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Is this Ozy's term? I must confess I still don't understand what it's supposed to mean.
What I mean is that if some magic fairy turned me into a women tomorrow, I would go along with it and not embark on a long quest to get my real body back, just as I would not embark on a long quest to find such a fairy in the first place. My gender is not tied strongly to my identity. By contrast, if a fairy cursed me to say become computer illiterate, I would grudgingly do whatever I had to do to undo that curse.
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It's like... some people experience dysphoria, right? They are in a body that matches their gender, and if they were in a body that didn't match their gender, they'd feel something was wrong. That's what'd make them trans in that situation. We may model that as two facts: they have a body, and they have a body model, and when the body model tries to match to the body and fails, it generates error signals that are experienced as dysphoria. That is, they are cis - body-aligned - if they have a body that matches their model, and trans - body-unaligned - when their body does not.
Cis-by-default people have a body, and they have a body model, but the body model is a model of whatever their body happens to be. If they put themselves into situations where they experience a body with a different sex, ie. mirror experiments, VR, really good imagination, then their body map just updates to the new schema. They're cis - body aligned - not because their body map matches their body, but because their body map tracks their body. If you gave a cbd man a female body, or a cbd woman a male body, they'd go "huh, neat" and move on with their lives - sex-changed but still cis. They might even swap pronouns, purely on the basis of "well, it's female now, innit. Just look at it." Or if not, it'll be on the basis of something like thinking that gender shouldn't be about sex at all.
As an AGP transhumanist, I identify (in the literal sense of "looking at myself, I think I am described") as CBD and I think this hangs together really well with AGP. Because you know you'll be fine regardless of sex, you can start having preferences, even kinks, about sex - but they're just that, not needs.
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As I understand it,
a sexual orientation that amounts to "I'm sex A, and sex not-A is the one that I'm physically built to mate with, so I guess I'm looking for a not-A partner".a "gender identity" that amounts to "I have sex-A parts, and in our society sex-A people are expected to dress/communicate like this and have interests like that, so I guess that's what I'll be doing". The test case are hypotheticals like anime transmigration/body swaps: assuming you are male, if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow (and your preexisting social web were conveniently erased),would you be looking for male or female partners going forward?would you (1) have a strong preference to refer to yourself or be referred to as male, (2) -"- as female, or (3) a weak preference to be referred to as female because anything else would now seem factually wrong? Answer (3) is the "cis-by-default" one.I think I'm in the set of people the label is supposed to describe, and I really understand it as the natural outcome of not having whatever sense generates the "I'm gender not-A" qualium in dysphorics but still being socialised in a society with distinct gender roles.
The way I understood it, it has nothing to do with sexuality. It's more like "if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow, would you feel a sense of existential dread, and would attempt to come back to being male".
Yeah, I corrected myself after making the initial post. Conflating sex and orientation is also something that's easy to do as a -by-default, though.
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