Could we reclaim "cis"?

[rocketpocket]

I am mainly just thinking out loud here and happy to be told to stop being ridiculous.

I know a lot of the women on here are deeply unhappy with the cis label but I was wondering if it's something we could actually work with.

Cis basically just means a person that identifies as the sex/gender that they were assigned at birth, right?

Wouldn't it be better if we reclaimed the label and had ciswomen only shortlists or ciswomen only refuges or ciswomen only sporting categories?

Perhaps transwomen can be women but they can never be ciswomen.

I think I understand the anger at the definition of "woman" being changed and all the rest. I suppose this is an "if you can't beat them, join them" solution. Is it terrible?

I don’t identify with the gender stereotypes associated with my sex. They’re pretty negative and hugely damaging to women in many aspects of our lives.

So no, I’m not a cis woman, but I am a woman.

Call me a derogatory name + woman and no, I’m going to be offended, whether it’s cis woman, fat woman etc. It is not a name I wish to reclaim.

rocketpocket

'Cis' has no meaning when applied to humanity. It is a Latin term applied in geography and in molecular chemistry. It is yet another misappropriation by the trans community.

No, we couldn't. 'Reclaiming' it would just be the same as accepting it.
The only thing to do is push back every single time by politely correcting them and informing them that woman is the correct word to describe an adult human female.

cis does have meaning as a result of usage. It's how language works.

However, if women adopt it they are accepting that they identify with the gender stereotype associated with their sex in order to be considered as women. If they don't, they're non-women in some impossible to define way.

Some women might accept the label but anyone with any awareness of what that means would reject cis as being a gift to potential oppressors.

I wasn't "assigned" anything at birth. Like everyone else, my sex was observed and recorded.

NO.

@jacky: Transgender, cisalpine, and trans- in trans-isomers are all adjectives, not verbs, that's why transport doesn't have a corresponding "cisport" :)

Also I'm no historian but I think the term was coined by somebody who wasn't trans (not sure what word is ok to use here sorry?), older trans people seemed to use "natal" or "genetic" as an antonym for trans.

@rocket: most trans people would be fine with that, it's the whole "you're not even a trans woman you're a MAN use that label" that's grating in my experience :)

rocketpocket

Think of all the words that include 'trans' :

www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-start-with-trans

Is the antonym of these words 'cis... ' ?

No can’t reclaim
Yes terrible

If we’re going to be called ciswomen, are men going to be known as cismen ? Only seems fair.

You cant reclaim something you never owned in the first place. Cis wasn't something we had that was taken from us.

We can reclaim 'woman' and 'female'.

REclaim??? How can we (and why would we want to) REclaim something that we never claimed or wanted in the first place?

And is it Cis as in Sis-ter, or Cis as in Kiss?

Cross-post with Upstart

Perhaps transwomen can be women but they can never be ciswomen.

If women were to bow down and accept the label "ciswomen", then there will be an aggressive campaign for penis people to also be given the label "ciswomen". Since they'll already have won the main battle in the war, that is women relinquishing that they are "women", this would be pushed harder than you could imagine. Also, defending "ciswomen" would be practically impossible because it is ridiculous and meaningless when referred to people being "non-trans", where these days "trans" is a meaningless label.

@petal: it's pronounced "sis" and yes, if a man's not a trans then I'd personally call him a "cis man" which is objectively one of the most boring creatures on God's green earth

we are reclaiming the word "woman" by utterly and totally rejecting the term "cis" forever

Quite frankly, I think trans people should just own the trans and accept the fact they cannot be and will not ever be the same as the people born in the opposite sex (unless they invent a time-machine AND a transmogrifying machine to actually change gamete production). Our current definitions are sex-based, and nobody has been able to come up with a satisfactory definitions of "woman" that reliably group females and trans women together which would require the prefix "cis" for females- without relying on how someone internally "identifies as." The "identify as" claim means absolutely nothing to me - as it would be like re-defining the word "lawyer" to "anyone who identifies as a lawyer." Such a definition won't exactly help me choose who should represent me in court.

Buying into "cis" means accepting this contradictory, faith-based, proselytising trans ideology - which I categorically will not do.

And the point is that whatever we are called, transwomen want the "label" too, because TWAW. They are identical to us, penis and all.

I utterly reject cis, it's a term put on me by men who want to insert themselves into the category woman to which they don't belong and have no claim to.

I also think using it wrt yourself when you're female is a sign of submission to they who must be obeyed.

So that's a no from me. I won't kneel.

No

No.

I am a woman. If, for the sake of clarity, in discussions people wish to draw a distinction between transwomen and women like me who were born biologically female then I'm happy with 'natal women'. My gender or sex wasn't assigned at birth though; my sex was observed at birth.

I am who I am. Me being a woman is like my eye colour or my skin colour. It's biologically part of me. I don't identify as being a woman. I am one. It just is.

No thankyou

Wouldn't it be better if we reclaimed the label and had ciswomen only shortlists or ciswomen only refuges or ciswomen only sporting categories?

So you would be excluding transmen (which are female!) from safe refuges during periods of male violence against them?