#positionality

If your desired gender presentation, sex traits, and identity does not conflict with your SIG (societally imposed gender), you will experience privelege under cisnormativity whether or not you actually identify as cisgender.

If you do not change your name, your pronouns, your presentation (including sex traits), your gendered terms, there is nothing about your gender identity that a cisnormative society will pressure you away from.

If you are consistently imposed female and you:

Like to go by she/her

Willfully use a feminine name

Identify as a woman in any way

Don't identify as another gender in any socially disruptive way

Are comfortable with your physical sex traits

You have privelege. Yes even if you are a nonbinary woman. Cis society is not going to pressure you away from any of these things listed above.

If you are consistently imposed male and you:

Like to go by he/him

Willfully use a masculine name

Identify as a man in any way

Don't identify as another gender in any socially disruptive way

Are comfortable with your physical sex traits

You have privelege. Yes, even if you're a nonbinary man. Cis society is not going to pressure you away from any of these things listed above.

Do I want to exclude people like this from the nonbinary community?

No. I have never said this. I have stated I want people like this to simply acknowledge they have some level of privelege over people who socially or medically transition.

Priveleged life experience often leads to implicit biases about dispriveleged groups. Identifying as nonbinary without actually having that similar life experience to other nonbinary people puts you in a place of ignorance about trans/nb issues. Many people who fit this description of a non-transitioning person (who doesn’t want to) have extremely ignorant and cisnormativity-informed opinions on trans people.

I have met people like this both offline and in-person and it IS a problem you will encounter occasionally that someone not equipped to talk about the struggles of transitioning is in a position where they speak over and make decisions for trans & nonbinary people. Occasionally they will obscure their relationship with privelege purposely to give their words more credence. This is a bad thing.

Obligatory: NO. I don't believe all non-tranditioning people act like this. I've met plenty who are lovely people. This comes with acknowledging their privelege.

Do I believe people like this are cisgender?

I believe them when they say they are nonbinary and I will call them nonbinary.

In my theory discussion & material analysis, I have tended to use "cisgender" as a catchall shorthand term for anyone who's desired gender experience is considered Correct under cisnormativity and experiences privelege for that. Could some nonbinary people fit this description? Yes— so for the sake of not stepping on anyone's toes I'll be using the term "SIG-conformant" to refer to anyone who's desired gender experience is considered Correct under cisnormativity and experiences privelege for that.

I should have done this sooner.

"So you believe you need to transition to be trans?"

I don't particularly care about people not transitioning identifying as trans or nonbinary, I'm not the arbiter of who is "valid". My problem is when people deny the material privelege that comes with willfully and comfortably being one's SIG.

ESPECIALLY when it's done for the purpose of positioning oneself as an authority on transphobia and exorsexism.

"But I am AGAB aligned nonbinary and I'm transitioning by [xyz method] so I'm not priveleged"

Cool, I'm not talking about you.

"But I'm nonbinary and I can't transition because it's not safe"

That sucks I hope things get better for you. And I'm not talking about you in this post. Being percieved as cisgender ≠ being ok/happy with it

"But what about people who haven't figured out their identity yet?"

This isn't really a post so much as it is a (non exhaustive) list of communities with hypervisibility and communties with Invisibility (or outright erasure).

Neither hypervisibility or invisibility are a privilege. They come with their own challenges. These are also generalisations so take them with a pinch of salt:

Hypervisibility/Invisibility:

Gay men / lesbians

Monosexual orientations / multisexual orientations

Trans women / trans men

Binary trans people / nonbinary people

Allos / Aspecs

Asexuals / aromantics

Perisex trans people / intersex trans people

And probably many more.

This isn't to say any of these groups are privileged (or privileged over each other). Not at all. None of these groups have that systematic power. Lateral aggression can and does happen, however.

It's part of the complex web of intersectionslity. Someone can belong to a group that has hypervisibility in *some contexts* and invisibility or erasure in others.

E.g. I'm a transgender man. Trans men are often erased or made invisible in the trans community. At the same time, I'm binary trans, which means on that basis there's more out there that caters to my binary transness than there is for nonbinary people. It's all relative and never ever should be an oppression Olympics. Nor is it oppression maths (it's not like +2 oppression but -1 for X reason or Y reason). It doesn't work like that.

Trans Unity - as a transfeminist framework - includes this complex web of positionality to explain how one can belong to multiple classes at the same time without that then being used as a cudgel to say you're "too visible" or "escape problems by being invisible".

making this post in response to circulating claims about "transmasc privilege" and a noticeable gap in some of y'alls understanding of oppression.

positionality can be thought of as the way society perceives and treats you, and what privileges you are afforded accordingly.

identity can be thought of as your internal sense of self.

for most people, the two do not line up perfectly. your positionality depends on what people immediately see, not what you tell them. your positionality may also vary day to day based on a number of factors including but not limited to the people you are surrounded by, the space you are in, and the positionalities and identities of those perceiving you.

privilege is based almost entirely on positionality, not identity.

a good example is the diversity within the transgender community. if you take three transgender men at different stages in their transition they will each have a different positionality. one may have the positionality of a gender conforming cisgender man, the second may have the positionality of a transgender man, the third may have the positionality of a gender conforming cisgender woman. the gendered privileges these three people are afforded are vastly different despite all three of them having an identical gender identity.

if you have the positionality of a certain marginalized group, you will be targeted with the same oppression as them whether or not you share an identity with them. the fact that you don't share the identity doesn't suddenly make that oppression go away. you can be oppressed based on a positionality that does not align with your identity.

Woke academia strikes again.

Today's entry comes from the University of Victoria, where someone earned a PhD in the School of Indigenous Governance, which I had never heard of but appears to be where ordinary academic standards go to be ceremonially sacrificed.

The dissertation is titled, "Mnidoo-mkwendamwin: Beading and Restitching with Ancestral Threads of Memory." And before the dissertation even begins, we of course get a mandatory land acknowledgment.

The abstract opens with a typo. It says, quote, "This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices." It appears to be missing the word 'of' there, but maybe proofreading is an oppressive colonial construct as well.

But it gets better, or worse, however you look at it. The author says the dissertation documents how to make, quote, "ancestral knowledge encodements" through "indigenous beadwork, textile, other fiber arts." It seems to be missing the word 'and' there as well. So that's two typos, and we haven't even moved beyond the first sentence yet

It then explains that beading is, quote, "indigenous resurgence" explored through the author's intersecting lenses of being a, quote, "chronically ill neurodivergent two-spirit Mississauga Nishabi Lucanan artist and scholar."

The abstract also says that, quote, "the body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture" are only viewed as separate entities "due to colonization."

This dissertation is based on so-called "indigenous knowledges." But while cultural traditions, stories, and art can be personally meaningful, when universities start treating them as co-equal with scientific knowledge and dismiss skepticism as a form of colonial oppression, we've left the realm of serious scholarship entirely and dove headfirst into mystical woo-woo.

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Abstract

This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices and into the realm of documenting how to make ancestral knowledge encodements that synthesize research through Indigenous beadwork, textile, other fibre arts. Beading is Indigenous resurgence that connects me to my ancestors, and this research delves into what that means in a grounded wholistic way through my intersecting lenses of being a chronically ill neurodivergent Two-Spirit Mississauga Nishnaabe Lucbanin artist and scholar. Conceptualizations around the body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture are often thought of as separate entities due to colonization, so a foundational part of this work examines approaches to Indigenous ideas of wholeness in community and identifies what forms of decolonization and resurgence can facilitate reconnection with the spiritual. Beads come together and interplay with one another in similar ways that gained wisdoms do within the research process. While the overall design that is created through knowledge is powerful and important, so is every stitch that makes that design come into being. Each relative who collaborated on this dissertation brought a prismatic array of experiences and played a powerful role in shaping the trajectory of the ancestral knowledge encodement of this work in the Ngwaagan Regalia (2025). Throughout the dissertation are ancestral knowledge encodements—created through historical inspiration, depictions of relatives, tea-visits with kin, and narratives shared by family and community members. The encodements created and embedded into this written dissertation take the forms of photographs, historical images, digitally stitched collages, digital mixed media illustrations, paintings, and diagrams. I have chosen to honour this tradition of weaving in the threads of previous generations and connecting it to those in the future through integrating ancestral mkwendamwinan (memories) in the same way that I am including contemporary conversational dbaajmownan (stories).

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Art is not science. Any form of "knowledge" which is inaccessible to all but an anointed, special few is not "knowledge."

“Fact” is not anybody’s experience; it states the experience of no one in particular. … By definition, then, if we take the empirical rule (no personal authority) seriously, revelation cannot be the basis for fact, because it is not publicly available. Similarly, attempts to claim a special kind of experience or checking for any particular person or kind of person—male or female, black or white, tall or short—are strictly illicit. … if you make different rules for black and white checkers, you are not doing science. … if the way you are checking works only for people with a sympathetic attitude, or if your results are not replicable by others in a reasonably regular fashion, you are not doing science. … If the way you are seeing and explaining works only for the religious, you are breaking the rules. – Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"

Okay, here's something to be aware of because I'm seeing more and more of this in research papers. It's kind of like a woke ritual meditation about their intersectional positionality and how they approach the data.

These aren't methods per se, even though they're usually within the methods section, but really they're just emotional statements that are reflecting on their privilege that they believe somehow helps them mitigate their bias when they're analyzing the data for their paper.

It's really awkward and strange. Let me show you.

In this paper, this subsection of the methods is called "Reflexivity and Rigor." They claim that one of the authors' "experience as a Black, gender-fluid, queer clinician and academic with expertise in crisis safety planning, informed the research questions and interview guide," whereas the second and third authors are, quote, "white heterosexual cisgender women."

Now listen to this whole section, okay? I'm going to quote it in full.

"To ensure reflexive analysis, the first and second authors met throughout the analysis and write-up of the study's findings to discuss their assumptions and perspectives of the participant responses, codes, and emerging themes. These ongoing dialogues created intentional spaces to question ideas and examine how each author's social location informed their meaning-making. The authors also shared excerpts from analytic memos created during coding, which captured the first and second authors' emotional reactions to the transcripts and their analytic insights. This collaborative and reflexive process deepened the authors' understanding of the data and helped to manage bias, thus ensuring a thoughtfully interrogated analysis."

This is totally bizarre stuff, and just unthinkable for me, as it really just defeats the entire purpose of a double-blind peer-review process.

Rather than making the authors totally anonymous and unknown to the reviewers so they aren't biasing their reviews on the immutable characteristics of the authors, intimate details about the authors' skin color and sexuality and other things are foregrounded.

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Literally a manifestation of the Genetic Fallacy.

"Positionality Statements," like pronouns-in-bio, are not completely useless. They're red flags offered up willingly that tell you someone is not to be trusted or should be ignored.