I Don't Get and Am Sick of Trans-Stuff

The BBQ Pit
61

Nope. What might be important is that if one reasonably literate person was confused by a stupid neologism, then it’s not unreasonable to think that great many others might be, too, and that perhaps the term was ill-advised as a means of promoting the desired cultural change. It’s not the technical etymology of a neologism that matters in culture and popular usage, it’s style and perceptual impact. The word “cisgendered” may be etymologically correct, but it’s stylistically crude and borderline offensive, and entirely unnecessary.

Consider how masterfully the gay community handled the issue of self-identification. First they appropriated the happy term “gay” to describe themselves, and “straight” came to mean heterosexual. “Straight” has the connotations of honesty (“straight player”), integrity (“straight and narrow”), and maybe even excessive conservative morality (“straightlaced”). They might have used the term with a hint of sarcasm or maybe even a hint of humorous self-deprecation, but it’s a very plain and straightforward term with nothing ugly, mysterious, or ominously mean-sounding about it.

Let’s face it, if the transgender community has linguists working for them, they should fire them.

Oh? In that case the transgender linguistic engineers are both misinformed and perpetrating even more confusion than I’d thought:
It’s not complicated: Cisgender is the opposite of transgender.

Cisgender is a word that applies to the vast majority of people, describing a person who is not transgender.

cisgender: used to describe someone who feels that they are the same gender (= sex) as the physical body they were born with …
Opposite: transgender

62

I suppose I have to agree with you. On the other hand, this has been an emotional rollercoaster and I don’t need people unfamiliar with the process telling me and the rest of us how fed up he is with the topic.

This isn’t some passing, media-attention grabbing fad. This is real, and finally people who have known this about themselves from birth are able to talk about it and get help. To tell them and the media to silence themselves is completely the wrong approach.

I’m sure we can agree on that.

63

Of course it’s a bad way to have a national dialogue, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. As a matter of fact, I think this is a really recent development for his family, so I surely don’t believe that, in the very beginning thick of things, he’s responsible for shaping how the world ought to view things. I mean, do you care much about how you’re viewed when your whole world is upside down and things are really, really hard?

And from even the slightest personal experience on these boards, it’s really freaking tiresome when someone has a bigoted belief and you waste the time to show them a glimpse of your life (to humanize their hatred, to let them know it could happen to anyone, to share the ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ thing, or whatever) and no matter how patient, how helpful in setting things factually straight or how understanding you are of their mental quandary for a billion times, your efforts only get rebuffed with bullshit rhetoric, willful ignorance, whining and a lot of “LA LA LA LA! I can’t hear you!!”

For some reason, most non-saintly people occasionally lose their cool. I’m really surprised his was so tame. All of the posters on here that share their stories about this and then don’t go on to blow up a bell tower somewhere, are frigging heroes and there’s no way I could hang one hot minute in their place.

64

If you don’t like rum or the lash, you might be interested in some of their other offerings.

65

Yeah, that’s not actually how that worked. Around the 18th century, the word “gay” started to take on connotations of immorality, specifically sexual immorality. It meant, essentially, “slut,” except it was reserved for men, and in particular, men who frequented a lot of prostitutes. Over the next century or so, it gradually mutated to mean, “Men who have sex with other men,” but was still very much intended as a slur. While it was eventually embraced as a term of self-identity, it was one choice from a variety of externally-imposed, condemnatory labels. The only reason it doesn’t have any negative connotations to you is because you were born in the latter half of the 20th century, well after the term had shed almost all of it’s negative connotations outside of sexual orientation. At the time it was adopted as a self-descriptor by the gay community, that was absolutely not the case.

The use of the term “straight” to describe heterosexuals did come out of the gay underground, but the etymology there is pretty obvious. It was used in exactly the same way that criminals or drug addicts use the term: to give up on the risky and illegal behavior you’re currently engaged in. Someone who stopped going to seedy gay bars and married a beard was “going straight” in exactly the same way someone who was retiring from bank robbing was “going straight.”

None of those cites disprove or even disagree with what Jimmy Chitwood said. Yeah, “cisgender” is the opposite of “transgender.” That’s not even remotely the same as saying “cisgender” means “non-transgender.” Or are you of the opinion that, because black and white are opposites, everything that is not black must therefore be white?

66

For my part, I apologize for having unseemly scolded you. (Heavy sigh… You should have seen the really stupid and over-the-top first version of my post…)

I definitely agree with you that this is a topic best addressed…by addressing it. It needs more coverage, not less. Yes, ideally the coverage would be sympathetic, or at very least considerate. There have been way too many really stupid declarations made (far too many of them about bathrooms. The transexual issue vastly transcends mere bathroom issues!)

In my clumsy way, I only was trying to argue for more attempts to reach out and find points of agreement, or at very least to focus on the meaningful issues of disagreement.

67

Mark me down as a binary reactionary, but…what’s the difference? “The opposite of x” is almost always “non-x.” What are the in-between zones on the Venn Diagram? Specifically, how can one be cisgendered and transgendered?

(Perhaps by filling both roles, i.e., transitioning from female to male…but also having a baby?)

68

I think you need to look at ways someone could be neither transgender NOR cisgender.

I am not going to name names, but I believe we have a few posters here on the board who could be described as neither one nor the other, but rather something else.

69

Thanks.

Hey, I’m about as heterosexual as one can get, but I’ve never had a problem with anyone elses sexuality. It’s none of my business, frankly.

Again, when it hits home it’s really a different paradigm. I never saw it coming at all. There were no signs, although he (she) wasn’t much interested in cars and maintenance, etc., but what kids are these days?

Imagine the courage to tell your parents that you are transgendered and want to be a girl. Imagine that. Imagine that you probably think, due to your upbringing that your parents will probably not disown you or call you a fucking freak. Imagine coming out to your parents and have them hug you, cry with you and tell you that you have their complete support and love.

This is how society should, must, be approaching this. It’s not going away. It’s been here forever. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

70

Yes.

Also he is not saying "shut up about not “getting trans-stuff”. He is saying shut up about spouting ignorance. Doctors take evaluation of young children with gender dysphoria very seriously. It is not like there are doctors out there pushing androgen blockers or testosterone injections.

Scientifically cis is the opposite of trans. I am not in love with the prefix, but guess what? I’m a woman who feels at home having a uterus and breasts and a vagina. I have friends who are women who still have testicles and a prostrate gland. My stepson has a vagina and recently started shaving, but is awaiting surgery to remove HIS breasts But I shouldn’t have to talk about my stepson’s genitalia. Calling me cis and my friend and my stepson trans has value. It avoids discussion of genitalia.

Carry on, my friends with penises and friends with labias. Lets discuss this, but please. lets not use cis or trans and identify ourselves by the parts we cover with bathing suits.

71

Wow I missed the rest of the Leaffan argument. anyway, what I say holds. And props to Leaffan for being a great dad.

72

You’re confusing the word itself with the act of marking the trait of cisgenderism as a specific condition. Calling it “non-transgendered” goes back to setting it as an invisible default condition without any particular characteristics: it defines it by the absence of characteristics.

It’s helpful for folks in the majority to see that their presence in the majority along particular axes has characteristics. I don’t much care what the word is that’s used to define folks whose gender identity matches their birth-assigned gender, but having a word for that is a good thing. It’s also a thing that’s probably going to make a lot of cis folks uncomfortable, and it’s that discomfort that I consider a good thing as well.

73

“Factory original equipment” and “custom upgrade?”

74

Actually, nineteenth century use of gay more often applied to the female prostitutes, rather than the men who used them.
Otherwise, you have it right. People who think that homosexuals co-opted the word gay in the 1960s or 1970s were just too sheltered (i.e., ignorant–e.g., Anita Bryant, Tom Snyder), to realize where the word actually arose.

75

It’s far from my favorite word, either but I disagree it’s unnecessary. I agree, in ordinary conversation it is out of place but in discussions of transgender issues and sexual identity it is a perfectly cromulent word. (“Cromulent” also being a neologism coined in 1996).

I could list off a dozen or so words I dislike as words, some of them quite common, but I don’t get my panties in a bunch over them, I just don’t use them myself if there’s a common alternative.

76

I think the term you’re looking for there is “genderqueer”, a term that is FAR more loaded with potential offense than either transgender or cisgender. Definition is usually some variant on “denoting or relating to a person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but identifies with neither, both, or a combination of male and female genders.”

77

I don’t doubt that it’s your experience, but it’s not because the word itself is bad: it’s still an uncommon neologism, and tends to be used only by people with some kind of interest in the subject. Since your encounters with those people are limited, so are the circumstances in which you hear the word used.

In my own experience, OTOH, where I often interact professionally and personally with trans people and “allies” (a word I dislike but that’s a subject for another post), it’s a simple descriptor like any other. It *can *be used derogatorily, just as “white people” can be used derogatorily, but most often it’s value-neutral.

I was reading an academic piece the other day which had nothing to do with trans issues, it was actually a study of ethnicity in Danish schools, but it discussed how people in dominant groups tend to see themselves as “unmarked” and not in need of any term to describe themselves in the way that different/minority/“other” groups are. I think that’s a big part of the resistance to “cis”.

And yeah, I kind of do agree that it’s a bit of an awkward sounding prefix, and I wish whoever coined it had come up with a better one… but I still think it’s useful to have one.

78

Oh I missed this in the OP. Yes, a very good argument: Stonewall was started by trans women, not cis gay men like the movie pretends.

79

Part of the issue here, from this across-the-Atlantic and a language gulf point of view, is on one hand gender vs sex, and on the other the general American obsession with little labels and little boxes. You guys like things neat and orderly, life isn’t that clean.

Sex is… well, for most people, it’s a biological situation wherein their genitalia, their chromosomes and their general hormonal profile match. Then you have some people form whom there is a mismatch, such as people who are genetically XY (male) but due to testosterone insensitivity, their genitalia and hormonal profiles are female. You have your male people, your female people, and your intersex people.

Gender is how society expects someone to behave as a result of the above. Depending on the society, those expectations can vary a lot. Expectations in the USA in 1942, in the USA in 1952, and among the Yanomamis in 1947, were different. The traditional view of this in most societies was to have male-sexed people express certain behaviors, female-sexed people express a different set of behaviors, and anything else was aberrant; in other societies, it was accepted that some people would behave as the opposite-sex people or to just be “queer”, having a different set of behaviors that didn’t match either those of the general male-sexed population or those of the female-sexed population.

There are places where someone who has a mismatch between their mental perception of self and their body are called “transexual”; in the USA the preferred word has come to be “transgender”, but sex and gender actually refer to two different concepts. And what’s “male” and “female” in medical terms and in sociological terms actually refer to different things: in medical terms, we’re talking biology, in sociological terms we’re talking mental boxes.

Someone who doesn’t quite match the expectations of their society, but who also doesn’t correspond to the “second acceptable little box”, is neither fish nor fowl in a society having only two little boxes. Nowadays, American society has more than two boxes, but being “a girly man”, “a drag queen”, “a cross-dresser” (not the same as a drag queen), “a butch woman” or even in a profession where the other sex is predominant don’t quite correspond to the two neatest little gender boxes. They are in-between, some more than others; in general, someone who is a sexual minority in their profession will be more acceptable than, say, a cross-dresser, but see threads about male kindergarten teachers.

80

I don’t think it’s an unreasonable view, personally, but as you note, I’m not moving in the sort of circles a lot of people here seem to be.

I get its use in academic contexts, but it’s the spillover into “everyday life” which I’m not thrilled about.