What does CIS mean?

Do you feel an immediate sense of distress at your conclusion that you are female?

Why then is gender reassignment surgery a minority interest for transwomen? Why can I find posts where they're saying how delighted they are with their current configuration.

Again, it's gender dysphoria used as an explanation when trans activists have rejected that this is a requirement for someone to be trans.

Then you can be fairly sure your gender identity is female.

Lucky you - your gender identity matches the sex you were assigned at birth - you can now just get on with your life with having to worry about transitioning in a transphobic society.

Do we have a deal?

Grr, that's more tooth enamel gone.

Anyway, enough of my derail, carry on with the angel photography of defining cis meaningfully.

I must not think about the appropriation of concepts from quantum physics in the social sciences

Schrodingers Cat is both cis and trans.

Sorry, sorry. Won't do it again

I must not think about the appropriation of concepts from quantum physics in the social sciences! That causes terrible teeth-grinding and I've not been to the dentists in more than a year.

If only gender identity ideology had a corresponding reality-based framework!

How does it help trans people? No one is suggesting the word trans is done away with. No one wants to erase trans identity (except for some TRAs ironically).

If male and female is assigned AT BIRTH is it a lie to say girls are aborted in societies that do not value girls/women? They have not had anything assigned yet!

chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/54520/why-does-rotating-a-double-bond-break-the-bond

Then don't call trans women men

Then don't call people who don't believe in gendered identities cis.

See how this works?

Thanks for your answers Chemistindisguise. Yes, of course, ring structures. I wonder what it actually is that causes the groups to be fixed in place and rotation not possible, for example in butene? (Well, maybe they're not fixed and flipping is possible but there's just not enough activation energy at RTP.) I hadn't thought about inorganics so that's interesting to know.

I have always been suspicious when scientific concepts having an established meaning get appropriated by people from the social science to create weird partial analogies, which then get turned into a thing.

C construction
I industry
S scheme
So without CIS, everything else falls down

Cis-Women is a subset of Women. Trans Women are the ‘real’ women now.

Transwomen = Women
Natal Women = Cis Women.

how do I know what my gender identity is? I personally feel I don’t have one, but I’m happy to look at a checklist or descriptions to see where I fit best.
I'd very much like to see this checklist too.

Good questions. I've already asked the first two. They don't know.

I’d like to ask the gender advocates on this thread: I’m fairly sure I know what my sex is (I have the female package of boobs/periods/vulva etc), but how do I know what my gender identity is? I personally feel I don’t have one, but I’m happy to look at a checklist or descriptions to see where I fit best. I really don’t “feel” like a woman, except maybe the times I have bad period cramps. What is it about someone that makes them womanly (or manly)?

Also, how do I know whether or not my gender “matches” to my sex? If even sex is a spectrum, and some arbitrary thing, ditto gender identity, how can even “cis” and “trans” be a thing? Surely then all humans would form a nebulous distribution cloud of random body parts and personality traits, therefore it becomes impossible to discern some axis along which humans might aggregate into two contrasting classes. There’d be no alignment or disalignment between the physicality of their bodies vs the cultured expectations and practices that coalesce around that physicality, if all humans fall into that amorphous cloud of possibilities.

If gender is something “inner”, how do I know whether or not I share it with someone of the same reproductive system type? How does something so “inner” affect how I am perceived and treated as I navigate through the world? How is it possible to build a liberation/equality movement about something so ethereal, and why is it necessary to have a movement based on an inward feeling that has no verifiable outward definition? That might make for an interesting social club, but what makes that inner feeling something of political importance, i.e. affecting power relations between two groups of people? How are those groups defined? Can the oppressors and those who seek to harm me with violence read my inner thoughts, or is there some immutable, outward manifestation about me that is instantly readable and hence how they react to me? Why is my husband read and addressed differently from me when being served in shops, even when we’re dressed similarly in jeans & hoodie, and facemasks covering most facial hair (or lack of) and features? What is that tangible thing that marks the difference 🤔

Thanks for the praise, but I think I'm mostly just channelling Jane Clare Jones. Do read the link in my post - it's one of my favourite JCJ pieces. It's a bit dense, but there's so much there.

The effect of laying a binary on top of a difference is that it effectively denies being to, or erases, the inferior pole of the binary, because the inferior term in defined only as a negative mirror-image of the superior term, and is not granted reality, or given worth, in itself.

There she's mainly talking the harm of thinking of "woman" as "not-man". And to challenge that you have to "spend a lot of time thinking through what women are".

But it clearly applies to thinking of "cis" as "not-trans" in exactly the same way. It's another binary hierarchy indignity piled on top of the not-men.

It's not using that specific word it's classifying us within your binary. We reject your cis/trans binary. It's a social construct that does not correspond to material reality or our lived experience (as the cool kids call it these days).

Well said, and an excellently explained post Necessary

It needs to be accepted that not everyone is going to be willing or able to fit into the narrow prism of gender identity, and other people need their freedoms to continue living peacefully alongside it.

I'm very happy not to call TW men - that's a label they have rejected and I respect that. (I'd appreciate not labelling me with words I dont agree with either.)

There are times in which to be able to stand up for the rights of others, that it is necessary to be specific that TW are male. And that the needs of female people and male people cannot always be combined into one, because people who are biologically female have sex based needs.

I am happy not to call someone a man who does not identify as one. I cannot avoid that sometimes I must refer to biological reality when I require mine to be respected. And if respect was shown to female people with sex based needs then female people wouldn't be driven to the discourtesy so much of having to be plain about sex based realities.

Fabulous post Necessary. Definitely not incoherent.

Circular Incoherent Shit

IMHO

A quick question Chemistindisguise, I'd always assumed that cis-trans isomerism necessarily involves the presence of a double bond, ie C=C (although not sure about a triple bond) because C-C bonds allow relative rotation. Is that right?