Petit-Cisgenderism in LGBT Circles
There is something haunting the LGBT community in the 21st century, the spectre of the cisgender-heterosexual. This spectre will possess LGBT people, in order to make them assimilate to cishetero-normative beliefs and mannerisms. This is common in LGBT culture as well, haunting LGBT social media pages, pride festivals, LGBT conventions, and even queer theory itself (queer theory is experiencing a mass misinterpretation of intersectionality by neoliberals). Franz Fanon, afropessimist theorist, was invoking a similar problem, when he discussed the issue of black people wearing white masks in his time, in his book “Black Skin, White Masks'', as a result of centuries of submission, an aspect of capitalism.
This spectre, the notion of Queer Assimilationism, an ideology of pseudo-queerness bending over for cisgender-heterosexual desires (becoming-cisgender) manifests itself in a portion of 21st century LGBT circles, labeled by me as “Petit-Cisgenderism”. Petit-c=Cisgenderism can be subtle, a prevailing expectation of LGBT people to act normally, assuming that an objective notion of normality from the establishment conservative perception, exists. The point-of-view from the cisgender-heterosexual is that if queer people are to exist, they must succumb to cisgender-heterosexuality, or, to its logical conclusion, abstain from sex, and become “ex-gay.” (A conception of allowed-queerness in some prosperity gospel/evangelical circles.) The ally cisgender-heterosexual isn’t better than the conservative cisgender-heterosexual either. The ally hides his hatred for queer people behind a faux liberal support, hence fooling queer people into being assimilated into cisgender-heterosexual culture.
The modern-day pride festival (Youth Pride Fest 2022 in my hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for example) was made by the ally in order to brainwash LGBT people into accepting cisgender-heterosexual rule, distracting them from the real problems facing LGBT people (Roe v Wade, for example, the law that not only effects women, but also transmasc individuals.)
Petit-Cisgenderism occurs in 2 main forms:
The form of the Faux-revoutionary alt-kid, or, pseudo-countercultural queerness. Tiktok is a source of this faux-revolution because it package old movements (Myspace Sceneness, and Emo Culture in the 2000s for example) and presents them in a corporate way, fooling people into thinking that it’s revolutionary and attacking capitalist aims. You cannot achieve a dismantling of cisgenderheteronormative structures with repackaging (recycling implies a positive context, and it’s a useless word to utilize in this sense) once-revolutionary cultures to millions of teenagers and young adults, so in order to keep up the populaces ignorance, and in fear of its lies being exposed, they silence any useful critique as internalized homophobia and internalized transphobia. The deterritorialization of identity is useful, but it has been dedicated to a non-reterritorialization, fragmenting identity further (i’m thinking of the MOGAI movement when i say this: making up new genders can be useful as a deterritorialization, but what they are advocating is a deterritorialization without any sense of reterritorialization in sight.)
The “normal” fully assimilated type of queerness. They don’t want to dismantle oppressive and cisgenderheteronormative structures. Instead, they only want to live comfortably in a world which will never accept them, continuing to fight for neoliberal abstractions like “equality” and “rights”. They dress like cisgender-heterosexuals, they speak like cisgender-heterosexuals, and they live in nuclear family ideals. Through this, we see the problem: They can’t seem to pry themselves off of this punchline of a joke that will never arrive to the climax. They can only convince other queer people that the system can be reformed.
These two methods have been proven to be psychologically damaging to LGBT youth, and the reason why anxiety and depression has been on the recline in LGBT communities is because of this non-realization that there is mass Petit-Cisgenderism in the LGBT community. We need to rediscover our own individuality, creativity, and intellect, just like the Stonewall Riots has, because we have lost the drive for reinventing ourselves and instead, opted for a centrist view of political and moral affairs.