What you said is both liberating and idealistic.

I try to separate what the religious institutions appropriate and the actual living knowledge/practice they claim to have authority over. Institutions come after this knowledge and even tradition is a step after the living thing. Once I can make that separation I feel like I can relate to the immediate, living practices or concepts and find many of them useful, at least a lot more useful than psychiatry and ubiquitous christian moralism.

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.

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!

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.

so I try to look as androgynous as possible and worry over it

We can't really ever hit that mark though. There is no essential androgynous way to look and cis people will always see it in binary terms anyways.

The paranoia is a feeling I relate a lot to. If I can I avoid overthinking it or even paying much attention at whoever I felt was watching. Sometimes I entirely avoid it all and won't even look at anyone around if I can, until I'm somewhere else.

no, but he's still the marx of marxism, yes? it creates the false, personalist impression that his ideas were his own. as for anarchism there's just an... anarch of anarchism.

Pierre-Joseph-Proudhon more then any other writer is effectively the Marx (Literally being one of his contemporaries) of the Anarchist ideology.

Well, do all things have to fit together in the same schemes, and be all interchangeable? I don't think there is a "Marx of anarchism", there is just a Marx of marxism.

most modern anarchists would reject like half the shit he believed

True for lots of other authors too. I don't see this as a negative, do you? And it's not untrue of other groups (except fundamentalists?). No one has to subscribe to the entirety of what was said on a given topic just because they somewhat align with it.

Also, I don't think you'll find many here who even value the "functional civilisation" thing.