For me, educating is one of the most important things I can do to “help the cause”. I like explaining gender and sexuality (particularly as they pertain to me, but also the basic Non-Heterosexual/Non-Cisgender 101), I don’t get offended when people ask me questions, and I just really enjoy teaching people about this stuff.

I attended a Gender Identity workshop and a Safe Zones workshop the other day, and having somebody else educate people (and me) was almost surreal. She was a cool person, funny and engaging, and I liked her a lot. She is gay, and the perspective she had on LGB issues was interesting and insightful.

She is also cisgender, however, and that makes it difficult for her to fully understand trans* concepts. I’m not saying that cisgender people can’t be good allies or can’t really get the lives of trans* people – actually, I am kind of saying the latter. Cis people can’t really get the lives of trans* people, just as the opposite holds true. And that makes it harder to teach other (mostly cis) people.

She didn’t do a bad job. I rather enjoyed the Gender Identity workshop. However, there were a few problems with the way she set it up. Firstly, she didn’t introduce the word “cisgender”,  just “transgender” and “transsexual”. This seemed very othering to me; though I’m sure she didn’t do it on purpose, it reeked of, “These people need a label because they’re different, and we don’t need a label because we’re normal.” That didn’t really sit well with me.

She also never mentioned that trans men are real men and that trans women are real women. This may seem trivial, but to a room of people who haven’t thought much about trans* people, stating this clearly would be really helpful.

The other main thing I had a problem with was how the matter of cis privilege was handled. She only mentioned briefly the horrors of being trans* in a cis privileged world – however, we spent quite a while on how privilege negatively affects the privileged.

This really bothered me. Discussing how privilege negatively affects everyone, even the privileged, is fine. But to focus almost completely on that? No. Privilege exists, and it puts other people at an extreme disadvantage. Being unprivileged in terms of gender identity is not something to gloss over, especially while talking to a room of mostly cisgender people who don’t really know what trans* people live through because of their lack of privilege.

I did like the woman who ran the workshops. She was nice, funny, knowledgeable, and a good ally. She explained things well and was engaging. Those two things just didn’t sit well with me, and it seemed to me that her being cisgender had a lot to do with it.

I think that if someone wants to educate people like this, that’s fantastic. But they should also ensure that they are fair to all people being represented, and aren’t inadvertently exerting any privilege.