#CisIsNotASlur trending on Twitter

[Slythermum]

I'm assuming through the garbled wordfuckery I'm seeing on twitter that this is people who don't understand language who are using that this is in response to:

a) The BBC article about Lesbians
b) Women objecting to the word "cis"
c) Shut up women
d) Dinosaurs
e) Shut up Lesbians
f) fannies

Meanwhile, my daughter has said girls in her class are saying "down with the cis bus" "cis people are evil", "cis should die" etc

@TurquoiseBaubles

I never even heard the word cis as applied to human beings until about ten years ago. Presumably no-one had a gender identity before that - why assume we all have one now?

I must admit when I first heard it used this way I did think that there were some women very enthusiastic about chemistry

So the WHO link, which many of us have seen before, that Millicispud linked says:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

Norms. Behaviours. Roles.

Well, norms covers the ‘cultural’ aspect that was mentioned upthread.

Tell us again Millicispud and catherina what aspect of behaviours and roles are not ‘stereotypes’?

This is the official guidance apparently. According to Mllli, who defined it as culturally, mentally and personally. The ‘mentally and personally’ drives ‘behaviour’.

I’d like to know just what research milli undertook to discover their gender identity. Because since they are so knowledgeable, they should actually be able to describe it so we can understand.

I don’t expect anything more from Catherina because they have not produced any usable definition in all their time on this board.

But the pivot away from stereotypes is a fairly recent move by activists to a ‘deeply held feeling’.

Well, my culturally, personally and mentally derived identity is that of ‘a person’ with no gender at all because I don’t believe in gender identity.

While we have our gender experts, can they please tell us how anyone knows whether they are ‘genderfuck’? I have not yet heard a usable description yet.

This forcing a prefix is not acceptable when gender identity is basically indescribable. It is as inane and meaningless as ‘non-binary’ at the same time of declaring there is over 100 genders. What is the difference between non-binary and agender?

So, I wait for anyone to tell us what part of ‘behaviours and roles’ is not based on stereotypes to ‘sort into woman and man’ gender identities.

I will not be told by any man (whether he's wearing a beard or a frock ... or both is irrelevant) that I am part of a subset of 'women' called a 'ciswoman' . Cis is a slur .
I am a woman . An adult female human .
Transwomen are not women , they are men .

I don't know how one can be "mentally" a woman without resorting to stereotypes, but I do respect Millicispud for sticking around and providing some kind of definition for gender identity.

Catching up on this thread, and I have a question for genderists: why do you have to get so snarky and nasty? You obviously want to tell us what gender is and get us to accept we are cis. You engage in good faith up to a point and then become bitter. Now here’s my suspicion… you actually can’t define gender identity. You say it has nothing to do with biological sex and nothing to do with gender roles or stereotypes. But in fact it’s impossible to define gender identity without reference to these things, so that’s why you resort to saying that gender is vaguely to do with the self or ones culture or whatever.

And it does make me think about why you do this. Why you contort yourselves to say that gender is this deep innate “feeling” (the content of which is never specified). And I think the reason is this. Because you know that if you say that gender identity is about clothes, makeup, hobbies, personality (which by the way is the gender bread definition), if you say that a woman is anyone who likes dresses and kittens and baking … well that is breathtakingly and obviously sexist. It’s not politically correct to say that women are women because we like pink or enjoy being submissive (another definition, courtesy of Andrea chu who says being a woman is about entirely subsuming oneself to another’s desires). You know this will got down like a lead balloon, and so that’s why you evade and dance round the issue. You throw out some vague half baked shit in the hope we’ll accept it (gender is the self!) and then when we don’t buy it you just give up and resort to insults - we are bigots, we’re stupid, we’re a cult etc. It’s pretty transparent.

You’ll deny it, of course, but what I keep coming back to is the fact I’ve been reading this board for a long time and no one from the genderist side has been able to define these concepts adequately. Or they do eventually hint that they are women because they are soft, kind, love glitter etc in which case gender critical feminists reply with an incredulous “really?”

What a brilliant thread. Also typical that once the decision was made to avoid answering questions, the insults started. I’m place marking, because the discussion here is an exemplar of the sheer illogicality of it all.

If cis is just a useful prefix to describe feelings in relation to one's birth state, then does that imply that it can be used with other characteristics as well?

So, cis age? Cis race? Cis hair colour? Cis species?

If you're born with a disability and that characteristic forms a large part of your identity, would you be cis-abled?

@WeeBisom

Catching up on this thread, and I have a question for genderists: why do you have to get so snarky and nasty? You obviously want to tell us what gender is and get us to accept we are cis. You engage in good faith up to a point and then become bitter. Now here’s my suspicion… you actually can’t define gender identity. You say it has nothing to do with biological sex and nothing to do with gender roles or stereotypes. But in fact it’s impossible to define gender identity without reference to these things, so that’s why you resort to saying that gender is vaguely to do with the self or ones culture or whatever.

And it does make me think about why you do this. Why you contort yourselves to say that gender is this deep innate “feeling” (the content of which is never specified). And I think the reason is this. Because you know that if you say that gender identity is about clothes, makeup, hobbies, personality (which by the way is the gender bread definition), if you say that a woman is anyone who likes dresses and kittens and baking … well that is breathtakingly and obviously sexist. It’s not politically correct to say that women are women because we like pink or enjoy being submissive (another definition, courtesy of Andrea chu who says being a woman is about entirely subsuming oneself to another’s desires). You know this will got down like a lead balloon, and so that’s why you evade and dance round the issue. You throw out some vague half baked shit in the hope we’ll accept it (gender is the self!) and then when we don’t buy it you just give up and resort to insults - we are bigots, we’re stupid, we’re a cult etc. It’s pretty transparent.

You’ll deny it, of course, but what I keep coming back to is the fact I’ve been reading this board for a long time and no one from the genderist side has been able to define these concepts adequately. Or they do eventually hint that they are women because they are soft, kind, love glitter etc in which case gender critical feminists reply with an incredulous “really?”

This. All of it.

And for the record, many TRAs did say thinks like I just feel so nurturing, or vibrant, or dainty, etc. Using stereotypes to describe their 'gender'. Until it went more mainstream and they got told it was sexist bollocks.

So now it's morphed into something conveniently indefinable.

(Except for uninformed parents who didn't get the memo, banging on about their sons liking dolls and glitter so they must be a girl).

Exactly right. Like with so much, you look to what they are not saying. And they say we GC don't want gender non-conformity, when actually we are saying wear what you like, but be aware it doesn't change your sex.

I'm cis, my partners are cis, almost all the women I know are cis.

Fine, you can call yourself what you like. I’m a woman. I’m not cis because I won’t use a silly expression that was made up to fit the claim that there are other kinds of women.

I was an English language teacher for years, thanks, and have a degree in linguistics.
Still not cis. Still not trans

I’m not cis, I’m not trans. I’m a woman and feminist who doesn’t believe in gender identity which is based on artificial, limiting and oppressive stereotypes. I did my bloody dissertation at university 25 years ago on characters in literature transcending stereotypes and prescribed societal roles within patriarchal society. Could now write the same thing about gender identity!

Cis is reductive and assumptive and also used pejoratively.

This is all so fucking boring but also stupid and damaging.

GREAT!

I'm neither cis nor trans and don't appreciate people telling me how to describe myself.

Interestingly cis is quite a regular prefix in modern French (Cisjordanie, cisalpin). It is used to refer to the other side of something of roughly comparable size / status, not pairs with clear majority/minority relationships.

If I were to believe in gender, I would believe that every single person the world was non-binary. Why are some people allowed to call me cis, when I’m sure they would not agree to me imposing my belief that they were non-binary on them?

In fact, in my gender world, the default gender is now amorphous, and anyone who strongly perceived themselves as having a set gender are now to be referred to as rigids.

Ridiculous as my proposal may seem initially, I think it probably has a lot more internal cohesion than the current definition.

I’m also using words that are long established, although I permit that their use describing gender is relatively recent. I also concede that rigid isn’t a perfect antonym of amorphous, but that’s perfectly fine, since there should be no diametric opposites in terms of gender.
I also accept that only a minority of people are currently using these words in the manner I am ascribing them, but language is always changing, so that has no bearing on their validity.

Cis is a useful prefix for describing spacial relationships, eg chemistry and geography. But it’s impossible to make a spacial relationship between unrelated concepts that are material and objective vs ethereal and subjective. Therefore the cis-trans distinction in social sciences is bollocks.

@Millicispud

It's just a descriptor; do people really get bent out of shape by being called cis?

I'm cis, my partners are cis, almost all the women I know are cis.

I am not. Anyone referring to me as such will be ignored. I am a woman. That is sufficient.

Still waiting for our gender experts to tell us reliably what genderfuck is.

And exactly what gender means, since they have done all this research, that isn’t even hinting at stereotypes and a person’s perception of how a gender ‘feels’ deeply held or not.

Link us to the exact research that convince you. The WHO is not convincing at all.

And millicispud talks about ‘wards’, I hope that they very much understand safeguarding for females and what that means. Because no female should be acceptable collateral damage for a male’s ‘needs’.

Exactly, weebisom. It's worth looking at the questions that they consistently refuse to answer. Not just yesterday but over the years since I've been here.
What is gender?
What is a woman? (Non- circular definition)
How can I find out what my gender is, (when I and society around me have used "woman", "he/she" etc to refer to biological sex our whole lives)?
How can a sex match a gender? What are the supposed "matched" pairs?
Is same-sex orientation perfectly valid or is it bigoted prejudice and/or does it need to be "checked" in case it's bigoted because society?
Should women/ any person with different political or religious beliefs be believed about their sexual experiences and gender identity?
Can "gender" broadly be described as essentially masculinity and femininity? (Which are entirely separate from sex). This last one is, to me, a slightly odd one to not answer. I'd understand gender a lot more if it was, generally, masculinity and femininity. But it has been insisted that that's nothing to do with it.

That's before we get into practicalities like the Staniland question.

Interestingly, there are trans women (not all) who have posted here who agree with what I thought transgender used to be - wanting other people to think you are the opposite sex. They will talk more about femininity/ masculinity, body dysmorphia and the importance of appearances, rather more than basing everything on an indefinable feeling-essence.

Still waiting for our gender experts to tell us reliably what genderfuck is
Nolan asked that of the non-binary, er person that he interviewed, but [pronoun] didn't have any sort of coherent answer. IIRC, [pronoun] said it wasn't up to [pronoun] to say what one of them was because er um waffle. Or something.

You could feel Nolan's brain quietly frying inside his skull while all this was going on.

I'd just like to say that I fucking resent having to school my language around an ideology that I think is utter bullshit. It's compelled speech, not something I ever expected in a liberal democracy, but here we are.

Yes Grumpyosaurus. The mayor was enlightening in his ignorance.

But we have a poster who stated they researched their gender identity so should have be able to tell us how and what sources (outside the WHO which doesn’t quite match what that poster is saying) they used.

After all, they are the one calling non-believers a cult.

As I said, Catherina has attempted to educate us in the past.

Well no, if you don't like the idea of any prefix, it's just women.

Trans and cis are just prefixes.

Nope. The only way "cis" would work for that is if "cis woman" meant a biological female person who didn't identify as transgender, and "trans woman" meant a biological female person who did.

But that's not how it is used. It presupposes adherence to what I consider a false belief in gender identity ideology.