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tuesday wrote

I lived in a very big, very trans housing share once and we used to joke when cis people would move in and they'd introduce themselves with their birth given pronouns and we'd all be like "for now." it never took long, generally with in the first 6 months before they'd say "uuuh I use they/them" or some variation of they and a gendered pronouns. one little egg broke x's shell like no pronouns at all for me just use x and we were all so proud.

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Sagefully wrote

Can somebody explain to me like I am five the gist of the meme? Who is Max Stirner and how do people realize they aren't CIS?

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Ant OP wrote (edited )

Stirner is a theorist who is highly influential on anarchists (and Marxists, actually). He went to some effort to show a whole range of categories are rigid, sharply delineated, coercive social constructs - and that many of these constructs 'own' us by having power over us mentally and otherwise. We can come to own ourselves by recognising these constructs (translated recently as 'spectres') as such and freeing ourselves from them, able to use them as we wish now that they have no power over us.

The gender binary is just one such rigid/fixed social construct, which, once people take the time to really engage and explore, can be unmade for each and every person.

Once that is done, each person will realise that the way that they relate to their own gender, others' genders, and similarly with sexuality, is totally different. No longer fixed and rigid in their ideas about these things, people often rid themselves of being cis, being attracted to just 'one' gender, and explore queerness as an insurrectionary relation.

It's not necessary to read Stirner to come to this conclusion - most queer theory will get you there, as well as most theories that genuinely reject simple essentialisms and binaristic thinking.

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Fool wrote

Max Stirner is Marx and Engels bum chum.

He teaches us about ghosts.

Understanding ghosts we dance.

ELI5

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AnarchoDoom wrote (edited )

I'm not sure that Stirner would give as much shit as some people here are to those big group categorizations (cis vs LGTBQ). He went a long way into demonstrating how these spooks are yet more impersonal externalities that are imposing categories upon people.

And the very fact I am others are being called "cis" here as a kind of demeaning insult is revealing of how aggressively this stuff is being enforced, even by so-called anarchists. It's likely none of those people know me from real life.

This meme attempts to be making a few conflations with things that got little relation to another.

EDIT: Also btw... downvoting is cheap.

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syllaby wrote

I believe you are being downvoted because, with little nuance, you said saying "cis" is being aggressively enforced and is an insult when gender is, by definition, forced, coercive itself, and trans and cis are words that unveil exactly that, as they point to how one relates to gender beyond just "being gender" as ideology intends it.

I liked the meme not just because it made me laugh but mostly because I don't see these trans-affirming stuff anywhere nowadays (i don't do social media and most work/education stuff is cis-washed as per your comment's rhetoric) and it's been a while since I logged in to Raddle and it made me glad to find it here, but I don't think it's demeaning cis people? It just suggests Stirner can make someone not cis and that increases the stirnerian trans evangelizer's power?

As for Stirner, I have read little, but I think attempts to use anarchist attacks on categories to level everything together just because we have concepts that make them moot, is a very liberal interpretation of anarchism, so because big group categories can be conceptualized as ghosts it does not mean they lose all power overnight, there's still the whole medical-state-family-religion-(...)-apparatus enforcing it.

It would be very mild to describe the way gender is enforced as "aggressive", and it's not about a web forum or anarchist scene... As anarchists having exchanges with other anarchists though, these can be ways of further dismantling how we think about the categories, I suppose that is your point? I hope this exchange can accomplish that somehow.

I think it'd be a sad reflection that Stirner goes a long way, as you said, demonstrating how categories are spooks so we end up defending essentialized categories already hidden in common language to the detriment of terms that try to discuss/reveal how the spook works because it's all ideas and ideas are bad. I'm just feeling confused by myself now so I'm going to stop.

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AnarchoDoom wrote

I believe you are being downvoted because, with little nuance, you said saying "cis" is being aggressively enforced and is an insult when gender is, by definition, forced, coercive itself, and trans and cis are words that unveil exactly that, as they point to how one relates to gender beyond just "being gender" as ideology intends it.

So do I. I do foresee the behavior of reproducing society's patterns in enforcing stereotypes on random people while completely disregaring their individual lives. I am not a gender. No one here is, unless they're maybe bots...

There's been aggressive enforcement being done on this forum, against me and some others. Like people calling me a "cis misogynist" of sorts. I'm not crybabying about it; this is the internet. Just stating what has been happening. All I'm seeing in such behavior is more of society.

Cis and LGBTQ_ are ID categories created by sociologists and bureaucrats, The closest I could relate to is "queer", regardless of what the social authoritarians here believe, and I still believe that "queer" is more a negation of any these categories.

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syllaby wrote (edited )

i don't usually participate much in public discussion because it triggers great anxiety so i can understand why you'd feel the way you feel by being approached by others. still, i can't relate to how you position categories and how to attack them.

it's hard for me not to digress. i wrote another long reply but i suppose it would just wear both of us down, so... have a good one!

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AnarchoDoom wrote (edited )

What do you mean by "positioning categories"? Got an idea, tho not too sure...

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syllaby wrote

It seemed to me by reading your comment that by holding 'cis and LGBTQ_' as the categories to be attacked you inadvertently protect the language that is hidden as essence, as natural, as the language of facts, transparent, like a ghost. It may not be the best or most perfect language, it will perhaps be abandoned sometime, but I hope that happens in a movement of revolt (or flowering) rather than reactionary critique.

This idea that there is something particularly wrong with the word cis... I have encountered that a few times before, and it was from this premodern, transphobic critique made as a "gender-critical" stance. I think there is a sad area of overlap between that and a gender nihilist's position, but to me that is more a mistake in how to position categories, because it is not about cis or LGBTQ categories, it is about the whole industry of representation and identity in the first place. It switches things around, as if it is trans folks who are proposing cis ideology and are to blame for how binary and simplistic it becomes when the words are enacted, but that's backwards.

I guess, to respond to you and to have this dialog, I too have to exist as a ghost. the ghost that repeats the identitary categories of gender, of cis and trans and other related language. But I would rather be a ghost myself than an unaware defender of ghosts that are dear to me and alienating to others.

Of course, to interpret and to address you only by means of your comments is to relate to a ghost too I guess. I do not know enough to have an opinion on your history in this forum, but it seems to me from the comments in this thread as though you appeal to a purity of action, a proper way of queering things.

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AnarchoDoom wrote (edited )

First paragraph: bad point here. I'm only reusing these words to point to the language practices I'm referring to. Was Stirner not talking about "the State", or "property" or "God" just because they're spooks?

So about "queer", unlike the other attached categories, this always been to me a non-category. Tho it is indeed culturally-charged, but more of a question mark than anything else. I guess it is, too, some ghost... Like anything impersonal one can identify with, that has little ground in their personal living experience.

We connect to these ghosts either through some conformity (trendiness, herd mentality) patterns, or just because we personally identify with these, as they feel or look or maybe even are empowering to ourselves, or beneficial in some way.

So I connect to "queer" in the way that I really, really don't fucking relate to the "adult men" representation that society is producing, which is the one I'm finding everywhere around, regardless of their sexual preferences, and goes way beyond their bland clothing and ugly hair styles. Machism, especially, is a morality of domination and rape.

I'm still not getting all this jabs about "purity". I may be looking like I'm expecting this from others here, but that's not the case. I only despise tendencies that reaffirm the normie cultures in all their forms.

Anyways thanks for being explicit in you views and sorry if I read like moralist or whatever.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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AnarchoDoom wrote

So this is the "Jesus was a Jew" moment...

And it goes like: Stirner was (apparently) a cis.

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