And unless you are in a discussion around these issues, maybe that is for the best? The trans-women I know pretty much wanted to be female, not a special category.
They announced that someone was now identifying as male at work and would use the men’s restroom, and that was it. He didn’t need a sign saying transmale. He got accepted for what he wanted to be.
Perhaps the resentment you are seeing comes from what is perceived as an effort to move a term that is useful in a specialized context into a wider context, and to almost enforce the use of it among those who don’t have contact with that community.
It really does, though. Think of the brain in Young Frankenstein, for instance: We’re clearly not meant to think that it’s abnormally intelligent. And that’s quite unfortunate, because we need a word there (and a corresponding one for “normal”) that has that meaning but without the connotations and value judgements.
I have a great many traits. In some of my traits, I am normal, and in others, I am abnormal, while yet other traits have no single variant that’s common enough to be called “normal”. Some of my abnormal traits are ones I’m happy to have, and others are traits I would rather not have, and the same for my normal traits. Likewise, there are a number of traits I possess that I consider largely irrelevant, and would not much care one way or another were they otherwise.
Like about 95% of humanity, I am heterosexual, and like over 99% of humanity, I am cisgendered. I am, in these regards, normal. Like about 50% of humanity, I am male. This can be called neither normal nor abnormal. Like about 35% of humanity, I retained lactose tolerance into adulthood. In this regard, I am slightly abnormal. Like about 0.3% of humanity, my body cannot properly regulate intake of dietary iron. In this regard, I am definitely abnormal. One can coin terms for all of these conditions (and there’s another term loaded with connotations it doesn’t deserve, “conditions”), but it’s also useful to have a blanket term that can be applied to any of them.
Now you are just fucking with me, right? If I say “transgendered male” that means ‘transgendered’ If I say “Male” that means NOT transgendered.
saying “I’m male” says that I’m not transgendered, if i WAS transgendered, I would say “transgendered male” assuming I wanted anyone to know that information.
Here’s an example. A couple of months ago I was giving a talk at a conference about game design and during the Q&A period someone raised a point that touched on diversity issues. (Which are a big deal in the industry as the result of GamerGate.) When answering it I said something like "Well, speaking as a straight, white, cis guy, that’s not anything I’ve had to deal with personally, but in my opinion yadda, yadda … "
It wouldn’t normally self-identify that way, but during a conversation that was explicitly about how having alternate perspectives on a team can affect design choices, it seemed like a useful disclaimer to admit up front that my own perspective is somewhat sheltered/privileged and shouldn’t be taken as gospel.
It doesn’t automatically bring a value judgement, but it certainly can. I’m not a huge fan of dictionary cites in these sorts of discussions, but a lot (not all) of them include as part of the definition something along the lines of “…typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.” If you’re talking to someone who’s gay or transgendered, I can pretty much guarantee you that they’ve been called abnormal by someone who very clearly meant it as an insult. If you want to avoid any ambiguity about where you stand on LGBT rights, it’s probably best to avoid using that particular word, unless you’re very clearly speaking in statistical terms. Otherwise you stand a good chance of being misconstrued.
Anyone doing that is very much an asshole. But, also, very much in the minority among trans people and their allies.
What if you’re male and you want to tell someone that you’re not transgendered, how would you go about it? Would you just keep saying “I’m male!” louder and louder?
Here you’ve strayed beyond your opinion and are stating things that are just wrong - they are not how the words are used. A person can be male or female, and can be cis- or trans-. There are four combinations. Just saying you’re “male” often doesn’t convey enough info for a context where you’re talking about gender issues.
I would avoid using it in personal conversations with that one guy, sure. I would not avoid using the word altogether, or stop using it around black people in general.
Not unless you pay me royalties. That shit ain’t free.
Right. I feel more or less the same about people who are transphobic. If a transphobic guy says he’s insulted by being called “cisgendered,” well, fuck that guy. I don’t care how he feels.
Which is not to say that everyone who objects to the term is automatically transphobic. But when someone makes a big stink over something as innocuous as “cisgendered,” one thing I’m going to be keeping in mind is that the person may not be coming from a place of total honesty in his objections.
So the confusion comes from a transgendered male identifying as “Male” or “Transgendered Male”. You are saying either are acceptable, which is fine as far as I care, people can say and do whatever they want.
However, in order to clear up this confusion, now I have to start calling myself something different than just the standard “Male”?
How you figure? As a cisgender person myself, I think it does serve a great function: namely, the very useful function of succinctly identifying the condition or state of “not being transgender” when we’re talking about issues of gender identity.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
It’s not too different from when republicans started using “democrat” instead of “democratic”
[/quote]
Wait, what? Nonsense: of course it’s entirely different. Some Republicans disingenuously use “Democrat” as an adjective instead of the standard form “Democratic”, because they want to deny to Democrats any connotation of being “democratic”.
But nobody says “cisgender” as a sneakily disrespectful alternative to a more standard term for non-transgender people. There isn’t any standard term for “non-transgender”: that’s why the word “cisgender” was coined in the first place.
Well, when someone’s talking about “walking people” specifically in the context of their being able to walk rather than use wheelchairs, why shouldn’t they refer to them as “ambulatory”? It’s a much more sensible and unambiguous term than the clumsy expression “walking people”, which could be erroneously interpreted to refer to the subset of ambulatory people who happen to be engaged in walking right now.
Again, if we’re talking specifically about issues involving body dysmorphic disorder, it does make sense to have a term that designates “not-having-body-dysmorphic-disorder”. Sure, we could just use “not-having-body-dysmorphic-disorder”, but it’s rather long and clumsy, and if some crisper term like “body eumorphic” caught on instead, I don’t see why we should object to it.
This kind of back-formation of majority-designating technical terms to parallel minority-designating technical terms happens all the time, and I don’t understand why you object to it.
Do you object to being called “heterosexual” when the subject of sexual orientation comes up, just because non-heterosexuals are a fairly small minority?
Should people discussing developmental disorders stop using the word “neurotypical” to refer to people who don’t have autism (or other developmental disorders), just because non-neurotypical people are also a minority?
It’s helpful to the majority of people on the rare occasions when they need precise designations to distinguish between various kinds of gender identity. The majority of people can simply go on paying no attention to such terms most of the time, and just look them up on the rare occasions when they encounter or require them.
As a paid-up member of Team Neology, I have absolutely no problem with people coining new words whenever they want. If some of them turn out to be useless or too unwieldy, no worries, linguistic natural selection will take care of it and the terms in question will naturally disappear from popular use. I happen to think that’s groovy.
I’m not sure having a discussion on a message board is considered a “big stink” I simply object to someone telling me “From now on, we are going to call you cisgendered, regardless of how you feel about it. And by the way, unless you are 100% on board with this proclamation, you are transphobic”
Whatever transphobic means.
Instead of Miller, from now on I’m going to call you PopTart. It’s not a historical slur, hasn’t been used for hatred in the past. Therefore, you have no reason to be offended by it, and must accept everyone calling you PopTart from now on, or you are breakfastpastryphobic.