Explaining why 'cis' is offensive

[dianebrewster]

Just mulling over the whole thing after a comment on the thread about the Irish author being mauled on Twitter......how do you explain why you reject 'cis' ? etc

I lived in Dublin for a year in 1981-2; went up to NI a lot, The Troubles still very much ongoing. I was doing field work for my MA in the Jewish community in Ireland. I was told a joke about a Jew being stopped by a gang of armed men at the border. Demanding to know who he was, was he Catholic or Protestant? He replied he was a Jew, "but are ye a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?".

I was brought up Catholic (left it 30yrs ago) but had family members who very much saw the the world as Catholic vs Protestant - ie everyone who wasn't a Catholic fell into the category of Protestant.

The TRAs insisting on the trans / cis division, for me, is like asking an atheist whether they're a Catholic or Protestant. I reject the very basis of the original belief system. I cant be Catholic or Protestant because I'm not a Christian, I can't be trans or Cis because I don't believe in gender identity.

Does that make sense to anyone other than me? 🤨

• how that correlates

I like Kenan Malik's observation about identity politics:

'In the space of twenty years, I went from being called Indian, to Pakistani, to Asian, to Black, to Muslim.'

eresh I once had that [it is just a description like tall, or fat] thrown at me. I can just imagine the head tilt as they were typing, I have to admit I disengaged at that point, I shouldn't have explain why I find it offensive and it ends up just trying to argue with a toddler - why? but?

No Lord, CJ didn't actually say that but the reasoning is Genderist reasoning (if you can call it that)...

Being cat called and sexually harassed = cis privilege

Menstruation and other gynaecological stuff = cis privilege

Pregnancy and childbirth = cis privilege

And iirc there was a blog talking about the cis privilege of abortion ffs.

This is why women and girls must stfu and check our cis privilege wrt anything to do with actual female biology and how it affects our lives and centre the brace&stunning instead.

Meet the new (Genderist) boss, same as the old boss.

Whoops, brave not brace d'oh!

cis is an interesting prefix

While some may posit that it i used as it is the opposite of trans in a scientific context of chemistry / biology, I would argue that language is always important and in these times of unprecedented social engineering we have to question the use of cis as a prefix.

cis is pronounced as “Siss” and the obvious associations is “sis” and “sissy”

Sissy is an insulting word used to describe a man or boy perceived as being effeminate or overly sensitive.

Thus we have a bizarre situation in which the prefix “cis” when applied to a man or boy suggest an effeminate type of masculinity and when applied to a woman or girl suggests a lack of authenticity, a false female who is really a male pretending to be a woman or girl.

This in just one of the reasons that I find the prefix cis to be disempowering and invalidating.

cis is never used for men, that alone means it's a term used to minimise women.

cis is never used for men, that alone means it's a term used to minimise women.

I think you will find that it is used for men.

A male friend undertook gender awareness training as part of his public sector job recently. He told me that "apparently now I am not a man I am a cis man".

According to him all of his colleagues attending just took it with a pinch of salt and would not dream of speaking out as to do so could risk their jobs.

This is happening all over the country unfortunately, especially within the public sector.

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1118063661552209920

This was good, but JCJ account is locked down so for those who can't see:

Retweeted Alex von Tunzelmann
That you won't even engage with the repeated, detailed, essay-length explanations we've been writing FOR YEARS about why we reject this term is pretty indicative.

You impose the term on us, and then you impose the reason why we reject the term on us, and you call that justice.
And the fact that you keep relying on an archaic usage of the words trans and cis in order to justify the whole house of card is pretty indicative.

In normal English usage, 'trans' means 'across.' It was used, originally in transsexual, to denote people who moved from one
sex class to be perceived as members of another sex class. Which is actually a pretty honest description of what trans experience is - or was before you rewrote the whole script around the magic 'I've always been a woman' gender essences.

What is it supposed to mean now??? On the other side of what?? Transition (it can't be that???). And cis people are on 'this side' of what????

Throw up whatever 'But it's Latin!' smokescreen you want...

1. 'Cis' is an ideological term used within the conceptual system of transideology and denotes people whose 'gender identity' matches their 'assigned sex at birth.'
2. We reject both the concept of gender identity and of assigned sex, therefore we reject the concept of 'cis.'
3. You cannot using this definition distinguish a GNC person from a transperson. If cis people accept the gender identity proper to their sex, then why are GNC people not trans??? If you want to make that distinction, you might have to go back to something more honest like dysphoria. That might be helpful all round.

. Gender is an oppressive system. Women will not accept being told that our existence as women depends on our identification with the system of our subordination. And it not politically reasonable in the slightest to request, let alone demand, this

1. Gender is an oppressive system. Women will not accept being told that our existence as women depends on our identification with the system of our subordination. And it not politically reasonable in the slightest to request, let alone demand, this.

1. The cis/trans binary functions to flip the axis of oppression and to position female people as the oppressors of male people. It therefore plays a massive role in this conflict in justifying removing women's protections by claiming they are the artefacts of domination.

Restricting VAW services to be female only is NOT the same as Jim Crow. And if you had any respect for the oppression of women qua women that would be obvious.

Cis thus functions to deny women political rights as an oppressed class. It's the LEAST neutral term in the world.

Sorry the first post was accidental

• I have overlapped point 4. so hopefully it makes sense.

If some women can be cis and some trans (e.g. male), then the definition of woman is not biological. Only people who're happy to redefine woman away from adult human female can accept cis.

Yes. Transwoman means malewoman, cis woman means female woman. If both males and females are woman, what is the definition of woman?

If the same applies to men, what is the definition of man, and how are men different to women?

The problem is that they will not respond to logical arguments because the ideology is not rooted in logic, it's rooted in feelings - therefore is religious.

If I say I believe in god because I have had religious experiences - I've felt the presence of something more than is explicable by logic - then I'm opening myself up to people saying "well I haven't had those experiences, I think you're delusional " or "yes I've had similar but I wouldn't say they were experiences of God"

This is no different to the discourse coming out of trans activism - feelings and experiences given an explanation.

Except we are told we cannot question the latter .

This Irish Times quote gets to the nub of it:

It is, basically, the opposite of transgender. I am a trans woman. Trans is just one of the adjectives that can be used to describe me. I am also a white woman, a fat woman, a gay woman, a funny woman (I hope), a kind woman (I also hope). I am all of these things and I am so much more. I am not, however, a cis woman for the very reason that I am, as already mentioned, transgender.

According to this thinking, a cis woman is a woman just like a trans woman is a woman. Cis and trans are types of women.
If you don't believe TWAW (and I don't) you won't believe you are cis.

Makes sense to me - and I imagine to many Irish people.

A while back I asked about explaining (in a one liner) why the term cis is objectionable and there were some great replies so sharing here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3533908-One-liner-as-to-why-cis-is-objectionable-please

If I say I believe in god because I have had religious experiences - I've felt the presence of something more than is explicable by logic - then I'm opening myself up to people saying "well I haven't had those experiences, I think you're delusional " or "yes I've had similar but I wouldn't say they were experiences of God"

Very well put. I write this as someone who has had religious experiences but would never dream of forcing others to accept my internal, entirely subjective, experience, as real or valid, much less change laws according to that internal perspective. The sheer arrogance behind such demands!

If you don't believe TWAW (and I don't) you won't believe you are cis.

That's it. I will be very happy to explain my evidence based view that gender ideology is false and gender is an oppressive social construct based on sex role stereotypes if questioned. But I'm not going to pretend I buy into it, for anyone. So a resounding "no" to "cis".

In today's world of identity politics we have the right to pick our own labels.
I reject cis and it is my right to do so. My "gender identity" does not line up with my "assigned" sex.
I don't have a gender identity, just a personality that's been shaped by my own actions and pressures from people around me. I wasn't assigned a sex. That was determined at the moment of conception and was then observed at my birth.
I reject cis because it's regressive and tries to put people in neat little boxes. I reject cis because I reject the boxes.

I wouldn't accept anyone calling themselves trans-Asian/trans-BAME and then insisting that as a cis-Asian/BAME person, I did not experience as much racism as them.

I don't accept it when it comes to sex either.

I’m now genderfree. It got too exhausting explaining why I wasn’t cis all the time! Genderfree fits and is quicker.

I toyed with genderfree - it has the advantage of using a framework they might get, but, OTOH, legitimises a framework I reject. I'll continue to ponder this one.

As far as I’m concerned, allowing the use of “cis” is yet again giving men the right to describe women. It is offensive because women already are and the word for women has a clear meaning acceptable to most of society.

Women are not a sub-set of women, they are the class itself.

Using a he term “cis” implicitly reinforces the idea that the default class is “men” and “cis women” and “transwomen”, are sub-sets of the class male.

So that would be a fuck right off with your cis bullshit.

Perhaps not so much feelings but story. Culturally we no longer identify with metanarratives. All the big institutions are noticing this with membership of churches, trade unions, political parties all down. Our identifiers are more about our and our families story and networks.

The problem with cis is that it is not my story. It is part of someone else's and it is being imposed on me. By imposing another persons narrative on me you are denying my narrative and my identity. When the person imposing that narrative is male and the person on whom the narrative is imposed is a woman, and given that women have been marginalised and outnarrated for generations, it really is all about male privilege.

The TRAs insisting on the trans / cis division, for me, is like asking an atheist whether they're a Catholic or Protestant. I reject the very basis of the original belief system. I cant be Catholic or Protestant because I'm not a Christian, I can't be trans or Cis because I don't believe in gender identity.

This bears repeating again and again.

Not a zombie thread, because people are still being asked to give their ‘gender identity’ on forms etc. I haven’t got one and I don’t want one foisted on me!