Is wearing your g string back to front a thing?

[Behooven]

A la Vorderman?

Yes - cis-male. The cis bit is the gender identity - biological sex identity assigned at birth matchy bit.

BTW - always loved and been hugely jealous of your MN name

I believe I somewhat lowered the tone oops

It is from my private stash of moose knuckle pics.

I saw the photo and thought it must be photoshopped.

I'm also female, not cis. I also have labia, but I'm not going to share them with you.

Zachary cis applies equally to either gender, cis man / cis woman. Re my earlier use, you're right, I didn't qualify, and I could have.

I actually don't often use the term cis, there's little need for it really - just the sentence "all women have labia" jarred.

I appreciate your point about bothering, Smegs, but I also think there needs to be room in the vernacular for different experience and what I was trying to say, or not to say, is an example of that.

Though I could have just said MOST.

othering!! not bothering.

the cis bit is the gender identity - biological sex identity assigned at birth matchy bit

It's becoming even more out there than that as the current fashionable thinking is that biological sex is also a construct and therefore "female penis" is now a thing. It's now apparently transphobic to know that there is a material reality in being female and anyone is female who simply says they are, regardless of any transition steps or even no transition steps at all.

Like these guys:

twitter.com/boodleoops/status/563632661361868802

twitter.com/WomenCanSee/status/558473074928922625

Among many others.

You can accept others' experiences and talk about them without labelling people. Labelling is unnecessary. Rooting a woman's identity in her ability to procreate, to go through puberty, to have a certain set of physical characteristics is inherently foolish, as even a small random selection of women will show great differences in their own personal experiences.

I have no intention of labelling my friends, acquaintances and people I haven't met yet. In the dim and distant past the words 'man' and 'men' applied to all humankind, not just the male sex. In a strange was that was much more freeing than all of the categories and sub-categories we have today.

Robot hugs

God, the whole thing confuses me.

I'm going to go and have a nap. Sinusitis is destroying my brain.

anyone is female who simply says they are, regardless of any transition steps or even no transition steps at all.

In some way I don't find that so radical from the first person perspective - it's an appealing solution to labelling "every little thing" as pp said
Though it would require a radical abandonment of gender ordering.
And as a feminist I find it problematic, because as it stands there is gendered experience and privilege that a person hardly opts out of when they present one way or another...

But a friend's 3 year old, ostensibly female and certainly with historically female labelled sexual characteristics was asking her mother about gender a few weeks back. Anyway she said she was a boy because she felt like one. I'm fairly sure she just meant, that day.

I maintain I wasn't trying to label anyone, just use a currently accepted term to acknowledge the possibilities beyond what I was saying i.e. women without labia.....

I'm glad I did though, because I've thought better about what I was saying, and this is way better than pointing at Carol Vorderman and laughing.

human woman

My 2yo says she's a bear. I think it's quite cool to have a bear in the family, although I wish she'd stop climbing onto the kitchen counters to get at the honey.

definition

If you believe that women face oppression and/or discrimination, it is necessary to have language to identify that and to address it. I don't know what it means to root someone's identity in her physical characteristics but there is certainly a material reality about being a woman and a political structure that treats a person in a particular way because she is a woman. It's important for women to be able to discuss these things.

This is the World Health Organisation's definition of sex and gender:

---

"Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.

"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

To put it another way:

"Male" and "female" are sex categories, while "masculine" and "feminine" are gender categories.

Aspects of sex will not vary substantially between different human societies, while aspects of gender may vary greatly.

Some examples of sex characteristics :

Women menstruate while men do not
Men have testicles while women do not
Women have developed breasts that are usually capable of lactating, while men have not
Men generally have more massive bones than women

Some examples of gender characteristics :

In the United States (and most other countries), women earn significantly less money than men for similar work
In Viet Nam, many more men than women smoke, as female smoking has not traditionally been considered appropriate
In Saudi Arabia men are allowed to drive cars while women are not
In most of the world, women do more housework than men

----

Agreed Flora

Maybe I'll decide that for me, 'cis' means 'real'. See how the cis-labelled like them apples.

CardomanGinger - hope you don't mind, I'm going to quote you just because I think your question offers me a particularly good way in to answering the question of why some of us object to being called "cis":

You wrote:
But gender is a construct (and typically one defined by those in positions of power, hence for much of history and for many now, constructed by men) so surely cis does import this by definition? Cis means that your biological sex and gender identity match, as assigned at birth. How is that not saying that cis women are happy with and accept the socially constructed gender identity of 'woman'?

My answer to that is that I (and many other women I know) are perfectly happy with our biology, but very deeply unhappy about the socially constructed gender identity of "woman" we are offered - and we are unhappy not because we are trans, but because most of the social constructions of gender suck. In my case it kicked in at school when it was made clear to me that a lot of the stuff I wanted to do - woodwork, cricket, etc - was for boys, not girls. And I find the whole idea that the brain has a "sex" which may or may not match that of the body really offensive - every reputable study has shown that cognitive differences between the average man and woman are tiny, while variations within each sex are enormous. There are lots of caring, nurturing men out there, and ambitious go-getting women; there are men who like knitting and women who like football; there are women who are great at maths and men who are very good at writing poetry to express their inner emotional state.

I have no problem getting my head round the idea that someone is trans. What I object to is a certain small set of trans activists co-opting the language round gender (a social construct) and turning it into something expressing "the essence of what it is to be a woman" - because once they do that, they have taken away the language I can use to describe what's wrong with a society that (fairly arbitrarily) forces men and women into rigid behaviour patterns and roles based on sex.

Exactly! Well said .

.

and I meant 'cis-labellers' and didn't notice the auto-correct

So agree Lurcio.

Got called away on urgent Auroch business, sorry

but here are the rest