Yes! Colleague is NOT CIS!

[Babysharkdoodoodood]

Another female colleague (sgt) asked me what a cis woman is, as she'd been referred to as such. I explained that it's a made up construct etc etc etc

She exclaimed ' But I'm a woman. Not Cis or whatever.'

Getting there slowly but surely.

fucking Ironic that biological women are having the label ‘cis’ forced upon them isn’t it.

im a woman. End of.

Sorry, I did miss the tone - mea culpa.

I am also at a loss about what the PP meant!

I keep checking my bank statement and just can’t find the direct debit anywhere, nor can I get my hands on the membership badge I must have been issued. More worryingly, I’m also missing the payments from the far right, US Christian fundamentalist lobby which, SM reliably informs me, have been secretly funding us all for years.

Which is a shame, as the mortgage will be a stretch next month without them.

Well, I guess it could be that. Or it could be a private joke. Who really knows (other than me, obvs)?

I clearly have far too much time on my hands today.

A cis woman is a woman who accepts and identifies with sexist ideas of how a woman ought to dress, present and behave and doesn't reject such gender stereotyping as offensive. There aren't many of them about but it's very insulting for anyone to assume that any woman is cis if she doesn't choose to define herself that way.

Ok, sorry 💐. It's probably best if I don't give up my day job to become a comedian just yet though!

I assumed "pater" = "father", so you are a dad, a bloke (obviously fine) but why would that automatically mean 'someone who belongs to the groups that are apparently out to 'cancel' women'? I don't think blokes are all out to cancel women, are they? Question applies even if you're not a bloke, btw.

Of course, this whole confusion could have been avoided by me simply asking the original PP what they meant!
Sorry for derailing everyone 🙄

I am a woman. No need for the CIS part. It means nothing to most normal women. If it's not impacting my rights, I'm happy for trans women if they want to call them selves a trans woman or even a woman. But I also will be calling myself a woman and won't have that taken away from me by men and TRA's.
Everyone knows trans people exist. They aren't imaginary, just like Women exist.

But this:
I'm happy for trans women if they want to call them selves a trans woman or even a woman.
is contradicted by this:
But I also will be calling myself a woman and won't have that taken away from me by men and TRA's.

If men and TRAs use the word 'woman' then it has been taken away from you, and all of us who are female.

Is Usain Bolt a cis black person then? He was biologically born black. And people who were not born black but now identify as being black exist. So Usain Bolt, he's cis black yes?

Yeah didn't think so. It's only women you want to control.

No-one is saying trans people do not exist. What I am saying is that I am not in a subset of womanhood.

If you take the 'cis' prefix, along with the assertion that trans women are women - you end up with a situation where the only people entitled to use the term 'woman' are trans women, and we actual, biological women are relegated to being ciswomen - a subset of our own sex class - and that is entirely unacceptable.

But I don't need any additional explanation as to what I am and I certainly don't need a man telling me that I am now in a subset of Female.

Trans can exist perfectly well without the need to demote me, tell me what I am called or intrude on my privacy.

There’s already a word for trans women. Why would the vast majority have the word cis applied to differentiate themselves from a tiny minority

In the context of discussions about transgender issues - eg pretty much every thread on this forum - differentiating between people who are transgender and those who are not is quite important. "Cis" or "cisgender" is generally frowned upon here, but "non-transgender" does the same job.

"non-transgender" does the same job.

No. I reject that completely.
As I said up thread: Lots of people exist who are different from me in some way. But I don't feel the need to use any labels to define myself as "not them".

🎯

And so do women. Real women. That’s why there is no need for the cis pre-fix. Just use transwomen and women. Except ‘transwomen’ don’t want that. Wonder why…

And if you don’t believe in it you end up getting labelled a ‘transphobe’.

You should not need to change the way you describe yourself though, in order to accommodate trans women.

I am a woman. Twenty years ago, or even five, nobody in my workplace or doctor's surgery or university needed me to categorise myself as anything other than a woman. I didn't need to qualify the word, because the word was pretty self explanatory, and still is. It denotes my biology. Not my love of pink lipstick or push up bras, not the way I choose to sit with my legs crossed daintily to one side, or the way I flick my hair or bat my eyelashes. Not the fact that I feel sexy in high heels. Just my biology. My chromosomes. My reproductive organs. My hormones, which are very different to those of a man. The fact that my body comes with a vagina and the means to carry, give birth to and feed a child. My menstruation. My menopause. All of that is the meaning of the word woman and absolutely nothing else.

Saying cis as a way of denoting a biological woman is nothing more than tautology. The word woman is enough. It's been enough for millenia. Nothing has changed about me, or billions of other women the world over. Why should our identity be relegated and diluted to a mere sub-category of woman, in order to accommodate somebody else's?

Cis my arse. I am a woman. It is enough.

In the context of talking about a group, having terms to define whether a person is in or not in that group makes conversation possible. If you want to talk about transgender people, and contrast them with people who are not transgender, then using "non-transgender" is entirely neutral, says nothing about the validity of transgender identities or their absence.

A similar example "In the United States, for example, about one in ten Muslims are married to Non-Muslims,"

If you don't object to this, but you object to non-transgender, I am not sure what your objection is.

But... we seem to get on fine on this forum without getting completely tied in knots of confusion without the need for "cis".

Trans woman
Woman

Job done.

Let's remove the term man and refer to all males as non-women?

I am not a non-muslim / non-runner / non-violinist / non-youth / non-anything else

I am defined by who I am - not by everything I don't belong to for several reasons:

• it is too clumsy
• it is un-necessary
• it places too much emphasis on what I am not, rather than what I am - it only allows me to be defined by groups of which I am not a member - and that is one huge big issue...

take that last reason - I am proudly a non-murderer - but I wouldn't wish to be defined only by my relationship to or not a group of murderers...

so why would any group have the arrogance to consider that they are so central to existence and human life that those not in the group can only be defined by being not-group members?!

Nah, it's bollocks, and I've had enough.

I was polite and said women and "transwomen" in a generous act of consideration towards vulnerable people, but that wasn't enough. A space was demanded between trans and woman to lay claim to being a subset of actual women. No sooner than that had been conceded the next step was to steal the word woman for themselves - renaming the womb carriers as cis-women.

Every inch given so far has resulted in the colonisers annexing another mile. I now say women and "men who identify as women" and don't give a stuff that it shatters delusions and bruises fragile egos.

If this intolerant new religion insists on forcing a prefix onto the word woman, then I will choose to use "real" or "genuine".

Woman and female are sex based words, and sex is decided at conception, it cannot be changed.

Gender (or preferred sex stereotypes) is no more relevant to me than a firmly held belief in astrology or homeopathy. I don't care about your gender or your pronouns, in exactly the same way I don't care about what star sign you were "born under" and what "house" the moon was in when you took your first breath. I'm not interested in persecuting you, or policing your language. I just want to give you a wide berth and require that you extend the exact same courtesies to me.

I still prefer the term ‘real woman’ - that one works for me.

And what’s all this hoopla about ‘transwomen’ ‘existing’?
Thanks for that. Yes. We know. All too well.

Woman and Trans Woman, or Man and Trans Man does the job just nicely. Why complicate it?

And also non-transgender? Seriously? So 99.99% of people should define themselves through the prism of the other 00.01%?

Wow.

I'm happy for you to @ me if you want to quote me. Especially if you're going to misrepresent what I was saying, to another poster.

I don't care what anyone wants to call themselves, including trans women who want to call them selves women. It doesn't mean they are women. A trans woman using the word woman doesn't take away the fact I am still a woman. They can call them selves woman/man/dog/cat/flying monkey for all I care.

People who claim a special identity differentiates them from people in general; women who identify as men differentiates them from other women; males who identify as women differentiates them from other men.
We don't need a special way of differentiating males who identify as women from women, because they are already differentiated in exactly the same way as other men are differentiated from women. So in that case, you could #JustSayMen. Women and males who identify as women are not a sex category, nor are they a gender category - in fact there is no utility in grouping these two cohorts. The only point of it is to include males in women's spaces, sports, facilities or services. Doesn't work for me.

Anyway, glad to hear about your work colleague, OP.