Do women like 'cis'?

[CisMyArse]

Bloody gone and tangled myself in a twitter argument.

I don't like the term Cis, not many here do neither. I should have worded it differently, but I can't let it go. Someone has asked me how I can speak for all women and I don't know how to retort

I believe in gender equality, and that feminism is for the benefit of everyone

Fruitdeloop Feminism is not about equality or about benefitting everyone. What feminism fights for is to free women from oppression. Feminism (real good old fashioned radical feminism) smdoed not want equality within a patriarchal system, it seeks to bring down that system. Why don't you simply describe yourself as a woman? That's what you are if you were born a biological girl.

For me, and for many of my friends (both trans and cis) gender-identity is not the same as gender expression, gender expression being the 'stereotypical' constructs and expectations. For us, gender ID is the innate feeling of being male or female

Is it possible to explain how gender-identity isn't the same as gender-expression? Because if you move away from stereotypes you're really left with the very basics of the differences between the sex - i.e your biology. Feelings aren't reliable. Feelings are something I associate with religion.

This is going to sound far ruder than it's meant to but I simply don't understand how someone who is clever enough to be at university can think something like this. University is supposed to teach critical thinking. It's supposed to be about objective evidence and robustly being able to defend one's position. The above us all about subjective, possibly variable feelings. I know that's where post-modernism has come along and tipped everything upside down but it's just a bit intellectually embarrassing. Loop that isn't even personal to you. It's about a system which is generating these kind of arguments as if they're credible. To my mind it's on a par with someone saying we have a collective consciousness and that if 50 people know something, 50,000 do, or homeopathy being real.

I have to say as a real old school person who lived in an era when you had to be bright to get into university, fruitdeloop strikes me as very stolid and remove..not very bright.

My user name tells you what I think about cis!

I am a woman, an adult human female. This is the word to describe my actual, physical biology, my reproductive system, not my clothes, hobbies or personality.

I am not a 'cis' woman, because that simply does not make sense. I can never be 'on this side' of woman, because 'woman' doesn't have sides. I will always be a woman, regardless of how masculine or feminine I appear.

Cis woman is not the opposite of transwoman. Transman is the opposite of transwoman.

Transwoman is not a subset of 'woman'. Transwoman is a subset of man.

If you want to specify whether a woman is trans or not, you do not need the term 'cis'. Woman and transman covers this.

If you want to discuss a woman and, say, Paris Lees, then 'woman' and 'transwoman' covers this.

You might well need to divide women into subsets such as old/young, rich/poor etc if you are comparing different adult human females, but 'woman' does not need any sort of prefix if she is being compared to a man. The word 'woman' says it all.

Teaching biology at universities must be a minefield these days. Seeing as they're so "right on" with their language, do they still use words and phrases like Man Made, and Mankind, therefore misgendering half the population?

humpty.jpg

Sorry everyone - I didn't intend to drop and run. I'll catch up when things are less crazy. Awful couple of days and I'll be posting when I catch up.

Tralalee

Good. I self identify as not cis. So don't call me cis. Hth.

I'd be delighted to not have to call you, or myself, or any other person, cis. I'll happily call ALL women simply 'woman', and no longer split them into cis and trans. Only that would make it a tad odd to discuss the issue of the changes to the GRA...
For example: "Women are afraid that by allowing women into women-only spaces will make women feel unsafe." makes little sense.

Well that is what happens to language when you take a word and use it to mean something it doesn't.

Washingupwarrior there’s no need to add cis.
Woman = woman
Trans woman = trans woman

The cis is pointless

*swivelchair

It means we are getting closer to ditching the connection between one's body parts and one's gender.

But it's not is it? It means we've just added a new box for people who believe in gender, feel that the one that society assigns to their sex is wrong, and want to be the gender assigned to the other sex.

Personally, I feel we should chuck out the whole notion of gender, and all that matters, and even then, only matters for some things, is sex.*

I agree.

The only thing I see differently is that accepting that people can identify as a gender is a step towards ditching gender. Not a smooth or perfect step, but no progress is ever smooth or perfect.

If as a society we accept that people are free to pick their own gender, or no gender, this clearly shows that gender is not necessarily related to body parts. For some people it is, for others it is not, but the obvious conclusion is that gender is not a physical thing. And then, we can let go of gender as a whole and see the desire to, for example, ride a motorbike or wear lipstick as the personal choices and preferences that they are.

Cis (and TERF) are just meaningless blah to me now. Even gender is becoming a bit of a bollocks word to me.

“Women are afraid that by allowing men...” does make sense though, and doesn’t dance around the core problem which is that women have women only spaces because of their biological sex, not because of gender, and they are worried about people with male bodies, regardless of how they identify.

Women aren’t being allowed to name the problem because of this barmy, flat earthy, unicorny belief that everybody has a gender identity which supersedes physical reality.

Transgender identified males are a subset of males not females so it is absurd to call them women.

For purposes of clarity laws that address sex segregated spacer should be written using the correct and easily understood terms male and female.

woman.

woman who does not like the gender stereotyped usual things, but still woman.

What I don’t get is why do they need to make such a massive deal about it.
I’m a woman. I know this because I was born with a vagina.
I hate my breasts and I’m saving to have a reduction to nothing.
I’ll still be a woman.
I know a woman with short hair who loves rugby, football and drinking pints with the lads. She’s still a woman.
I know a man who has long hair and wears make up, he’s a man.

What’s wrong with man, woman and a billion different personalities?

I think cis is a nonsense term

As is gender if I'm honest. It's a philosophical concept which is being expected to replace universally accepted scientific truths. Akin to pushing creationism over evolution (a bit extreme perhaps but you get the point)

I am a woman as I was born and woman and have two X chromosomes (obviously there are intersex people but that is a whole different issue and not relevant to this debate)

Some days i curl my hair and plaster on make up and wear pink dresses

Some days I wear a tracksuit, scrape my hair up and play video games all day

So what on earth does that say about my gender? The concept of gender just reinforces the idea that certain behaviours are attributed to a certain sex. It's regressive in my opinion. A few years ago there was an upheaval against toys which are targeted toward girls, such as barbie dolls- as we should be teaching young girls that there is more to being a woman than having beautiful long hair, manicured nails and wearing high heels. Now men dress up as barbie dolls, and say that's what makes them women, and we should see them as empowered for it.

Just live and let live and stick to the basic science. No need for the alphabet soup of genders that we are now stuck with.

"I don't like the term Cis, not many here do neither. I should have worded it differently, but I can't let it go. Someone has asked me how I can speak for all women and I don't know how to retort"

You don't need to speak for all women, you are speaking for you.

And I agree with you.

Cis woman is also quite offensive, as it bases your entire womanhood on whether or not you were born with a penis.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I hardly ever hear the term cis man???

For example: "Women are afraid that by allowing women into women-only spaces will make women feel unsafe." makes little sense.

It is only making little sense (at least you can see that much!) because you are taking words and changing them to suit your own ideals.
Why reassign women and mislabel them (don't mislabel me! I'm a WOMAN) in itself?
You're effectively taking a word and making it mean something else.
Woman is woman, man is man.
Say trans man, say trans woman, but cis woman is an unneeded prefix as there is already a perfectly good name for us. Women.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I hardly ever hear the term cis man???

That's what I was thinking too! Do you tell a man they are a cis man? Genuine question.

No I'm not a molecular (is also used in chemistry)

Are we now down to defining women by the penis?

That's what "cis" means to me.

I don't know any woman with a penis.

I don't know any woman with a penis.

That's what it boils down to,isn't it. People saying that "women have penises too."
So seemingly trying to rewrite language, history,and erase biology to fit an ideal.

For me, I see cis as something similar to using the phrase neurotypical. It would be hugely offensive to say normal people vs people with autism/Downs syndrome etc. So in that vein I can understand using cis to differentiate between trans women and normal women, and using it makes no difference to me in those discussions.

I'd never go around describing myself as a neurotypical person, only when discussing sn issues.

However I also see it used to dismiss women, so I'm not on board with that and that makes me rethink it.