I think part of the greater aversion from gay men is that… they like both being and being with men. A trans person who goes from male to female is a total rejection of what they desire, and they likely feel they cannot relate at ALL to the desire. I certainly don’t.
As for misgendering Caitlyn, get over it. This is the kind of gender nazi like crying that will forever keep your shrill arguments in the gutter. By REQUIRING everyone around you to label trans people the opposite sex they were born with you are essentially telling ALL of them, Fuck your standards of what makes a male or female, accept MY definitions.
I consider males who went trans to be trans females. Not regular females, because they are not regular females in my eyes. Especially the ones that neither look nor sound female. I reject this postmodernism smuggled in from the art world where everything is what you say it is without limit.
Does this infinite malleability of concepts bother none of you? I know most of us are liberal here but god damn man.
The reason I think it’s so tragic to be of a trans state of mind is because I COMPLETELY believe that some people genuinely feel they were born to the wrong sex, and there is nothing we can do to square the circle, because just saying they ARE the other sex after some visual modifications does not make it so, and it gets worse the more chimeric the male and female features are mixed up in some twisted tangle of the uncanny valley the guy mentioned above.
I’m aware of chromosomal abnormalities, xyy males being over represented in Hockey players because they are considered super males (taller and dumber on average), It’s not perfectly one to one but it’s mostly one to one.
Max, be honest with me here. Look at the list of genders facebook offers.
When you heard about that before or just now, did you roll your eyes a bit or nod your head like a good puppy about how we need to cater to the most infinitesimal microcharacterizations people want to call themselves? Where the punishment for not doing so is social rebuke for DARING to not address them TWO SPIRIT like they intend?
Can you HONESTLY not look at the never ending list of definitions as comical and over the top?
Frankly, I don’t see why it should bother anyone. If you just want to stick to the traditional binary standard that’s still an option. What do you care what other people call themselves?
Really? How do YOU know “large numbers of trans people recognize it as such”?
Have you asked “large numbers of trans people”?
How “large” of a group of people need to find something offensive before it becomes “offensive” in the common lexicon?
I say that “large numbers of trans people” DON’T recognize it as offensive. So?
Incidentally, I just watched Andrew Zimmern called various transgender women “ladyboys” on one of his shows last night. Do you want me to track down his email so you can rightly lambast him for using the term “ladyboy”?
This is a legitimately interesting question, and not one that is easy to resolve. At some point, “colored” ceased to be an acceptable term to use for black people. At times, “black” itself has appeared to maybe be on its way out. How do we know? What’s the cutoff?
And honestly, I don’t think there’s a clear, bright line answer. That said, I trust the opinion of someone like Una Persson, who is clearly involved with and knowledgeable about the issue, ahead of most. Which isn’t, of course, to say that any one person’s opinion is somehow decisive or definitive.
That said, I’m also going to be more sensitive towards groups that are frequently victimized and marginalized than I am towards groups that are part of the dominant majority. My reasoning being that if I get it wrong and I use “tranny” when it turns out that it’s actually, on the balance, offensive, the damage I can do by being wrong is more than the damage I can do by using “cisgendered” when it turns out that it’s actually, on the balance, offensive.
Sticks and stones, and all that, but names can do a lot more damage to groups who are already living precarious lives than those which aren’t.
(a) I disagree with your point
(b) In particular, you jumped from “haha, FB has a long list of silly sounding gender names”, which I suppose I might possibly conceivably at least see the humor in, even though I recognize that there are people for whom it’s a really serious life-defining issue, and what right do I have to mock them; to “Where the punishment for not doing so is social rebuke for DARING to not address them TWO SPIRIT like they intend?”. Which is another issue, but again, one that I think you’re just wrong about. Has anyone actually berated you for not referring to them as a TWO SPIRIT, or is that just something you assume will happen at some point? Suppose someone new is hired at your office who identifies as one of the more unusual gender identities. There’s a big difference between a situation in which you meet this person for the first time, and accidentally use the wrong pronoun, and they jump down your throat and start shrieking about the patriarchy; and a situation in which the calmly state that they prefer X. Why do you assume it would be the former?
(c) but none of the above has anything at all to do with whether or not “cisgendered” is an offensive term
From you? I don’t expect much of anything. But if you ever come across someone who considers themselves an “otherkin” that has a wolf basis, and is not human. I expect your THOUGHTS to be consistent and NOT think they are ANYTHING other than what they say they are. An otherkin and not a human, and so if someone considers themselves not human because that’s how they FEEL, you better damn well sign on of their definition of what they say they are. Because ALL of reality as it relates to self perceptions is defined by what we say we are.
ANYthing less is the definition of bigot to some here.
Yep, exactly like my demand to FUCK homophobic standards of what makes a male or female, accept MY definition.
And my demand to FUCK racist or homophobic standards of what makes a marriage and accept MY definition.
And my demand to FUCK sexist or racist standards of what makes a president or any other job and accept MY definition.
People go for the definitional arguments all the time. It always astonishes me when people who were on the receiving end of bigoted definitions spout them, but that’s humanity for you.
I consider the term cisgendered less offensive and more of a weaponized form of language from certain corners.
The shift to “gender” over “sex” was a tool of rhetoric to shift the focus away from hardwired sex differences to mental states of what one considers they are.
Then you get terms like transgender, but this places it in it’s own separate sounding category far apart from the norm. This of course, cannot be allowed to stand, the goal from some is to see transgender as nothing more than one among many different equal classifications, and so we will include and invent the term cisgender which clearly puts the around 99% + of humanity among the same sorts of categorization as the .6% + of humanity who do NOT think they were born to the right sex.
Straight males
gay males
trans males/females
That’s enough.
The numbers are SO lopsided in terms of people being born into the same sex they identify with, it’s implied in the normal descriptors. You don’t need to rename all of humanity basically just to make the infinitesimally small segment who does NOT identify with their sex of birth feel more included. The reason it rubs many the wrong way is it comes across as such an OBVIOUS rhetorical language policing to try and achieve that last bit. And it’s not needed.
OK, you’re transgender, you feel you were born into the wrong sex. Fine. Have fun. But no, everyone else has to be renamed so make transgender people feel more included in a larger subset. Just call them transgender if you want. Cisgender is taylor made to be a battleground word for people like you, MAx, to do what you are doing now and engage in wars over how people should see and classify others and themselves. That was the point, that is why people resent it.
For the record, I have no problem if some social conservative does not consider gay marriages “real” marriages based on their own standards. Because I’m not as much of an authoritarian leftist dick who demands the entire universe have the same standards as I do. I prefer to constrain the more expanded rules for government offices and certain essential services, but down to the level where I brow beat some conservatives into accepting MY standards of what a marriage ought to include? I could not care less. Don’t want to accept gay marriages as the same as yours? Don’t. No skin off my back. But of course, to most of the gender n@zis, that’s not enough. The universe must conform to their definitions and standards and morays. We’re just talking about thoughts and attitudes here btw, not policy.
So with all do respect, f*ck off.
For all you straight cisgender males white knighting to be good little moral liberals, I expect some fucking consistency. If you truly see trans women as no different from women born as women, then you ought to see them with ZERO difference in your own personal mating habits. I’m sure you’d all have no problem dating a trans woman, even if she has a deep voice and has masculine features.
Different? Why? Because it’s about attraction? But attraction is part of peoples own internal ideas and perceptions, and I thought you ultra leftist cisgender demanding gender n@zis wanted us all to see no differences? You sound like you are picking and choosing.
This is why I think it’s a harder road to be trans. I am not like one of these disingenuous white knights LYING about my own sentiments, they will say they see no difference to your face, and never give you the time of day in their personal life, they sure as hell won’t treat you as being the same as a woman born into the sex. These are real issues they will have to deal with beyond the gay issues and lesbian issues or straight issues.
It’s interesting how it’s no skin off your back if someone doesn’t want to accept gay marriage, but it’s apparently so deeply wounding if someone thinks you’re a bigot about trans rights that you forget how to spell “Nazi” and “fuck.”
How has anyone been renamed? Before the word cisgendered existed, you were a straight man (or a bisexual man, or a lesbian, I don’t know you). You’re still a straight man, bisexual man, or lesbian. No one is insisting that people somehow start inserting “cisgender” into their everyday introductions or something.
Suppose tomorrow we discover a rare genetic mutation which makes certain people immune to heart attacks, and we start calling them SuperCardios. At that point, we will suddenly realize that everyone else, all the “normal” people, are “non-SuperCardios”. At that point, we might make up a word that means “non-SuperCardios”, and we might not make up such a word. But in neither case are you or anyone else being “renamed”, it’s just that a word either is or is not coming into common usage to make it easier to discuss those situations in which it’s important to specify whether someone is or is not a superCardio. You’re not going to have to change the way you introduce yourself, the way other people interact with you, the names other people call you, or anything in the 99.9% of situations when your immunity to heart attacks, or lack thereof, is irrelevant.
I’ve never liked the above argument. If someone has been the victim of bigotry, that obligates them to be pious and saintly do-gooders compared to people who haven’t?
I’ve got nothing else to add to this debate except that Trans Americans have gotten on my nerves - what’s with the eagle anyway? :dubious:
There is no renaming occurring. “Cisgender” is an additional term, for precision of language in specific contexts. It does not replace or cancel any other identity term.
I hold the following two positions:
(a) Transgender people deserve all the same rights and respect as cisgendered people. They should be allowed to use the bathroom they most identify with. They should have the same marriage and adoption rights as everyone else. They should be allowed to serve in the military. While there are a few corner cases where their transgender status is actually relevant (competing in sex-segregated sports, for instance), it should have legal impact on their lives vanishingly rarely
(b) I am happily married, but if I were not, I would, I suspect, feel quite uncomfortable getting romantically involved with a transgender woman, and that would certainly be more pronounced if it was a woman who had less-stereotypically-female features
