Please read my blog’s “about” before responding to this post.
(I’ve made this post before on a different blog, but the thread was a bit hard to follow, so I’ve decided to just summarize my thoughts here.)
It is unhelpful to group all binary people (cis and trans men and women) together and say that they all have/are equally benefited from binary privilege because the distinction between exorsexism and cissexism is not as exact as you might think.
Exorsexism is a useful concept for understanding how the Western gender binary rigidly defines gender roles and expectations, but it is not, in fact, an entirely different system of oppression from cissexism. Exorsexism does primarily hurt nonbinary people (and, one could argue, GNC people), but it still largely affects anyone who does not strictly conform to the Western gender binary, including to cisnormativity.
All pericis people are benefited from pericissexism (or a better way of putting it might be that they’re not otherwise disadvantaged by it), but not all binary people equally benefit from exorsexism.
For example, the degendering of trans women (regarding us as genderless and subhuman) as a way to simultaneously uphold male supremacy and refuse to recognize our womanhood plays a large part in transmisogynistic oppression.
If we can understand and accept that intersex cis people do not have full access to cis privilege and that the presence of cis privilege is rendered negiligible for the absence of perisex privilege, we can also understand that the absence of cis privilege renders binary privilege negligible. And, at that point, there’s no real use in distinguishing between cis and binary privilege considering exorsexism is not enacted at a systemic level by binary trans people.
In a lot of cases, binary trans people who are openly and maliciously exorsexist also deal with a lot of internalized transphobia and are attempting to make themselves more palatable to cis people by distancing themselves from those who aren’t, a classic case of “See? I’m not like them! I’m one of the good ones!”
Another way you could think of it is how biphobia and homophobia manifest in different ways (mostly interpersonally), but are still largely inextricable from each other. Gay people can be biphobic and vice versa, but neither group systemically benefits from biphobia or homophobia. It’s all the result of heterosexism.
Of course it’s important to discuss exorsexism, how binary people can misunderstand and misrepresent nonbinary issues, and what binary people can do to help combat this, but just remember and acknowledge that not everyone who is capable of being exorsexist equally systemically perpetuates or is equally benefited by its existence.
How does this compare to transmisogyny?
Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m surprised that some TME nonbinary people and trans men have taken to using this discussion as an excuse to say, “Well, if binary people don’t automatically oppress nonbinary people, then how can TME people automatically oppress trans women?” The answer is simple, really: Going back to what I was saying about the “one of the good ones” argument, all TME people can weaponize transmisogyny, but not all binary people can weaponize exorsexism without also hurting themselves.
As stated in my Q&A, transmisogyny can be thought of “as being similar to misogyny, but for a group of people who are wholly and outright denied their womanhood” (and, to a greater extent, personhood). Transmisogyny is not independent of transphobia — like all systems of oppression, they inform and intersect with one another. But because exorsexism is an especially restrictive type of cissexism and transmisogyny is not specifically a type of cissexism, all TME individuals are systemically benefited from transmisogyny to a much greater extent than binary trans people are from exorsexism.
Please read my blog’s “about” before responding to this post.
