In ordinary usage, no, certainly not. If you identify as male, you can just refer to yourself as male, without volunteering any information on the state of your genitalia at the time of your birth.
But, if you’re in some situation where information on the state of your genitalia at the time of your birth is relevant, then it is useful to have the term “cisgendered” to convey that you’re a male of the not-transgendered type.
On the other hand, we have articles like Einstein’s brain was normal size, but parts were abnormally large.
To cause more confusion, I’ll call myself agendered. Gender only exists as a distinct concept because there are people where gender doesn’t quite match sex. If all people were cisgendered, we wouldn’t need the word gender at all; sex would be sufficient. I doubt I’m alone among the cisgender in finding it hard to think about transgender issues because gender and sex are simply identical things as far as we’re concerned. Having a separate gender is like having four arms or sonar. I just don’t have it at all.
Do you spend a lot of time talking about transgender rights? Then no, the term probably isn’t very useful to you. Do you spend a lot of time welding? Then no, an arc welder probably isn’t very useful to you. If you don’t need a tool, then the tool isn’t useful to you. But you should understand that just because something isn’t useful to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
You missed the point of that one by a mile, didn’t you? Let me try again. Around the beginning of the 20th century, very few people in the US, statistically speaking, were non-white. Does that mean that the term “white person” should not have been coined? Should white people just have been called “people,” and only non-whites get an adjective?
“Cisgender privilege” is certainly a thing people talk about. But that doesn’t mean that the term “cisgender” itself is about privilege. People talk about “white privilege” all the time, that doesn’t mean that the term “white” is automatically associated with concepts of privilege.
Okay. Sure. How is any of this remotely relevant to the current conversation? Facebook added a whole bunch of (often redundant) categorizations of gender. So what? Why is this something that anybody should care about?
Is that not how it works in most restaurants?
Maybe I’ve been in San Francisco too long.
What about this as an analogy:
Someone asks “What nationality are you?” and you say “I’m ______-American”
What do you put in the blank? A lot of people identify themselves as African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, and they also identify as American. If I just say American, how do people know if I’m Italian-American or African-American or none of those? We must have a new term, like Cis-American, in order to clear up confusion during the rare occasions when nationality becomes important and we must have a term that describes accurately your current nationality. And if someone says “Hey! I don’t want to be called Cis-American, I’m just American” you just use the soon-to-be-patented Miller’s Equation of Taking Offense and just tell them to “get over it or else you are a bigot, or nationphobic”, or some other type crap.
Did you also describe how you are presumably not handicapped, blind, deaf, dumb, abnormally tall or short, or autistic? If not, why not? Now I know you ae gonna give me some spiel about how the above you mentioned are relevant in the context given those attributes give you are curated perspective of the world based on privilege, however I would say being in the 99.7% of anything doesn’t really confer privilege in any meaningful sense since nearly everyone has the same “benefit”. That’s not to say there aren’t downsides and prejudices faced by trans people, but rather that it’s such a small group of people that it makes no sense to self-flagellate about how lucky you are to be cisgendered when they same logic applied to nearly every condition or attribute that gives people a tough time in life. It’s just that transgender stuff is the new hot topic so you thought to mention that rather than sighted or having non-irritated bowels.
You say I am not transgendered :dubious:. Besides, why would you have to do that given almost everyone assumes that is the case? Why would you have to clarify you are not in the .3% of people? And yes, there may be a situation where such a distinction is meaningful and necessary, but those are so few and far between that it’s not really worth talking much about.
I certainly agree that people shouldn’t be gratuitously referencing your birth gender assignment where it’s not relevant or none of their business.
Just like people shouldn’t be gratuitously referencing your sexual orientation, or your gender itself, or your race, or your body type, or your height, or your hair color, where it’s not relevant and/or none of their business.
The general rule is that you don’t highlight or specify any of somebody’s personal characteristics unless they are directly relevant to the subject under discussion. A lot of people routinely violate that rule, and it is indeed rude.
(For instance, many journalists used to annoyingly and gratuitously specify female but not male gender for the people they wrote about: e.g., the head of a firm would be referred to as a “CEO” if he was male but as a “woman CEO” if she was female.)
So no, nobody should be referencing your cisgender identity unless they’re actually talking about issues of gender identity and birth-assigned gender. But I don’t think anybody here is arguing otherwise.
Who here has called you transphobic? Indeed, has anyone in this thread been called transphobic simply for objecting to the term cisgendered?
It means, “Prejudiced against or bigoted toward trans people.” I thought that would be fairly self-evident.
Has anyone ever told you you really suck at analogies? Call me PopTart all you want. I’ll even let you in on a little secret: Miller isn’t my real name, either.
:eek:
You suck at knowing what an analogy is, PopTart. 
You don’t have to. Most of the time people identify their gender and don’t specify whether they are a transgender person or not. Most listeners will assume they aren’t transgender people, because the math backs them up, and most people don’t really think about gender identity at all outside of internet discussions anyway. But now you have a word to specify that you aren’t a transgender person, if you ever need to.
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Did you also describe how you are presumably not handicapped, blind, deaf, dumb, abnormally tall or short, or autistic?
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able-bodied and neurotypical. Don’t have anything for super tall or short. Yeah, they are probably just as relevant to a generic “diversity” panel, though they are further down the rabbit hole.
Yes, actually. Sometimes you have to call yourself “manson.” Sometimes you have to call yourself “the dude who always takes the last doughnut.” Sometimes you have to call yourself “the guy married to the woman who has the really loud laugh.” And sometimes you have to call yourself “cisgender.”
Under many circumstances, identifying yourself as male is sufficient. But if there’s a discussion of transgender issues, it’s not enough to identify yourself as male: identifying yourself as a cisgender male can clarify your take on the issues.
I can’t see why this is a big deal.
Which is perfectly fine. “I’m American” is a perfectly reasonable and accurate response to the question “What nationality are you?”
If what the questioner actually wants to know is “What’s your ethnic heritage?”, then that’s the question they should ask. And then you can say “My family’s Irish”, or “Half Japanese and half French”, or “No clue, I’m adopted”, or “I don’t feel that’s any of your business”, just as you prefer.
Similarly, if somebody asks you what gender you are (um, because they’re a robo-app filling out a form and they can’t tell that you’re male? idk), then you can just say “Male”. If what they want to know is whether you’re a cisgender or a transgender male, then that’s what they should ask, and they better have a pretty good reason why they think that question is relevant.
All of this minimal-information-and-MYOB stuff is just as valid for transgender folks as for cisgender ones, by the way, if not more so. A transman or transwoman who’s asked to state their gender is entitled just to say “Male” or “Female”, respectively, without adding on a footnote about their personal history.
People who want to describe their personal information to complete strangers at the drop of a hat are at liberty to do so, of course. But making assumptions or references concerning other people’s personal information when it’s not germane to the subject at hand is still not polite behavior, no matter how “modern” or “enlightened” you are.
Wow, did not know that offense to this was a thing. Cisgender makes total sense to me - we needed a word that was the opposite of Transgendered. “Male” doesn’t work, because that’s the opposite of “Female.” “Normal” doesn’t work, because that’s the opposite of “abnormal,” a word with problematic baggage and connotations, and I can understand why anyone would oppose falling under it.
As for why we need a word when people who are transgendered make up 0.3% of the population, well, this seems obvious to me as well - because we as a society have decided to place a magnifying glass over that 0.3%. We debate their bathroom usage, their healthcare, the age at which it is appropriate for them to declare their status, and their right to safety. Our society has ensured that they are a very debate-worthy 0.3%. So, in discussion, both ‘sides’ ,for lack of a better term, need to have clear identifiers to avoid confusion.
Non-trans people, if not cisgendered, what would you like to be called?
If they want to know if I am a transgender male or not, why can’t they just ask “Are you a transgender male?”
I totally agree with this. But if they say “Male”, I’m not going to insist they say “Transmale” even after they say that offends them, even if I DID use PopTart’s Equation of Taking Offense.
This is just a hot mess of a post. I mean, just for starters, “Irish-American” and similar hyphenated terms don’t refer to nationality, they refer to ethnicity. There is no such country as Irish America. And we often do need terms like “Irish-American” or “Italian-American” to clear up confusion in discussions about ethnicity. Consider these two sentences:
“In the 1960s, the treatment of Americans by the American mainstream reached a boiling point, and many American communities across the country erupted into protest. The response from Americans ranged from sympathetic to open hostility to the American protestors. Many Americans played prominent roles in helping the American civil rights movement.”
versus
“In the 1960s, the treatment of African-Americans by the white American mainstream reached a boiling point, and many African-American communities across the country erupted into protest. The response from white Americans ranged from sympathetic to open hostility to the African-American protestors. Many Jewish-Americans played prominent roles in helping the African-American civil rights movement.”
See how modifying the word “American” greatly increases the clarity of the passage? Can you grasp how “cisgender” would be a similarly helpful term when specifically discussing issues around gender and transgenderism?
Who is insisting that you identify yourself as cisgender?
Sometimes he has to call himself a space cowboy. Sometimes he has to call himself the gangster of love. And sometimes he has to call himself Maurice.
Because he speaks of the pompitous of love.
Should there be a word for not schizophrenic, not body dysmorphic, not autistic, or not hemophilic? Further, I never said there was never a use for such a word, but rather that it is PC jargon that is annoying to people because it’s presumptuous not very useful IMO.
And TPTB want to deny cisgendered people the exclusive use of male and female as gender descriptors for better or worse.
Because there generally doesn’t need to be. And yes, many people do use it disrespectfully. I don’t think they make up the majority by an means, but it does happen.
No, they are not. It’s MUCH higher and more prominent.
If the term “neurotypical” caught on, I would think it was just as stupid and useless.
But it’s not just rare occasions. That is the issue. If these terms were relegated to academic papers and trans fora, I don’t think anyone would care.
And you should get that the same applies to you.
This is both false, and wrong given “White” didn’t really mean the same thing. Even if you use a modern defintion, it’s also false relative to the .3% we are talking about.
Aside from the irony that such a thing basically happened, the analogy is really flawed as I already explained.
I disagree.
Because your side keeps arguing that this language is used in limited areas where specificity is needed and it’s not foisted on people who have no interest in or understanding of the issue. My example shows that is not the case.
No, it’s not at all.
They certainly could. Just like if they wanted to know your sexual orientation, they could just ask “Are you a homosexual male?”
But a general characteristic of our language is, as I said earlier, that we tend to coin parallel descriptors for parallel categories. We don’t say “homosexual and non-homosexual”, we say “homosexual and heterosexual”. We don’t say “blonde and non-blonde”, we say “blonde and brunette”. Etc.
And now that the public consciousness has realized that the trans/cis distinction is a thing about people and their gender identity, we’re not saying “transgender and non-transgender”, we’re saying “transgender and cisgender”.
Well sure, as long as it’s a situation where their birth-gender assignment isn’t relevant. But in a situation where it is relevant—if, say, they’re talking to their urologist about a prostate checkup—then it is relevant and appropriate for them to identify themselves as “transmale”.
Anybody in such a situation who refused to specify the relevant and appropriate information about what type of male they were would be kind of an obstructionist jerk, ISTM.
Heterosexual
Homosexual
Transsexual
ERGO
Heterogender(ed)
Homogender(ed)
Transgender(ed)
But why didn’t you mention them in your speech? And I highly doubt trans people, of whom there are an estimated 700k in the US outnumber the number of people with a disability (36 million), or those which neurological issues. Why weren’t they worth mentioning?