Cis labels

[sooperdooper]

I'm kind of new to reaching 'Peak Trans' and I had this thought...

So if, as the trans lobby keeps repeating 'trans women are women', why would they need to call biological women 'cis'?

If they really are female there would be no need for a distinction because by simply 'identifying' as female they would be

So they've made the distinction themselves by labelling biological women cis, doesn't that make the whole discussion about 'trans women being women' invalid by their own admission?

Sorry if this is totally obvious but I'm trying to work through my own thoughts on this

Who has suddenly acquired the right to tell women what we may call ourselves?

I have XX chromosomes. I am a woman.

They believe they are women, not female. The key difference is that while we are women who are female, they think they are women who are male. You know, this whole 'your gender does not have to correlate to your sex' thing.

Therefore 'cis' simply defines us as women and females, and 'trans' defines them as women who are not female.

Of course there is a growing movement in the trans movement lately claiming that not only is gender a social construct BUT so is biological sex, apparently... So now we have transwomen claiming they are not biologically male. Now that is Peak Trans for me.

I don't think there is a definition of 'cis', certainly not one that is set in stone and has the same meaning for everyone. I've read trans discussion where many MTT think of themselves as cis once they are happy with their body modifications. So, for some, cis doesn't mean non trans.

Women means adult human female. It doesn't mean 'adult human female or adult human male'. So for a MTT to call themselves a 'trans woman' they are claiming to be a trans adult human female, which is clearly a lie.

If the language does evolve, and women can mean both male and female, we will need another word for 'adult human female' and that too will be a word that doesn't apply to MTT. Because MTT are adult human males, not adult human females.

A female is belonging to the sex who can bear offspring and produce eggs. A woman is an adult human female. One is a continuation of the other.

The word woman is not a cultural description. You can't be a woman and not be female.

You can be a man and be feminine, but not female.

Female is used for all animals. To denote belonging to the class that can bear offspring and produce eggs. Female dogs, cats, any animal has a name which denotes the species (mare, etc).

Woman is the human version.

This is why I'm moving away from 'transwoman' (no space) to MtT.

It's as if 'transwoman' was the jumping-off point, 'trans woman' is currently being slid in (just as transgender was slid in to replace transexual) and yes, I do think the next stage in changing the language will be to drop the 'trans'.

Just. Fuck. Off. That is why I am taking my inch back. You don't get to have 'woman' in your category at all now, because you have abused the courtesy. You are MtT.

On the Facebook page about transactivists, people are starting to use TIM - trans identifying males, in an effort to claw back the word woman.

I'm trying out Trans Identified Males, too, Datun.

The linguistic creep is insidious.

We've all seen "Trans women are women, period!"

But what could one make of the sentence "cis women are women, period!"? It's just nonsense. That's because they both are, but the first has been trumpeted about so much that people are starting to believe it. Words aren't just words. You have ideas, then you articulate the ideas into words, then you try to shape your world using those words. They matter.

Transwomen are women has become a clarion call.

At women's marches, at that Vancouver women's library, all over social media. It's used as the conclusion to the entire argument.

'Transwomen are women'

'No they're not and here's 300 reasons why'

'Transwomen are women'.

It's difficult, there are some transwomen I really like and admire, ones that identify as transwoman (much to the chagrin of others). I don't want the vocal fetishist nobheads to poison me,.

I don't want the vocal fetishist nobheads to poison me

I know. Miffer. It's not that I don't have every sympathy for genuine transwomen. It's just that I don't believe they're women.

The fact that many transwomen agree with me annihilates the ridiculous rhetoric of the 'ideology'.

Hopefully, at some point down the line, in the dim and distant future, this will all revert back. Genuine trans will be treated for dysphoria in any way that helps, and the rest will go back to their basements.

But in the meantime, I have concluded, politically at least, that you have to pick a side.

I am not cis in special snowflake land I'd be non binary but in the real world I'm a normal woman with a personality not a 2 dimesional cardboard cut out of a stepford wife.

I'm going to start using MtT or MIT I'm also taking my inch back.

I struggle. In a purely binary sense if we look at subsets then if there is a sub set that is trans, there is a sub set that is 'not-trans'. Just as to have disabled you have to recognise that some are able bodied. If we say it is more of a spectrum you still have two ends to the spectrum.
But that doesn't have an impact on me also being a woman. Where the cis descriptor becomes troubling is where it feels as though it changes the descriptor of something that I don't want to have changed about me.

I am not a cis woman.

I am human, a woman and not transgender. That hierarchy of identity makes sense to me and I would have thought to transgender people too.

I didn't like the word cis, but then I was constantly told to check my privilege.

The more I've thought about it the last few days, though, I've come to realise that it isn't the same as minorities taking slurs used against them and then taking ownership of those words. It's entirely different.

ThinkAboutItTomorrow

I don't follow your reasoning. If trans and not trans are both subsets, what are they a subset of?

Is it that you are saying there is a set of people who are gender conforming and therefore trans and not trans are both subsets of that?

Because I don't think you will find a woman on the planet who would agree with that. We're not talking just about superficial gender comformation like dresses.

If you subscribe to your stereotypical gender matching your sex, it means you also subscribe to all the other oppressive gender implications that only apply to women. So female foetuses aborted before they are born, female genital mutilation, honour killings, all of it.

Gender roles are prescribed for a reason. And that reason is oppression.

I also strongly object to being described as cis. I am not cis. No feminist is ever cis.

As for what I call transgender males, I generally use the word transwomen, always as one word. Using two suggests that trans is just an adjective, like tall or young. However, as time goes by and TRAs get increasingly insane and furious, I find myself less inclined to use transwoman and more comfortable using MTT. However in discussion it's often not individual MTTs I'm referring to, but TRAs, which is a term in itself and probably the one I use most frequently.

Phyllis, do you not see how arse about face it is that women, who are globally oppressed by and because of our biology, should be instructed to "check our privilege" by biological males, regardless of how such males wish to present themselves?

Women don't have privilege over men. Any MTT who tried to get me to apologise for being born into the subordinate sex class would get a very sharp answer.

Prawn, I don't think women have privilege over men at all. I think I had just spent a lot of time around the LGBT community.

To be honest, though, since my pregnancy, I haven't really seen any of my LGBT friends. Only my straight female friends have come round to see me.

Last year, I was on a night out and there was a trans woman (no longer a friend, not the ones I referenced in Caitlin thread) who blocked me from all social media because I had supposedly been taking the piss out of the term 'cis' by referring to my friends that weren't trans as 'sis' as in sister.

I've just felt overly cautious with terms ever since, like I always feel that I'm the one in the wrong and I'm the one that needs to show respect.

Women don't have privilege over men. Any MTT who tried to get me to apologise for being born into the subordinate sex class would get a very sharp answer.

That's why I don't really care about being seen as a TERF. No need to pander to that attitude and entitlement. I'm not going to, so don't even start with me.

Phyllis... are you starting to see the light?!

Absolutely Venus.

They can fucking cis your arse.

I really take offence at the term "cis" and will not use it or acknowledge it as a descriptor. I do not need to say what type of woman I am. I am a woman.

I am not bothered if I am called a TERF. I would never describe myself as a radical feminist, and I'm afraid the TRAs are probably right - I am a bit trans exclusionary these days. I never used to be, but the in the last couple of years the trans movement has become so fucking awful I cannot be bothered with any of it now. Well done, TRAs.

For millennia men have defined what it is to be a woman. They used to call you an "unnatural woman" if you didn't want children, if you didn't want to have sex with them or if you didn't conform to whichever version of womanhood was in vogue at that time.

"Cis" is just the modern version of this. I suspect for some TRAs, the only true women are the ones with a penis.

TalkingintheDark, haha! I think you've all definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things. I don't want to use the term cis ever again. I don't think I'll ever agree on everything with the majority of you, but I'm strongly thinking about how trans are impacting on women's rights.

I still hold my opinion firmly that the majority of trans people (whether male or female) are not wanting access to the toilets because they're sexually perverse. They've been born a certain way that they can't help, and they just want to be able to live their lives as comfortably as the rest of us.