A Primer for Cis People

One of my neighbors is a 7-year-old girl. She was born with a penis, but she always knew something else was going on. If you saw her playing with her girlfriends in the street, wearing a dress with her hair in a ponytail, you’d never suspect she was anything but an ordinary XX child. But that little girl has been forcing all the grownups around her—out of sheer love—to become savvier about gender. It’s happening all around—young people are
challenging everything we thought we knew about gender.

The percentage of US people identifying as trans has doubled since 2016. Partly that’s people daring to come out. The Internet has helped—young people can find each other and realize they’re not alone, or crazy, and that
their feelings mean something. According to the LGBT group GLAAD, 3% of us are trans. More and more people are asking about it. So here’s a far-from-perfect primer from a cis ally.

Sex is physiological. It refers to what genitals you have, or what chromosomes, or what hormones you’re running. More or less. The more you investigate, the more complicated it becomes. But basically, sex is based on your body.

Gender is your identity as masculine or feminine. It’s what you feel yourself to be.

Transgender people are people who were assigned to a gender when they were born (on the basis of their genitals), but who don’t identify with that gender. They may or may not identify with the other gender. Not all trans
people take hormones or opt for any kind of surgery.

Cis-gender is a term coined for people who feel their gender designation at birth to be accurate. The gender they feel inside matches the shape of their body outside.

Intergender is someone who doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, but who doesn’t identify with the other either. Sometimes they’re in a process, and sometimes they’re staying right there, happy in the
ambiguity. They also refer to themselves as gender non-binary, meaning they don’t conform to the two-gender norm.

Intersex is someone whose body combines both sexes or is in between, in terms of hormones, chromosomes, and so on. There are as many intersex people in America as there are redheads.

“Queer” is a reclaimed ex-slur that serves as a catchall for non-conforming. It means someone who’s getting creative about the whole field of gender and sexuality.

A transvestite is generally a straight man who likes dressing in women’s clothing. He still knows he’s a man; he just digs wearing dresses. The term is outmoded; a more up-to-date term is cross-dresser.

Transsexual is an outmoded word for a transgender person.

“Tranny” used to be a cool reclaimed word used by trans people, but you wouldn’t use it now unless you wanted a smack in the snoot.

Pronouns are an issue. If you don’t know whether someone’s a “he” or a “she” just ask them what pronoun they go by. Some people prefer “they.” That used to be the plural, but it’s the only non-gender-specific third-person
pronoun we have in English, so get used to it. Don’t worry if you get it wrong; apologize and try again.

Trans people have always been around. Within Native American cultures, trans people are called “two-spirit” people because they carry both male and female energy. Two-spirit people transcend boundaries, including that between the earth and the spirit world. They traditionally held powerful and important roles as teachers and healers.

Recognizing trans people muddies the waters of gender. Some radical feminists reject trans women. Trans activists have branded them with a new slur: TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). The left regularly tears itself into pieces warring over these issues. As a feminist for 40 years I’ve noticed that while people may be easy enough to hate in the abstract, they’re easy to love when you actually meet them. Trans people are just people.

A gender non-binary lesbian friend said she thinks that when cis women are rattled by the presence of trans women, it reflects a mentality of scarcity: None of us feel like we’re good enough as women. Wow, that rings true! Most of us feel that if we were a bit skinnier here, or a bit curvier there, or had better hair, or any number of other variables, we’d be more “feminine,” more “womanly,” more “attractive.” Why are we all competing over who’s a “real woman”?

What I’ve come to is this: I want all willing women in the sisterhood. I want my non-binary lesbian friend, and my little white girl neighbor, my fat friend who struggles so hard to fit the skinny norm, and our Black friend who let her hair go wild because to hell with racist beauty standards. I want my femmy lesbian friend and her butch wife, and my straight cis neighbors who sip Chardonnay while bitching good-naturedly about their husbands. There are many ways to be a woman. Enough for all of us.

I hope this little primer doesn’t offend you. But if it does, then you’ve just entered a huge global dialogue. The topic needs far more pages than I have here, and I have had to leave out so much. This primer was intended to help cis folks get started, and in writing it I’m grateful to trans friends and their families for many generous conversations. The vital thing is that we talk to each other and listen to each other, as cis women and trans women, as Black, brown, white, and indigenous women, as working- and middle-class women, as 7.6 billion differently embodied people. Be well.

Rachael Vaughan, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist and an associate professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a lifelong feminist and an ally who thinks trans people should not have to do all the work of educating cis people. Her passion is inclusion.

There’s something more dangerous out there than the next big flu. It’s a virus, but it’s not a tiny microbe; it’s a meme. It’s the prevailing myth of emotional selfsufficiency.

It says that people who need people are pathological, that a deep longing for relationship is sick, and that caring for others is codependent. It says you should be able to meet all your own needs and whispers that if you loved yourself, you wouldn’t need anyone else. It shames you for feeling lonely.

I am so tired of battling this myth alone. I need you with me on this. And here’s why: humans did not evolve to live alone. It’s not our natural state. We evolved in closely knit bands that hunted and gathered in groups. We sat together around communal fires, shared food and stories, and slept snuggled up against the cold. It was safer to be part of the pack. Some of the unpleasantness of loneliness is the trace of ancient fear when we’re alone—the outliers were the ones that got picked off by leopards and lions.

So I need you. And you need me. We need each other. It’s in our DNA.

We Were Born to Be Relational

Day-old deer can run and jump, but humans are helpless when we’re born. For the first months of our lives, we rely completely on our mothers. Mom’s good attunement to baby builds trust and love, and what’s called secure attachment—the inner confidence that you are loved and will be responded to. Secure attachment creates confidence in exploring the world.

The myth says that somewhere along the line, we grow out of this. But that’s not true! Our need for relationship is literally a lifeand-death issue: we live longer if we’re happily married or have a network of close friends.

Our need for touch is part of it. Loving, caring touch causes us to secrete oxytocin, often called the bonding hormone—it makes us feel calm, safe, and happy. Just 40 seconds of being hugged by someone you like causes oxytocin release. But you can’t hug yourself. You need to get it from someone else. Try it. Hug someone and count—you’ll feel the relaxation response switch in. Far from being self-sufficient, we physically need each other.

Scientists are now finding that all mammals are programmed for altruism and love. Our previous view of the world as a jungle full of selfish creatures fighting for survival is giving way to one of the world as a tightly knit tapestry of reciprocal relationships.

It’s ridiculous to think we don’t need each other. In fact, the opposite is true—the more you give and take love, care, attention, and contact with others, the happier and healthier you will be. So how did a meme based on avoidance become such a fervently held belief?

This Meme Is All about Fear

We become avoidant because of fear. If people have been mean to us in the past, we may carry the scars of that trauma. So we turn away from love because it’s twinned with the fear of betrayal. All of us have been betrayed at some point. So all of us harbor a little fear connected to the vulnerability of opening ourselves to love, and therefore this meme is seductive. But at a deeper level of feeling, you know this meme is wrong.

Don’t Isolate, Inoculate

The solution is not to open less to other people. The solution is to open more. The idea that we can—and should—provide for ourselves in every area of our lives is one that has been sold to us. It’s part of the ideology of the consumer society.

We are increasingly reduced—reduced, not empowered—to buying services that used to unfold from natural human relationships: home health care, babysitting, massage therapy, spiritual counseling, sexual fulfillment, entertainment, and so on. All these things used to be available to us for free because we lived with and among other people. Community gatherings met layered sets of needs, in a rich texture of transactions.

Markets, barn raisings, harvest times, village dances, and weekly religious services provided opportunities for sharing information, trading, making friends, getting help, courtship, and entertainment. Now we’ve lost that collectivity, and most transactions have become one-dimensional. Even cafes and bars are no longer meeting places—they’re full of isolated individuals staring down at screens, updating their status on Facebook.

Fight the meme. We don’t need more selfreliance. What we’re blocked in is our relationality: our readiness to receive and our willingness to give. We’ve become so infected with consumer values that we think we should only give if we’re going to get, and that we should always try to get the most return for the least investment. God forbid we love someone more than they love us. Or give our love for free.

We think we should provide for ourselves because otherwise we’d be relying on someone else. And that means taking a risk without any guarantee. This is what has us feeling both lonely as hell and ashamed of feeling that way—we’ve been told it’s wrong to need people, and we’re scared that our normal attachment instincts are sick.

Trust Your Feeling

Instead of going inward and trying to meet your own needs, go outward and build yourself a robust network of relationships, a community of like-minded souls that you can laugh with, cry with, listen to, care for, and love. Then when the inevitable betrayals, bereavements, and disappointments happen, you’ll have support. Because no-one makes it alone. And no-one—unless they’re the sole survivor of a plane crash in a jungle—should even try.

Inoculate yourself from the virus by smiling at people, saying hello, getting involved, keeping in contact, leaning into differences, sticking with a friend who’s in hard times, offering to help, forgiving your lover, sending a card, giving a hug, picking up the crying kid, calling your mother. People need people. You’re perfectly normal.

Rachael Vaughan is a marriage and family therapist with offices in Marin and San Francisco. She also teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).
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