I think “nonlawyer” is a perfectly good word, derived from one correctly used for a tiny percentage of the population.
I think what you’re missing is that I don’t want to own the whole label “woman” if my sisters only get it if they modify it. That makes me more woman than they are.
We are all women, yes.
They are transgender women, when the need arises. You get that part.
What am I, when the need arises? I am a cisgender woman.
I do acknowledge it’s kind of an ugly, hissy, clinical sounding word that uses a prefix not often seen outside of chemistry. I’m not married to the word. I’m open to changing it, if someone proposes something else that isn’t insulting and is more intuitively understandable. So far, I haven’t seen it.
Do you think that “non-transgender” is insulting? It strikes me as both intuitive and understandable – much like if someone asked whether I happen to be a combatant, which would prompt my intuitive and understandable and not-at-all-insulting response of, no, I’m a noncombatant. Sure, it’s defined in terms of not being a combatant, but isn’t that pretty much the whole point?
No, just too vague.
- Unlike combatant status, part of the point here is to not define either cis or trans in terms of the other.
- Non-transgender includes, but is not congruent to, cisgender.
It’s the best of the alternatives proposed, but it essentially just reverses the problem. It then sets up transgender as the default, and defines me by what I’m not (as has been said over and over in this thread.) I’d rather find a term that doesn’t define us in contrast to one another, but by a neutral standard (like ____gender).
I don’t get my panties in a bunch over non-transgender, I just think that if anything, it’s more clunky than cisgender, although I agree it’s more intuitively understandable.
But – hilariously – the latter concern only seems to come into play hypothetically.
Look at Kimstu’s reply to another poster earlier on this very page:
Perfectly legitimate point. Explains why we need a word. Nobody raises an eyebrow. But as soon as I point out that Kimstu just used a word to accomplish exactly that, suddenly a new scenario is proposed where “non-transgender” wouldn’t suffice.
Una Persson, back on page one, mentions using “non-transgender” if there’s not enough time to offer up definitions and explanations – and nobody bats an eye, because why would they? I note how “non-transgender” gets the job done, and – oh, hey, no; that’s fine in Una Persson’s real-world discussions, but we hypothetically need a word that further subdivides.
GLAAD says a more widely understood way to describe people who are not transgender is “non-transgender” – which is true, and which facilitates actual communication. I note that, and all of a sudden we’re mulling a proposed situation where it won’t be enough to observe that someone is non-transgender; it’s still true, but we’re now envisioning a time when we could desire greater specificity.
But in the discussions that actually occur, “transgender” and “non-transgender” in fact get the job done – or someone says “cisgender”, and sensibly counters blank looks with a quick and parenthetical “non-transgender”. (No, really; they do. Google it, that’s like the anticipatory go-to move.)
I know. And, like I’ve said over and over – and if we’re at the point where we’re just repeating ourselves, maybe both sides can drop it – I genuinely don’t have a problem with being defined in terms of what I’m not.
Like I was just saying, I have no problem with “non-combatant” – and like I’d said earlier, my father the atheist has no problem with “atheist” – and some activities are off-limits for nonlawyers, and some of those people are unemployed. It strikes me as a perfectly good way to build descriptions, which is why we use it all the time.
We talk about nonviolence, and the unborn, and being impartial, and using nonlethal force, and whether a plane is radar-invisible – no one raises an eyebrow. We describe some professors as non-tenured, or some practitioners as unlicensed – sure. We say the next meeting isn’t open to non-members, because why wouldn’t we? After all, we so categorize whenever the situation calls for it.
That makes the most sense to me, too.
I think the problem with making “male” and “female” the null hypothesis (meaning that transgender people are something other than “male” or “female”) is the same problem that making (white) people the null hypothesis, such that “people” refers to white people, with qualifiers only added for others (e.g. Tom Hanks is a “person”, while Denzel Washington is a “black person”) – both conventions would add an otherness to those in different categories.
Why? Seriously. There is a default set of attributes that will be correct the vast majority of the time. If I’m talking about a leopard, you a set of attributes comes to mind and will likely be correct. But if I’m talking about a subset of leopards, snow leopards, then me using the term in full would give you the additional information. What’s wrong with that? Which is the way we usually handle language issues like this?
I believe that if things settled down such that the commonly used, acceptable way of describing someone whose gender identity matched their biological sex was “non-transgender”, with “cisgender” either never being used, or being used only in extremely specific academic settings, most of the “pro-cisgender” people in this thread would be fine with that.
If you had started a thread saying “I think ‘non-transgender’ is a better term than ‘cisgender’, I hope it catches on, hear are my reasons…” I don’t know how emotional or committed any disagreement would be.
The passion and anger in this thread is not about the word “non-transgender” at all, it’s about people finding the word “cisgender” offensive or hurtful, accusations that those claims are spurious, analogies to other words that are offensive to other groups, etc, etc.
I don’t think we do with people as much, or at least we shouldn’t, in my view – if a city is 99% white and 1% black (or vice versa), I think we’d consider it highly discourteous to call the 99% “people”, while the 1% become “black people” (or “white people”) – “people” includes, or should include, all of them; similarly, “male” and “female” include (or should include) transgender people and people whose gender identity matches their biological sex.
If I was writing an article about snow leopards and “normal” leopards, I’d want to have some word to differentiate the two. It would be handy. And “normal” doesn’t work, since it doesn’t matter much for leopards but it does suggest negative connotations to the not-normal (hey, even comparing people to animals isn’t great! Yay me!). But I wrote this article and spent the whole thing switching between “snow leopard” and “leopard”, it wouldn’t be particularly clear, purely from a readability viewpoint, which groups I was talking about at any one point. So no, I don’t think it is how we usually handle language issues like that.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make. If one talks about the people of the city, or the women of the city, the statement is including all “people” and all “women”.
Actually, it is. Sorry.
But my point is, using “non-transgender” sidesteps that: you say that there’s passion and anger in this thread, and that some folks find the word ‘cisgender’ to be hurtful, and that other folks figure those claims are spurious, and that there’s a long debate with analogies about other words of arguable offensiveness – and that all vanishes like ice cream in the sun if “transgender and non-transgender” is, uh, the default.
Sure, but we still need a term to explicitly differentiate between the default and non-default sets of attributes, when it’s relevant and appropriate to do so.
[QUOTE=magellan]
If I’m talking about a leopard, you a set of attributes comes to mind and will likely be correct. But if I’m talking about a subset of leopards, snow leopards, then me using the term in full would give you the additional information.
[/quote]
This isn’t actually correct, because snow leopards, Panthera uncia, are actually a separate species from leopards, Panthera pardus, not a subspecies of them. In other words, “snow leopard” refers to an animal that isn’t actually a leopard, just as “ant bear” refers to an animal that isn’t actually a bear.
**You can meaningfully make statements like “A snow leopard is different from a leopard”, or “An ant bear is different from a bear”. But it is not meaningful to say, for instance, “A barn owl is different from an owl”, because a barn owl is a particular kind of owl.
Likewise, it’s not meaningful to say “A transgender woman is different from a woman”, because a transgender woman is a particular kind of woman.
**
So, as I said, there needs to be some specific term meaning “not transgender” (and if you want to argue for “non-transgender” as the simplest possible version of that, I don’t have a problem with it) to distinguish, when relevant and appropriate, between women who are transgender and women who aren’t.
That wouldn’t actually work. Without differentiating all groups when talking about the differences between those groups, when the sole characteristic being used to describe one group is also a characteristic in common with both groups, you’d end up not being able to differentiate one group (the one with the generalised label) from the overarching group.
Instead of leopards, then, let’s use the posters in this thread. We have pro-cisgender posters (defined as those who like the term), neutral-cisgender posters (who don’t care), and anti-cisgender posters (who don’t like it, for whatever reason). If we decided not to differentiate one group - let’s take out the anti-cisgender posters - and simply referred to anything they said as being the opinions of “posters”, we lose our ability to make it clear who we’re talking about. I could say “Posters, in general, don’t like the term”. I’m wrong if I’m talking about all posters; I’m right if I’m talking about anti-cisgender posters. Language requires terms to differentiate, and we can’t use a characteristic for a subgroup that’s is what we also use as for the whole group for discussing subgroups.
Yes, we get your point. Your point is that the debate about using the word “cisgender” could be eliminated altogether if people didn’t use the word “cisgender”. This is undeniably true.
But what this debate is about is whether the word “cisgender”, as it currently exists in increasingly frequent usage, is generally considered offensive or neutral. Eliminating a debate is not the same thing as resolving it. And even if a debate remains unresolved because the two sides can’t reach an agreement, that doesn’t mean that it should necessarily be eliminated.