Cis fragility

[deactivated]30 Nov 2023 4:14 UTC
−51 points
9 comments3 min readLW link

Cisgender fragility or cis fragility is:

a tendency to engage in defensive posturing and outright denial, minimizing concerns raised by trans communities while overemphasizing good intentions.[1]

Another description of cis fragility:

It is a combination of lack of stamina in interrogating [cis people’s] conceptualizations of gender, as well as a resistance to challenging those conceptions. … When cis people encounter challenges to their conception of a binary gender, they often react with defensiveness, forcing trans people to do the emotional labor of comforting the cis person in addition to educating them and explaining basic concepts about gender or divulging personal experience to satiate cis curiosity and confusion. This derails conversations about trans experiences with oppression and devolves them into assuages of cis guilt and potential violence.[2]

Here’s a hypothetical, fictional example of cis fragility:

Kay, a cisgender woman considers herself open-minded, yet shares with her transgender colleague that gender-affirming surgery is “going too far.” When challenged by her colleague, Kay feels embarrassed and begins crying as she retreats to her office. She then emails the boss, letting her know that her colleague made her cry and created a negative workplace culture.

In this scenario, Kay neither considers the impact of her words on her colleague nor the workplace culture. She then utilizes her embarrassment to try and silence her colleague. The fragility in this scenario is evident by Kay’s inability to see how she utilizes her cisgender privilege to both create an unsafe working environment and silence gender-diverse individuals. Similar to and often at work with white fragility, cisgender fragility serves as a tool for further disempowering the marginalized and stigmatized.[3]

Here’s another purely hypothetical, fictional example:

Zora, a non-binary person, comes across a post on the Effective Altruism Forum that tangentially mentions trans people and uses the term “transgenders”. The full sentence is: “Lately, society has become more accepting of transgenders, which is a good thing.” Zora leaves a comment saying that a better term is “transgender people” or “trans people”. She backs up her claim that these terms are better by quoting from the Associated Press Stylebook and from a glossary of LGBTQ terminology by GLAAD.

Nobody responds to Zora’s comment, but it gets heavily downvoted, so much so that she becomes rate-limited from commenting on the EA Forum. Eventually, her comment gets deleted and she gets banned from commenting on that author’s forum posts ever again. In private, the author accuses of her of being rude, obnoxious, and preachy and of thereby alienating potential cis allies.

Based on the two definitions and the other example above, can you determine why this second example is also an instance of cis fragility? It’s cis fragility because it’s an extremely defensive reaction to a simple attempt to convey information about the preferences of trans people with regard to the language cis people use about them. The ideal response, from Zora’s point of view, would be to make a tiny edit — simply change “transgenders” to “transgender people” or “trans people” — and acknowledge her comment with as little as a one-word reply, such as, “Okay.” In other words, the implicit request is for something very small. To Zora, it’s a matter as simple as pointing out a typo or a broken link.

Well, what if Zora really was rude, obnoxious, and preachy in the way she worded her comment? Defining what constitutes rudeness, obnoxiousness, or preachiness is subjective and elusive. That makes it difficult to come to any agreement about the fact of the matter. This is the murky land of tone, subtext, and modelling of strangers’ mental states, which is notoriously fraught with text-based communication on the Internet.

One potential solution: bite the bullet. Forgive people when they’re rude, obnoxious, or preachy about the equality or rights of historically subjugated minority groups. Chalk it up to the price of progress. Maybe nicely ask them to be nicer next time.

A less radical solution: be cautious about the intentions, motives, feelings, thoughts, tone, or subtext you attribute to a stranger such as Zora. Be conscious that your attributions are not reality; ask yourself what you really know based just on what was written. Remind yourself that this subject matter tends to make people feel defensive, notice any defensiveness welling up inside you, and hold back your knee-jerk response. I conjecture that this caution and self-reflective process would avoid any outward hostility in the majority of cases where someone is perceived to be rude, obnoxious, or preachy about minority rights or equality.

If you stop yourself and introspect, you might end up thinking something along the lines of, “I want to tell them to be nicer to me, but, actually, they were the normal level of nice. I think I felt attacked because it felt like they were acting superior or were calling me a bad person. But if I look at what they wrote and imagine what a person who wasn’t doing those things and only had the best intentions would have written… They might have written exactly the same thing.”

In this post, I focused on cis fragility, but you can apply what I’ve written, mutatis mutandis, to white fragility, male fragility, straight fragility, and so on. If you’re a person of colour, a woman, an LGB person, etc., you can use your experience of being a member of that group, and perhaps occasionally being in Zora’s shoes with regard to your own group, to empathize with the Zoras of groups you’re not part of, and clamp down on your defensiveness.

This post exists only for archival purposes.

  1. ^

    Streed, C. G., Jr, Perlson, J. E., Abrams, M. P., & Lett, E. (2023). On, With, By-Advancing Transgender Health Research and Clinical Practice. Health equity, 7(1), 161–165. https://​​doi.org/​​10.1089/​​heq.2022.0146

  2. ^

    2016, D. 22 F., & Categories: Gender, T. (2016, February 22). Cis fragility. Morgan Potts. https://​​web.archive.org/​​web/​​20160224204826/​​morganpotts.com/​​2016/​​cis-fragility/​​

  3. ^

    Perspectives on cisgender and transgender relations. Pride Veterinary Medical Community. (2023, March 6). https://​​pridevmc.org/​​perspectives-on-cisgender-and-transgender-relations/​​

[deactivated]30 Nov 2023 4:14 UTC
−51 points
9 comments3 min readLW link