Thank you to everyone who participated in this vigorous and thoughtful discussion. It is very clear to us that while our intent was to center the voices of feminism and of people with disabilities, the way it was expressed hurt and angered people. We regret and apologize for that. These discussions have made it clear to us that it is impossible to have these discussions with language created by the kyriarchy. We are also aware that there are an equal number of issues to explore around defining “voices of people with disabilities,” as we wish to include voices of people with or without engagement with or belief in the medical system or any of the myriad of models of disability, and we look forward to continuing to explore those issues in the future. Thanks again to everyone for their enthusiasm and commitment to helping us ensure it is a safe space.

It seems like there are a couple distinct objections being raised here.

There are people who are unsettled by the centering of unprivileged voices. These people may sit on certain axes of privilege (abledness or cisgender maleness, for example) and are not used to not occupying the center of the conversation. This makes them uncomfortable, which is an understandable reaction. However, this discomfort is a feature, not a bug.
There are people who feel that their experience is misrepresented by the original stated policy, or the way it was first stated (they may or may not have an objection to the very idea of centering typically-marginalized voices, but they definitely have an objection to the way it was presented).

First, I want to clarify: We were not trying to police who can comment/participate in this space. Rather, we asked that commenters focus on promoting links from authors (of the linked pieces) who identified as living at that intersection.

Second, I want to expand on the direction we were wanting to go with this feature.

We want to center voices that have always sat at the margins of the conversation, along both of the axes this blog focuses on: 1) disability, and 2) gender.

(I’ll note that there doesn’t seem to have been much conversation around the first aspect. I do think there is a lot to explore there, but this conversation has mostly been avoided. And that does reflect certain assumptions about disability.)

There is much attention given, already, to privileged voices. Even within anti-oppression movements, the dominant voices are often the people who are not affected by that oppression. We find the same systems reproduced within a movement meant to deconstruct that system.

We want to raise the profile of the people who are directly affected by both of these two oppressions (the axes of ability and sex/gender). By requesting that people limit links to authors who identify as having experienced these oppressions, we feature them in a way that might not happen if their voices are mixed in with the voices that already receive disproportionate attention and far-disproportionate legitimation. We want our movement to be a bottom-up movement, one that organically derives from the very people affected, one that is created by, run by, affected by, refined by, the people it is meant to focus on. Not a movement that is co-opted by people who hold the very privilege we mean to tear down.

In this case, this means temporarily abled, binary, male-identified cisgender persons.

The reason we did not explicitly exclude trans men with disabilities is because trans men are not cis men. (This does not mean they are not men.) It is not “men” who hold the power in our society: it is cisgender men. Cisgender men hold the majority of seats in almost every governing body in the world (if they don’t hold every seat). Cisgender men dominate the medical profession. Cisgender men make up the majority of officers in almost every law enforcement group in the world. Cisgender men are disproportionately represented in popular media. Cisgender men are positioned as the default human being, and cisgender men’s experiences are positioned as default experiences.

Disabled trans men are often granted male privilege (privilege, remember, is a thing granted by the outside, not a thing intrinsic to the inside). Disabled trans men, however, can still face a great amount of gender-based oppression. They can face it during their lives before transition. They can face it during the transition itself, and they can face it even after the transition, in those assumptions of a cisgender default, and if they have the misfortune of encountering a person who perceives them as not “passing” and attempts to enforce their binary-cissexist understanding of gender on them. And they can face it if they don’t transition at all. Throughout their lives, trans men with disabilities can experience gender-based oppression because they live in bodies that are hotly contested by the society they live in, and by the medical and psychiatric systems with which they are forced to deal.

This is why we did not explicitly exclude disabled trans men: because those people who identify as disabled and as trans men do live on the intersection of disability and gender-based oppression.

Additionally, a few of the responses to this post (remember that responses have not been limited to this comment thread) have misconstrued this as being about three genders and three genders only: cis men (excluded), women and trans men (included).

This is frustrating, because there are many, many gender identities out there, identities that are congruent with the sex/gender their bodies were assigned and identities that aren’t, identities that conform to the presumed binary and identities that don’t, identities that fit on a spectrum of gender and identities that challenge the spectrum and imagine a great potential of genders across many, many more dimensions than simply one. It is positively impossible to list all of these genders without erasing some people and misrepresenting others.

Even the category “men” is not restricted to cis and trans only, as many responses seem to imply.

I would also like to remind readers that while some of our founders are cisgender and binary-conforming, multiple contributors are not, and limiting this conversation to that binary contributes to their erasure from a space they helped create.

All of that said: the initial wording of the proposed feature clearly conveyed to many people the idea that trans men are not men, that trans men are either “really women” and/or some sort of third gender. We are working to correct this: the wording clearly needs to be changed to more accurately reflect the focus on marginalized voices that we wanted to encourage and not risk perpetuating harmful conceptions of gender.

We do hope that this experiment will turn out well in the end: that people will reflect on the attention they pay to different voices and notice the way certain voices always seem to gain a higher profile than others.

There are some PWD who do not identify as cis men who also feel they do not experience gender-based oppression. But there are others who do experience this oppression. We want to raise their voices, too. There are also people labelled with medical conditions who do not feel they experience disability-based oppression. However, the fact that some disabled people feel this way does not mean that other disabled people who _do_ feel they experience that oppression should be ignored, excluded, or otherwise erased from the conversation.

People who are privileged enough to identify as our oppressors are cordially invited to be quiet.

Women do get drowned out, quite often. I’m still largely read as female or other, and I loath getting talked over. Happens quite often as a matter of fact. I’ve been under the working idea that the blog centered disabilities and wwd, and others were welcome to comment. As it’s currently stated to my understanding, it’s ‘no cis men’ for authorship of the content in links drop, and not the comment policy. Dunno if that’s cisgender or cissexual, though. I just don’t understand why cis is getting noted when the other qualifiers that can be included in men (poc, trans, disabled, gender nonconforming, et cetera) aren’t. All men experience male privilege, but not all are ‘created equal’ when taking into account other oppressions people experience as men. Separating cis from trans seems to me to put one experience of someone in a minority groups above the rest. Since all oppressed groups have unique difficulties that often overlap in generalities, to my understanding, to take trans men and say “And you, too, are for the links-drop, but not the other men, of which you may also be a part” I disagree with. That’s like saying “Well, A.W., if you write something relevent to the FWD community and it’s interesting, someone can link it here, but it hinges on your gender identity (or lack thereof) and/or presumed sex.”

I understand that the mods are trying to be inclusive of gq and trans people, but separating trans guys’ experiences and gender identity from cis men as if there was automatically an insurmountable gulf between ‘em isn’t the way to do it. There may be similarities, too, and they also count.

Meloukhia,

You told Codeman that being ‘cis men’ wasn’t ambiguous. With all due respect, you’re wrong. Cisgender and cisexual are not the same. There’s at least two meanings for cisgender. One is that ones gender identity is static, the other is that ones gender presentation is accepted as valid. Quite a few trans people consider themselves cisgender, and many cisexual people are on the trans spectrum.

My writing is vaguer than I would like because I don’t know if people are talking about accepted cultural norms wrt dress and behavior along gendered lines, a static gender identity, a malleable identity, gq people (using gq as plural for the various identities, both static and non cuz the comment is too long as it is, et cetera and so forth.) There seems to be at least two convos going on, partly because of various and multitudional privileges and partly because vocab for trans people is still kinda messy.

I’m transgender and transexual, poor, disabled and nuerodiverse. I’m also white, live in a rich country and not currently homeless. To cut along a cis divide on who is and is not privileged enough to author a piece for link spam isn’t going to work when there’s so many issues being discussed on one blog. I might just be a bit lost, though.

I would also like to ask people to please remember not to erase the disability aspect of this conversation! This is a disability-centric blog.

i’m not sure how trans men are automatically “gender non-conforming” any more than cis men are.

i understand the concept of woman-centered (and support it — as has been said, women’s voices are often drowned out in a sea of dudes), but i didn’t realize this was an exclusively-woman space. it’s difficult to come to a feminist perspective when one is not a woman, but it is possible.

the whole thing just makes me really squicky. :-/

- a binary trans man who totally has male privilege