Polerius, meet neurotypical. Neurotypical, meet Polerius.
Actually, schizophrenics (and neuroatypical folks in general) mind a great fucking deal. Were you not aware of the huge stigma faced by people with any and all mental health issues ?
Is neurotypical indeed the term that means specifically someone who doesn’t have schizophrenia?
If I’m not mistaken, neurotypical also refers to someone who isn’t on the autism spectrum, and maybe can also refer to someone without other mental illnesses.
So, while cisgender is the opposite of transgender, neurotypical is not the opposite of schizophrenic.
ETA: To clarify, if someone is autistic but not schizophrenic, you can’t call them neurotypical. So, neurotypical is not the word that means “not schizophrenic”
It’s not notional. It’s biology.
All of those are incorrect. Neurotypical doesn’t mean not having BIID. Healthy doesn’t mean not having progeria. By your logic, healthy and neurotypical could easily describe someone who is transgender.
Gender, not gender identity.
Wrong. It’s less than half that number. The number cited is usually 700k which is about .3%.
So are you arguing the numbers matter or not? And that is pretty rare. More than 3 times as many people have Schizophrenia.
Has anyone argued against accommodations? Besides, please tell me where you have to identify as sighted?
What gender is an intersex person who feels they should have been born intersex?
Sorry, I meant none of those things or their counterparts are rare.
Ten percent of the population is left handed. That is not rare. Do you even bother to look these things up?
You completely missed the point. Trans people also use male and female right? However, we now are supposed to also identify how we relate to those terms by adding things like cisgender and transgender. We wouldn’t do that with age even thought there are diseases that affect how one would relate to that number.
Your point being?
Again, neurotypical doesn’t mean, “someone without schizophrenia” specifically. It just means someone with “does not have atypical neurology”. That is part of the point being made. First, that we have no issue referring to people with atypical neurology as “atypical”. Second, that schizophrenics haven’t carved out a specific term only used to describe people without schizophrenia rather than just a broad term that basically means healthy.
Exactly.
Let’s remedy that: Let’s call people who are not schizophrenic ‘uniphrenic’.
Yes, the word was coined by the autistic community but was enthusiastically adopted by others. It basically means “one who does not have any mental illness” (and the autistic community then coined a new word, specifically to mean “people who are anything but autistic” : allistic. Seems a bit too in-group/out-group of them to me, but whatevs.)
You share this confusion with **brickbacon **: it’s not supposed to be an opposite. It’s a nomenclature for one identified group. It just looks like an opposite because people have traditionally only thought of gender as strictly binary. But cisgendered does not strictly mean “who is not transgendered”, it also means “who is not androgynous”, “who is not genderqueer”, etc…
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
All of those are incorrect. Neurotypical doesn’t mean not having BIID. Healthy doesn’t mean not having progeria. By your logic, healthy and neurotypical could easily describe someone who is transgender.
[/QUOTE]
(bolding mine) Err… yes ? Why is that an issue ? Anyway, see above.
Gender and gender identity are one and the same. They both refer to social constructs and self-perception. If you want to talk biology and plumbing, the word is “sex”.
Estimates vary (in part because there’s confusion on what “transsexual” means - some polls and estimates are based solely on reasignment surgery for example). Still, even using your estimate, 700,000 people is not exactly a tiny irrelevant number.
About as often as you have to identify as cisgendered, I expect.
Bigender or trigender, depending on their idiosyncrasies. Polygender and genderless could work too. Plenty of options.
I said “pretty rare”. I guess I could have said “uncommon”. The point stands. And what’s the cut-off point for “rare”, anyway ? 1:100 ? 1:200 ? 1:1000 ?
Again, as soon as this becomes an issue, I’ll be sure to reassess my held notions about age. In the meantime, you have *actual *transpeople who face *actual *harm and stigma on a daily basis.
This “discussion” is going further down the rabbit hole.
May the GLBT (and whatever other letters join the soup) alienate as many as they wish.
But don’t be surprised when there is pushback.
You just called them (well, us, since I’m one, too) “cisgendered” in that last sentence. Did you commit an offense by doing so? I don’t think you did, nor that you “owe” anyone anything, because the several people who are claiming offense are doing so on a basis I don’t find to be reasonable. If I lacked the willingness to make that distinction, then I’d find myself limited by anyone who claims offense over anything. There are people who I offend just by existing, and these are not random psychos or internet-jerks but the latest generation of centuries of antisemitic bigotry - do I owe them something?
You seem pre-alienated and already pushy, frankly.
It depends on the reason they’re offended, doesn’t it? If they’re offended at the existence of any term, then we don’t owe them anything. If they’re offended that the terms attempt to put both groups on the same ‘level’ rather than identifying one group as ‘damaged’ versions of humanity, then we don’t owe them anything. If they’re offended because the term sounds like another offensive term, or has been used historically to belittle their group, then perhaps a change is in order.
The only alternate proposed so far that doesn’t go out of its way to insult others is ‘non-transgendered’. At best it’s clumsy sounding, at worst it’s less precise than cisgendered. Is there any vaguely objective reasoning to support the idea that non-transgendered is less offensive then cisgendered?
No, he posted several links to websites that he claimed demonstrated cis is pejorative. His citations did not withstand scrutiny. But what you seem to be forgetting or simply overlooking is that pretty much everyone in this thread is cisgendered and we do not feel oppressed by the word. So simply declaiming that some people somewhere aren’t happy about it doesn’t really mean anything given that this group right here with just as much say in whether it’s pejorative or not feel it’s perfectly acceptable.
That being said, if one day you linked to an OED citation for cisgender and it was marked ‘derog.’, then yes, I’d agree it should be avoided.
What an ugly sentiment, and what a time-honored response to folks striving for some basic decency.
There are two primary differences between what you’re saying and the semicryptic warnings that folks gave to civil rights activists in the 1960s:
- The word “cisgender” is only slightly related to a civil rights movement–it’s really just an accuracy-in-discussion issue. Your whole “pushback” thing is even less understandable than it was when it came from racists in Mississippi in 1960.
- There’s no power behind the ominous warning about “pushback” that you’re giving, given the unstoppable movement in our country toward equality for LGBT folks and the complete lack of alienation most folks are feeling from LGBT folks.
Reported in today’s San Francisco Chronicle that protest signs at last Friday’s demonstration in Oakland included “Die Techie Scum.” So there’s another word that can no longer be used according to the DrDeth Theory of Offensensitivity™.
From what I can tell, the vast majority of cisgender (or non-transgender, if you prefer) people in this thread, including me, are not offended in any way by the term “cisgender”. For the folks who are offended, I don’t plan on calling you personally “cisgender” – if I forget and mess up, please correct me. But in any discussions of transgender issues, I will continue to use “cisgender” as the technical term to refer, in general and non-specifically, to people whose gender identity matches with their biological sex.
So why isn’t that acceptable as an alternative to cisgender, and why is it okay to imply those people are atypical when it isn’t for trans people?
It’s not confusion. That is specifically what was asked for. Cisgender has no meaning or context outside of the idea that transgenderism is both real and worthy of specific distinction. The fact that there is not a specific opposite for any of those things is telling. That’s not even mentioning the fact that the other opposites you mentioned were not specific terms created to accommodate the atypical (eg. sighted).
No, it means someone who feels their gender matches their sex, a distinction that only differentiates transpeople from non-transpeople. That dichotomy is only relevant in that context, and is thus a direct and specific opposite.
Because then we wouldn’t really need a term like cisgender if neurotypical or healthy were not considered “offensive” to trans people.
Yes, it is.
No, by definition they would be cisgender.
Ten percent is not “pretty rare” or “uncommon”.
More than a fraction of a percent of people that suffer from an unusual condition. Again, there are more than 3 times as many people with schizophrenia. Should we use a specific term to highlight their plight.
LOL. Do you really think the harm transpeople face is at all based on the fact that a term like cisgender exists or doesn’t? It’s largely because they are actually atypical, not because they are or aren’t described that way.
The impression I got was that the harm transpeople routinely get makes the alleged “harm” to people annoyed to be called “cis” look trivial and imaginary.
Because it is trivial and imaginary.
Criminy. I still really don’t get the ofense.
Within the context of discussing people who do or do not suffer from schizophrenia, the term “neurotypical” is entirely reasonable and not in any sense insulting.
Within the context of discussing people who are or are not blind, the term “sighted” is entirely reasonable and not in any sense insulting.
Within the context of discussing whether or not someone is transgender, the term “cisgender” is entirely reasonable and not in any sense insulting.
Those of us who use those terms in their appropriate contexts find them extraordinarily useful. And we are not insulting you by, within that context, labeling you as neurotypical, sighted, or cisgendered.
For those who do feel insulted–Brickbacon, polerius, others ITT–I’m sorry. It must feel awful. I still don’t understand why you feel that way, but I get that it hurts. As iiandyiii adroitly said, I will do my best to avoid using any of those terms in personal conversation with you.
.
Oh. So, your argument is that we should selectively avoid the term “cisgender” out of deference to the sensibilities of people who think that transgender is not real and/or not deserving of recognition as a specific gender identity?
In other words, because some cisgender people believe that transgender is a delusion or manifestation of mental illness, or else a mere idiosyncratic personality quirk that doesn’t qualify for inclusion in fundamental and universal human gender-identity distinctions, we should change the modern usage of standard technical terms to accommodate their prejudices?
:dubious: How about no.
Similarly, “heterosexual” has no meaning or context outside of the idea that homosexuality is both real and worthy of specific distinction. And there are plenty of people (and there used to be many more) who don’t believe that homosexuality is real and/or worthy of specific distinction. But we’re not changing the standard usage of “heterosexual” just to placate people who don’t believe in the genuineness of homosexuality.
Now that I understand what kind of people are the ones allegedly being “alienated” over this, I have much less sympathy or concern for their “alienation”.
There are two problems with using words like “normal” or “healthy” or “neurotypical” so describe people-who-aren’t-transgendered. One of them is what you’re getting at, which is that they’re offensive.
More tellingly, however, they’re also just not very useful. For instance, what if one wanted to use “transgendered” and “neurotypical” in a sentence such as “as a neurotypical mother of a transgendered child”? Well, you could. But then what if you were talking about autism and the transgendered community, and also wanted to use neurotypical to mean not-autistic?
So with “cisgender” you have a word that is fairly short, has no history of offensiveness, is in fact NOT found offensive by the preponderance of cisgender people in this thread, and unambiguously states precisely what it does and does not mean. Or you could use alternatives that are either vague, or offensive, or bulky-and-awkward-to-use.
So what precisely is your objection?
Or do you subscribe to the paranoia that in a few year’s time you’ll have to write “M(cis)” instead of “M” when asked for your sex on random pieces of paperwork, and angry liberals will berate you whenever you use the word “man” to describe yourself?
Wow, 8 pages over a word? Forgive me that I didn’t read past the first.
It’s a word. It conveys meaning, and the meaning is reasonably specific. I don’t understand the etymology other that what I read in Wikipedia, but if that’s accurate, it makes sense.
I’d tend to use “straight,” but that may have meanings that are less specific. I wouldn’t use “normal” because that’s WAY too general.
I’m astonished there’s much to debate here.
Straight refers to sexual orientation, not gender identity. Someone can be both straight and trans, just as someone can be both straight and cis.