politicians have axed funding for surgery purely for political reasons (Alberta, 2009), equality rights are “read in” rather than explicit in legislation and so on. It isn’t being over-sensitive to look at RuPaul’s (and others) “funnin’” through the lens of how it impacts the public policy interests of the less visible communities in the Trans* world.
Pointing out privilege is not a response to the argument. It’s a tangential discussion of where someone is coming from. If I say that it’s counterproductive for folks in this community to disparage their allies because someone said the wrong word unintentionally, “poor cis-het, whining about their hurt feelings” is not a response to that argument - on the contrary, it’s an attack designed to minimize the importance of the cis-het person’s words BECAUSE THEY ARE CIS-HET. In that sense it kinda is used as an uncomfortable slur. In this context is is absolutely meant to dismiss an argument by pointing out privilege instead of answering the actual argument, which may or may not be valid.
Plus the use of shortened jargon is also subtly coded to make the person outside of the group feel like they don’t belong. So even if it is true that the person is cisgender heterosexual, saying so in that way is not merely a statement of fact - it can have connotations and contexts outside of that, and the fact that the cis-het person does enjoy a certain amount of privilege doesn’t absolve people from answering the arguments presented to them or from the negative consequences of saying mean things to people.
