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Because, like everyone else in favor of reproductive rights, I find the prospect of yelling at their actual opponents too daunting, I am neck-deep in the intrafeminist, intraprogressive sublimination squabble. And the subset of this I’m apparently fixated on is not the whole ‘can you say woman’ thing (already oversubscribed), but rather the way that the knee-jerk recitation of cishet privilege rhetoric extends to this ill-suited-for-it issue.
I invite you to type “cishet women” “Roe” into Twitter’s search where you will find such items as:
The online left didn’t know what to do with this hard evidence of discrimination against no not just cishet women, but specifically—though no, not exclusively—demographic. There’s the urge to discuss how cisgender, heterosexual people have it all-things-equal easiest, which, yes. However.
Virtually everyone who gets pregnant is a cisgender woman who has sex with cisgender men. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules, but this is how it goes, for the obvious reasons. That’s still a category that includes plenty of (I can’t even believe this needs spelling out, but) marginalized people: does “cishet” imply white? rich? how? But like all categories, it excludes.
Yes, other people sometimes seek abortions, and when doing so may experience additional obstacles: cis women who aren’t into men but were assaulted by one; cis lesbians pregnant by choice but with a fetus likely to have severe birth defects; cis women partnered with transgender women or AMAB non-binary people, and, yes, non-binary AFABs and trans men. These outlier cases are further reduced when one considers that a certain number of trans people have undergone procedures and treatments that reduce or eliminate their fertility.
If the argument were simply that trans rights need to be a part of feminism then fine. But the idea that cishet women are taking up a bit too much room on the topic of abortion is borderline surreal. No, not all of feminism has to be straight cisgender women, but if there were ever a topic where such women would rather naturally take the lead, well…
I know it’s a thing among gender-critical so-called terf sorts to be offended by cis, or to insist that one is not “cis” but just a woman to which I say meh. There needs to be a word for not-trans and this is what has caught on. The existence of cis as a term need not, in theory, say anything particular about how comfortable let alone enthusiastic a woman is in her womanhood. It just means, a woman who’s fine with she/her and being referred to as a woman and has not sought out alternatives to this. Yes, sometimes you see it used to mean being comfortable with being a man or woman which is silly but if all that’s meant by comfortable is that you’re not trying to change things then seems reasonable.
No, the problem comes from the gender-neutrality of the term cishet, and the way it’s used to suggest a common experience among cishet men and women where gender and sexuality are concerned. I say “where gender and sexuality are concerned” because obviously nearly all descriptive terms can apply to men or women, without this posing any particular concern. (A redheaded woman. A redheaded man. Whatever.) Cishet, however, suggests a shared ease, or even just a shared role, that simply isn’t there. Where cis sticks with a description of gender identity, cishet is about gender and sexual desire intertwined, a more complete portrait of how people go through the world, and thus somehow, to me, more troubling.
Some of this is cultural. I always return to the example of the teenager bringing a significant other home to meet the family. The boy who brings home a girl: go get ‘em tiger, or, not infrequently, a sigh of relief that he’s not gay. The girl who brings home a boy: a conservative father prepares the proverbial shotgun, while the liberal mother wonders if maybe her daughter is sacrificing her ambition for some boy. (While specific girlfriends can get labeled—and can be!—bad influences, the mere fact of having a girlfriend is not generally understood to mean a boy has chosen girls over school.)
But then there’s the salient and unavoidable biological fact that pregnancy-as-undesirable-consequence is largely the realm of the cishet, and falls rather asymmetrically on one half of the equation. It just does. By all means de-center away on other topics but this one maybe let the center well enough alone.
On all issues, it's simply best for cishet women to be quiet and learn. Because progress.
I think when used in this context "cishet" does imply "white", ridiculous as it is. "Cis" also seems to be used in a way that implies "lame" or "square" (when I see young, white, evidently heterosexual and very feminine presenting women saying they are "not cis"... It's a pejorative they're trying to identify away from, as with straight people saying they're queer).