Not at all! My insults are all over-hand. What do you think this is, softball?
Did you bring enough ignorance to share with the whole class? Oh, I see you did.
Cricket’s the name of the game in this part of the world, old chap, and it’s Not The Done Thing to deliver underarm anymore.
My point is it’s quite possible to read “Everyone I’ve ever encountered with this opinion is an unmitigated asshole” as “Therefore, you are too, because you also have this opinion”. If that’s not your intent, then that’s fine, trying to communicate via text and it shortcomings etc.
If however, you are saying “You’re an unmitigated asshole for having this opinion” then that’s a different kettle of fish.
It’s somewhat like “eupeptic”. You’re mostly only going to run into it within the context of a conversation about foods or eating behaviors that are dyspeptic.
I have nothing against normative-typical people thinking of themselves as “normal” with regards to sexual/gender identity, but “cisgender” is a useful and precise term in a conversation about being gender variant.
If everyone previously encountered with a given opinion has proven to be an asshole, is it so unfair to assign some burden to the next one, to demonstrate that they are not?
People certainly objected to “heterosexual” at first, too.
At least “cisgender” is not a “mixed origin” coinage, being entirely from Latin.
When that someone is a poster who’s been around the boards as long as I have and has generally been proven themselves not to be an asshole, then yeah, it is.
Hey, this thread is still going, albeit slowly!
So, just because some people don’t like the word “ladyboy”, doesn’t mean that I need to worry about mod warnings for using it for others?
I mean, it can’t be a slur just because YOU say it is, can it?
Well, I wouldn’t consider myself an unmitigated asshole. Maybe mitigated. But I’ve seen where you consider anyone who doesn’t immediately agree with everything you say as an “unmitigated asshole” so I don’t really care.
And additionally, if I want to be rude and call someone a “ladyboy” you wouldn’t bring down your mod actions for a warning? I’m sure you would.
Does that work for gentlemangirl too?
No, it’s not a slur because I say it is. It’s a slur because large numbers of trans people recognize it as such. My input is pretty much meaningless.
OK, admission time.
I’m gay. I am uncomfortable being around trans people and generally prefer not to be in their company.
I don’t hate them, I don’t think what they do and are is morally wrong or suspect. I am just ill at ease around them. It’s not that I think they will want to rush at me or make a move or anything like that, it’s…
It’s because there usually something off about them. The trans people that can pass grate my sensibilities less to be around.
But if you were born a man, and look like Bluto in real life, and put a dress on, you look like Bluto in a dress. It’s worse when the voice is deep. The combination of frankenstein like male and female attributes creates a visage that is often freakish to behold and listen to. Even the voices grate on my sensibilities, especially male voices trying desperately to sound feminine. You have to get Man ti Teyo level female voice deception before it goes away. Most male to female trans voices where the guy is trying to sound female sound incredibly unpleasant to me.
There is this lingering sense that something is “off”
I think this is biological. It’s like seeing someone with a rash on their skin, boils on their face, it’s not the kind of physical feature that lends itself to being closer to. It has different degrees of repulsive power, and that is what the whole trans phenomenon gives off to me to a lesser degree.
Even the new trans Kardashian looks off. The face of Bruce Jenner is shaped like a mans face, it does not look feminine at all, no matter how big he makes his tits.
This uneasiness would entirely go away with me if we could transplant the consciousness of a person inside the actual body of a real man or woman, but without that, the current state of transformations leave a lot to be desired, and it makes me uneasy to be around.
nb4 you terrible bigot, how dare you not stand in lockstep with your fellow lgbtqrzyalphabetsoupsanscritcharactersandstillnotenough
I think something that has been lost for DECADES is the wholesale replacement of the term “sex” with “gender”
The former is more biologically based, the latter far more fluid and whatever goes on in the minds of mankind. People clearly did not like the former because it could not be argued against. You have certain chromosomes, you are either male or female. Mental state never came into it. But of course that is an intolerable state to people who want to legitimize the different mental states of people that feel like they were born into the wrong sex.
I am more uncomfortable with the idea that ones feelings about what you are dictate what you are than most people here, but I can live with it.
You feel like you are a man trapped in a womans body? A woman trapped in a mans body? A Furry trapped in a human body? An otherkin trapped in a human body?
Fine, feel that way, alter yourself if you wish to appear more like the sex or creature type you identify with. But that’s not enough, you want the rest of us to see you as that particular sex or creature.
Or worse than that, you want the definite term “sex” removed from the lexicon of use here entirely so one is not constrained by its more definite outlines.
I find the entire issue tragic. It’s far more tragic to hear that someone feels like the body they were born into is not what they consider themselves to be mentally. It’s not at all like being gay. Gay guys and lesbians are still men or women. Their attractions are different from the normal population, but they are not trying to redefine their own being and biology to be something that they are not. But that is the task of the trans person that wishes to change. And it can’t be a perfect transformation right now. IT will always be less than ideal. I supposed the hope is that if the entire population set treats trans women as no different than normal women that were born to the sex instead of deciding they belonged to the sex and transformed as best they could, then the assent of those around them would strengthen the legitimacy of the desired state. Make it more real.
I get it, the strategy makes perfect sense. But here again we get back to some hard realities. If you are a guy built like a linebacker, with a voice like Barry white. It will ALWAYS look and sound off when trying to pass as a woman, even if everyone around you pretends you are just the same. millions of years of evolution will be sounding a silent alarm that something is off and wrong, not morally, biologically. I really don’t see away to get around that reality. And so it is a far bigger tragedy to be born with a trans state of mind, because ones life is intrinsically harder to square.
There are cis biological females with deep voices and stereotypically masculine features. I somehow manage to treat them the same as I do stereotypically feminine women. It’s really not hard at all to treat trans women the same, whether or not they pass.
People made the same arguments against gay marriage. I found it unconvincing and offensive then as now.
Yes, some transgender people fall into the Uncanny Valley. I feel bad for them, even as my “something is creepy” alarm is going off. It’s yet another burden for them, and yet another reason why so many are so desperate to pass and will undergo all sorts of procedures and self-tortures to do so.
Er… yeah. OK, I’m one of those unfortunate people who is prone to extensive rashes and have, in fact, had boils on my face (in fact, there’s a thread around here with an epic tale of one that ended in surgery and a vomiting medical student but let’s not get side tracked with that). The thing is, while people have at times found that repulsive and been amazingly rude, intrusive, and assholish about it to me, no one has beaten me, called the police on me, or tried to kill me over the matter. Beatings, arrests, and murders have all happened to unfortunate transgender people who either couldn’t pass, or were passing and were found out.
So, in fact, I’d say the situation is a lot worse than having even a major rash-disease or boils. Disfigurement doesn’t seem to provoke the same level of panicked disgust as the transgender uncanny valley.
I get it, though - I certainly had that reaction the first time I knowingly encountered a beginning-to-transition transwoman in real life. But I owned up to having those feelings. I still do at times. But while I can’t control my emotional reactions to some unusual traits I CAN control how I act. I can be polite and courteous to those living in the uncanny valley, I can treat them fairly, and I think for the most part that’s want they want.
In real-life face-to-face exchanges, I’ve had transphobic slurs used against me about 10 times. IIRC, 8 of those times were by non-transgender gay men, and twice by non-transgender lesbians. Hm.
Bullshit. You deliberately deadnamed and misgendered Caitlyn Jenner twice in your post (I’ll leave alone your comparison to boils…) That’s really all we need to know about your feelings.
That’s news to all us intersex persons. Interestingly, I had two people over to dinner last night, in fact, who were neither XX nor XY. You really are quite ignorant about this whole issue.
You sound just like other transphobic gay men I know. Your posts are a prime example of faux tolerance.
As a straight, white, cis man, I find the objections to the term “cisgendered” to be absolutely fascinating. Stupid, but fascinating.
There are a lot of words that refer to a minority of the population. Gay, left-handed, diabetic, autistic, transgendered, red-haired.
For some of those words, there is another word that refers to the majority who are not in that particular minority: Straight, right-handed, neurotypical, cisgendered.
Some of the time, that word is used in everyday conversation kind of as the “opposite” of the minority term, even though there are other, smaller, minorities, who are covered by neither of the terms. For instance, one might refer to “All Americans, straight and gay alike…”, while being aware that some people are bisexual. I’m quite happy to refer to “left-handed” and “right-handed” as opposites, while being aware that some people are ambidextrous, and that some people write left-handed but play sports right-handed, or what have you.
Some of the time, the majority term has a different meaning depending on the context. For instance, in a discussion of autism, specifically, “neurotypical” might mean “not autistic”, while in a discussion of, I dunno, schizophrenia, it might mean “not schizophrenic”.
And for some minority words (like “diabetic” or “red-haired”), there is, as far as I know, no commonly accepted term for the majority.
For some of those minorities, the minority word itself has been, at times, a slur (“gay”).
For some of those minorities, there is a slur that the minority has at times used against the majority (“breeder”). At times, some or all of the majority terms have been used in an insulting way (“die dis scum”).
And you know what? It’s all good! It’s all OK! Language works the way language works, which is to say that it’s not always consistent. The way language seems to be heading is that the word “cisgendered” will mean “biological/birth sex matching gender identity”, in a somewhat technical and rarely-used but nonoffensive sense. But that might change. Maybe in 10 years, everyone will use “gender typical” or “gendernorm”. Maybe “cisgendered” will be forgotten entirely. Maybe “cis” will in fact be offensive. Maybe there will be no one word with that meaning (although that seems unlikely, because while contexts where it’s useful to say things “as the cisgendered sister of a transgendered woman, my experience has been…” are rare, they certainly do exist).
But as of right now, in 2016, the term cisgendered exists, and is used in a slightly ambiguous way to both mean non-transgendered and to more specifically mean “biological/birth sex matching gender identity”. And a solid majority of cisgendered people, at least among those who are aware of the term, do not find it offensive.
And no one is forcing you to start self-identifying in everyday contexts as cisgendered, any more than people want you to frequently bring up the fact that you don’t have diabetes, or are right-handed, or have 10 toes, or are not an amputee, or zillions of other such things.
So get the fuck over it.
Yes, they did. I know plenty social conservatives still don’t consider gay marriages to be legitimate in their eyes. And that’s totally fine, let them not see the marriage as legitimate. I neither require or desire the assent or recognition from everyone that gay marriages are legitimate, I just wanted to get to the point where most of the culture and society thought that gay relationships were worthy of giving the blessing of society and called “marriage.”