Cis Het Conversation Dominance

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Why do some cis het people feel as if they have the right to dominate conversations about being gay or trans?

They have no lived experience of it.

It feels at best like a dissection rather than a discussion of experiences.

And it inevitably leads to mistakes. Not out of deliberate bigotry but accidental bigotry, akin to stumbling about in the dark.

Heck, I'm trans (binary trans guy) and because I'm probably not going to go the medical route, there's times when I know it's best for me to butt out & let someone who's had bottom surgery (for eg) do the talking. And because I'm AFAB and young, I know that there's some experiences of being a gay man/bi man that are best left to cis, older guys to talk about, for eg the experience with AIDS in the 80s - not really my place to comment, even though I'm bi.

People need to learn to listen to other people's experiences more than they talk over them.

I'm not saying 'butt out'. I'm saying 'let someone else take the lead'. And 'listen to people's lived experiences rather than trying to pathologize it', 'take people at their word about their own lives'.

Reminds me of NTs who want to talk about autistic people without ever talking to any of us.

I think you may be conflating "right" with "expertise".  People have the right to speak on any subject they desire, even while believing they know more than they actually know about that subject.  This is called the "Dunning-Kruger" effect, which is likely the same reason why some people who have never visited any given country seem to believe that they are experts on every aspect of living in that country (i.e., cultural, environmental, political, social, et cetera), and may especially be the main reason why men will "mansplain" on any given topic -- especially when women are around -- when they have no real idea what the eff they are talking about.

In the interest of "full disclosure", I am a cis/het person (I identify as a gynotropic cis-male), and what I have stated in the previous paragraph is only my own subjective opinion, so take it or leave it as you see fit.

People like to share what they think is a much more evolved opinion on a subject, especially if they think their opinion is one that might not easy to achieve, such as one about a minority that they are not a part of. Talking over actual people might be bad, but I do think there is still a place as those who might only listen to a cis het person.

It's a case of secondary data (at best) rather than primary.

Primary in this case being: speaking from one's own life.
Secondary: speaking from observations of other people or reading what other people have said about themselves and discussing that.
Tertiary: speaking about what other people have written about other people. I think that's dangerous to do when it comes to groups who are alive today. Reminds me of the way Victorians and people in past centuries used to discuss foreign tribes.

I agree if it's done while listening to actual lgbt people first. (The secondary approach)

Not the tertiary approach of 'wow there's all these cases of homosexuality, I wonder what causes that' or 'I wonder why so many people are adopting transgender lifestyles now'. That kind of thing will just lead backwards and seems to me to be a rather 1950s, medicalising approach to things.

I think anyone should be able to comment on whatever topic they want to, but it is really frustrating sometimes when a cis/het person goes into a conversation about trans/gay people and starts spouting off certain things, like "I remember when there were two genders," or asking personal questions, or just overall dominating the topic.

I started avoiding this sub-forum when I first came on here because every time someone made a post here, especially a trans related post, it'd just turn into cis/het people giving their opinion on why we even exist and questioning people which derailed the thread.

I also agree about that "tertiary approach". I see a lot of cis/het people talk about trans/gay people and why they think we're like this without never actually asking us anything about our situation. They just treat us like some specimen to study, and while I'm especially interested to know the biological causes of being trans I don't want a cis person telling me some outdated info and arguing with me about it since they think they know better than I do. It's not helpful.

It has come to the point in my life when I am much less concerned with someone else's sexuality, and much more concerned with what we're having for supper.  I mean having someone pass the salt is far more important to me than how they get their yah-yahs.

I am a little interest in general shifts that I think have appeared in discourse. Several years ago I think the general idea was mostly that minorities and the like should not have to educate people on their existence, that it is not their job. I think that has changed a bit as it had been recognised that this could lead people uneducated on subjects getting their information from people with misplaced ideas. People outside of a group deciding that they were the expert on subjects.

So it has in some ways become more of a recent change that I think queer people are actually trying to explain their experiences more, and I think that is or will help people recognise their own experiences.

QFT

I usually like it when cis het people are willing to engage in topics about being gay or trans. It makes me think, hey, they might want to actually learn something, gain some understanding, neat. That is unless/until they start ignoring any gay or trans people in the conversation and start talking all over them in some weird display of what? A need to be heard? I dunno. It's like, do they want to learn something, get some understanding, or just show how much they think they know about a topic they don't really know anything real about? Makes no sense to me at all. Sadly, it can be reality though.

I remember when I was sixteen / seventeen and sometimes in class we'd have discussions on LGBT issues. However, it was always assumed that everyone in the room was Cis Het. Our class was composed of mostly boys and two girls. During one of our class discussions, our English teacher asked how we would feel if our girlfriend or boyfriend acted in the way that one person did in a poem we were analysing. A couple of the boys felt outraged about the inclusion of boyfriend in that question. They felt insulted and went into a rant of 'How dare you? I'm straight!'

Our teacher then pointed out that the boyfriend part was aimed at the two girls (including me) in the class. That she wasn't implying that anyone in the class wasn't straight. I know she had good intentions, but I do wish she'd told them to grow up and addressed the fact that being gay is not shameful. A part of me did wonder whether I should bring up the fact that I was in the class and that I'm not straight. I was also tempted to tell them to grow up. However, I kept my mouth shut.

^Probably a wise decision, under the conditions you were under at the time.

Yes, I agree with you. I think part of the reason is ego or perceived self-importance.

I am told that I tend to dominate conversations, but I am cis-bi. I don't know that LGBTQ+ conversations are something that I dominate in particular, but in general, I'd say my default is to talk too much and too loudly.

Basically it's a case of:
1 dominate conversations to do with sexism and bisexuality. Your lane. Don't let guys esp cis guys* get away with mansplaining what it's like to be a woman. Esp if it veers into misogyny. Don't let people say s**t like 'you're just going through a phase' or 'women just pretend to be bi cos it's hot'. (I'm bi too so I've heard a lot of this bs although when I'm stealth it stops being 'women are bi for male attention' and starts being 'you never dated a woman in your life'... funny how all roads lead to men )
2 listen when it comes to trans issues.

There's a discussion on the WP general autism forum atm about black people's experiences of autism. It's right for me to listen to people's experiences. Not to talk over them as a white person. It's also right for me to butt in if other white people are being racist - probably in that case I'd report it.

It's certainly not my place as a white person to have some weird overly navel-gazing, othering conversation about blackness which the black people reading it can't actually relate to. I need to remember that people reading it might be black. This is what I feel comes up when certain cis het people talk about 'homosexuality' and 'transsexuality', they assume the reader is cis het and probably male and doesn't even know trans people but is purely engaging in a similar kind of intellectual exercise...

*Cos trans guys have some shared biological experiences so it's not right to say for eg 'if you're a man you don't have first hand experience on menstrual issues'