Cool, thanks.
You’ve gone to Thailand to work directly with advocacy and outreach on behalf of the transgender and third gender community there? Or did you go to a show at Nana Plaza or one of the beach clubs at Phuket? Clarify please?
And what’s your beef anyways? We both agree it’s not necessarily offensive with respect to Thailand. What’s your point?
(Shrug) I’ll put my direct personal experience of years in the community throughout the United States, working as an advocate for everyone from homeless transpeople sleeping in alleys to those in Fortune 100 companies, up against your inability to find a dictionary that says exactly what you want it to say. How many transgender women have you directly asked in real life “if I start calling you ‘ladyboy,’ will you be offended?” More than 0?
I do. All the time. You really haven’t read any of my threads on here, I guess. I am working with advocacy and outreach to the trans and non-trans and mixed communities nearly every single day. I run a radio show on these and other human rights topics, and I’m a Director at a counseling institute, so this is also my (side) profession.
There have been a few threads on this subject on the SDMB. Read them and tell me the percentage breakdown. Looks to be along the lines of 1:18 offended:not. You tell me.
It’s pretty easy to see how ladyboy could be offensive in different contexts, both geographic and personal.
The word “boy” isn’t offensive to a 9 year old male. But try calling a 6 foot biker a “boy” when he’s not your friend, or try calling a black adult male a “boy”, see where it gets you.
You know who determines whether a word is offensive? The listener, not the speaker.
My point is that “ladyboy” is not offensive. Unless the simple fact of YOU saying it is offensive makes it offensive. Is that the case? If so, then cisgender is offensive, since I say it is offensive. Which is it?
I have no doubt that you have years of personal experience working in the community. That has nothing to do with my point, which is NOWHERE in any dictionary does the word “ladyboy” carry the “offensive” or “derogatory” descriptor that words such as “tranny” or “fag” have. If it’s offensiveness was as wide-spread as you claim, you’d think that SOME dictionary would label it as such. If not, if words are just offensive because someone SAYS it is, then that leads right back to cisgender being offensive because I say it is.
So what does the ratio have to be in order for a word to be offensive? 1:10? 1:5? what?
If only that were true. You can see right in this thread that people are offended by “hearing” the word cisgender, and the “speakers” tell us it’s NOT offensive.
Eh, I would say there’s etiquette for directly addressing people and for speaking more generally. If someone directly tells you they do not wish to be referred to as cisgender, I’d argue politeness says, don’t do it. There’s no reason to do so.
Likewise, if someone is offended by being called transgender, then don’t use that term in direct reference to them. But I’d say since neither term is broadly or generally considered offensive, it’s okay to use them in a general context.
I mean, I don’t think referring to Americans who have West African slaves as their ancestors as “black” is offensive, but if a black person told me not to call them that, I wouldn’t. I probably wouldn’t stop using the phrase generally, but there’s little reason in an interpersonal conversation to refer to anyone by a term they ask you not to use.
I don’t know.
Left Hand of Dorkness:
In a sense, they have. When Israel was part of the Syrian-Greek Empire (prior to the revolution that is now commemorated by the holiday of Hanukkah), the Greek rulers enforced participation in naked gymnasium athletics, and many Jewish boys went to lengths to hide the “abnormality” of their circumcision, as tampering with the perfection of the natural body was anathema to the Greek culture. Obviously, there are cultural norms, and by definition, ab-norms. Those change from place to place. Inn a multi-cultural society like 2000s America, there’s little place to consider cultural differences as an abnormality, because culturally, the norm is freedom to make those choices.
But “normal” can have different contexts, and why should there be any question that there are certain biological norms that really don’t require a special word to describe them? There are some people born with six fingers, and no one will refer to people with five fingers as “pentadactyls”. On a personal level, my kidneys are failing, and in a few weeks, I’m going to have to start dialysis. It doesn’t bother me to say that my kidney function is not normal, and I don’t feel a need to refer to those with normal, healthy kidneys as “self-dialyzers” or some such.
I read Una Persson’s “Ask the Transsexual” thread with great interest when it was first posted. She very eloquently described the mental anguish suffered by a person who can’t reconcile their mental body image with their actual body, both her own struggle and those to whom she’s provided counseling. Her problems with this didn’t end (or, if they’re not yet truly over, at least were not somewhat ameliorated) until she went through certain therapies that enabled her to present as the woman her brain tells her she is. Clearly, there is a hard, biological normalcy to thinking and presenting as the same gender that does not exist for people who do not.
I have no problem personally with bearing this “cisgender” label if it makes life easier to bear for these poor, tortured souls like Una described herself and other pre-therapeutic transsexuals to be. Really and truly. However, I can also understand that many people get annoyed when asked to newly apply a label that they feel is unnecessary.
No, people are telling you that it’s not a slur just because you say it is. We won’t call you cisgender, since it’s just rude to call someone something they don’t want to be called, but just because you don’t like the word doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop using it for others.
It would be different if I wasn’t cis. But since I’m cis, and since the vast majority of cis people have not indicated any offense, then at this time I don’t believe the word is offensive to more than a miniscule portion of cis people (or sas people, for those that don’t want to be called cis).
For those flipping their lid – how often does the need to lable oneself “cis” come up on a daily basis? It’s not like you always have to say, “oh hey, I’m cis.” It’s pretty much only used in context when talking about gender identity issues (at least in my observation).
(I do find the phrases, “male-bodied person” “female-bodied person” a little pretentious, though.)
Pretty much never, which is fine. The problem is, when it does come up (invariably online), people start throwing the “cis” label around at others, even when those others have said “please, don’t use that term to describe me, I don’t like it.”
I know the SDMB veers so far to the left it’s coming back around to meet itself, but I’ve commented before on the boards about how all this Politically Correct Language only applies to “approved” entities; I think this is another example of that - namely, the people who object to being called “cis” aren’t on the Approved Courtesy Recipients List.
Well, as has been noted, it’s very rude to call someone by a term that they’ve specifically asked not to be called.
But sometimes, I want to be rude to someone. And one thing I’ve noticed around this subject is that the people who object most strongly to being called “cisgender,” are generally people that I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. In my very unscientific sampling, there appears to be a strong correlation between being upset by the term “cisgender” and being an unmitigated asshole.
I think a subtlety of the discussion may be missed, in that the word “cisgender” really in no way impacts my life. IMO it’s a word which is relevant really only in discussions of gender and transgender, and if it suddenly vanished from all our lexicons it wouldn’t impact us. Likewise if there were more than just a scattered few who claimed offense, I would stop using it, as would I reckon most folks.
If six-finger folk faced widespread, systematic discrimination–if my state were passing laws about which bathrooms they could use, for example, and if they were fired from employment, and if they had a high suicide rate–then there would be a lot more conversation about six-finger folks versus five-finger folk (oh shit, do you see how I just spontaneously invented a term that was directly comparable to the term I used for six-finger folk?)
As a Pentadigital-American, I object to this labeling!
Five sounds like jive, and I don’t speak jive.
I sincerely hope you’re not making some underhanded attempt at insulting me here.
“Straight male” is a perfectly cromulent description for what? About 90% of males world-wide?
Really, really doubt something as awkward as ‘cisgender’ is going to become mainstream any time soon – if ever.
Did you know that straight and cisgender are almost entirely orthogonal concepts to one another? It would take only about 30 seconds of genuine investigation to find that out.
This is an example of the phenomenon a few people, Miller most recently, have mentioned: your objection, if you have one, to the term can’t be taken very seriously if you don’t know what the word even refers to. You don’t even know what the purpose of the word is. Of course you find it awkward.
Not interested in the least. I only opened this thread due to mild interest/agreement with the OP.
Don’t give a shit if I’m taken “seriously” or not. Fact is I chose my battles and this isn’t one of them. That said try going out in the real world and calling people “cisgendered” and see how many know what the fuck you’re talking about. And no, I’m far from an Archie Bunker.