More Cisfail Poetry

How dare I call you ignorant?

I call you ignorant

because you’re ignorant
five minutes of research
could tell you what you don’t know
but you won’t do it

because you’re white
because you’re straight
because you’re cis

privilege

is what it is

and you can’t stand it
to have your image countermanded
and that’s why you make up
all the stories that you’ve handed

down about you bringing civilisation
to hide the fact you’re living in the parasite nations
tic-fat on the blood you sucked from slave-plantations
on the money you extorted from the rebel Hatitians

all to hide the fact
that you brought hate where there was hope
and when you couldn’t deal in cotton
you got rich from dealing dope

and now you sit and boast about
the beer you’ll have tonight
smug and safe inside the knowledge
that you won’t have to fight

to get from where you’re living
to the place you want to go,
such a cosseted Caucasian
such a healthy young hetero

who could learn what you don’t know
in just five minutes of research
that I know you’ll never do

because a girl like me
should never call a guy like you
out on his ignorance

because I know it makes you feel so bad,
and, oh, my dear young white boy,
we can’t be having that


So, yeah, I had a go at some tosser at work for being transphobic today. Said tosser had also been racist earlier in the week. Said tosser was, of course, white, and straight, and cis, and missing no opportunity to tell every single fucker in the office about the child he'd recently fathered on the woman unfortunate enough to be his wife. Because, you know, you learn so much more about being a man once you've given life...though apparently you don't learn how your dumb cis mouth can easily deny other people the right to their own life, it would seem.

I finished my tirade at this tosser by telling it (I deliberately misgender and dehumanise transphobic cis people as a matter of policy, on the grounds that they're the only people on the planet who need to find out how that feels) that it should read something before arguing the point with me and, my dear, you should have seen the look on its face. Nothing annoys a cis white male more than the suggestion it might not know anything purely by virtue of being pale-skinned, heterosexual, and happy with the genitalia it was born with.

I suppose it's possible it's reading this - if indeed it can read. And if so, hey, stick around, fella. Read. Learn. Appreciate that your skin colour and your sexuality and your genitalia aren't the gateway to ultimate understanding. Understand in fact that being a white, straight, cis male actually makes you, in the eyes of  most of the rest of us on this planet, one of the dumbest motherfuckers on Earth. It's okay. Conscious incompetence is the first stage of true learning.

It's possible it could be reading this. I kind of doubt it. Why should it bother to learn? It hasn't had to yet.

Which, of course, is what will make it all the more sweeter when it pisses its last in an old folks' home, still angry at the pangendered, multicultural, polysexual planet that's replaced the world that it grew up in. Change is coming, motherfucker; what you reap is what you sow; and when the trans man that used to be your daughter pulls the plug on your sorry comatose arse, you can't say that you weren't warned.