I remember back in the 90s, certain weirder straight people getting upset about the term 'straight'; after all, they weren't straight, they were _normal_! It's extremely weird to see this playing out again 30 years later.
I don’t remember it for straight but I definitely remember it for heterosexual, and abled. I think it’s not weird though, I think having so many examples proves it’s “normal” (ha!) It’s something about the updated language or discussions around it implying (or outright stating) that having not used it previously makes one morally wrong that gets people upset perhaps?
As an aside: I do think it’s reasonable to use the word “normal” when referring to a trait that, say, 90% of people share. It’s just that not having the trait shouldn’t be treated as bad, broken, or abnormal. For instance, it’s ok to think of being right-handed as normal or the default, just don’t treat being left-handed as bad or wrong.
It reminds me of the time when gay people were not that visible. Once the term "heterosexual" got more common, many people were freaked out to be described that way. I guess similarly others are so afraid of the transgender topic, they are scared of even being described as the groups at all. We'll just have to wait until they get over that too.
This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today. Like tall, or blonde, or young.
Sure, you can have another preferred label. You can even try to make it popular - maybe others will like it too. It wouldn't be the first time there's a shift like that.
By "get over it", I mean realise nobody's using it to insult them and there's zero impact on their lives due to the term existing. (For many, if they don't actively seek out conversations about this topic, they may not even realise it exists)
> This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today.
That may seem reasonable, and I certainly wouldn't want to argue against it, but I've seen enough discussions around these questions to know that what's written there is not entirely uncontroversial.
Firstly, even an indisputable fact can be offensive if you mention it in a context in which other people consider it to be entirely irrelevant.
Secondly, some activists vehemently deny the existence of "biological sex". They insist on talking about "gender assigned at birth" instead. I can tell you from experience that arguing with those people is not always productive.
Thirdly, although standard English uses two different pronouns for people, "he" and "she", so gender is an undeniable social fact in any community that speaks standard English, some languages (probably most languages) don't have gender so "gender" isn't such a simple factual thing in those communities. You may be able to infer gender from roles in society, behaviour or clothing styles but it's less clear.
I find the points really confusing / not saying what you seem to expect.
1. You can inject anything irrelevant into a conversation until it's offensive. You could do by constantly talking about cars, but it has no effect on the word "car".
2. In that case cis/trans still exists in terms of changing the gender.
3. Have you got a source for that? I won't pretend I'm a linguist, but most language families I'm aware of certainly have at least 2 genders. Many have 3. Quite a few assign genders to objects as well. Wikipedia lists just a few examples and some of them are further qualified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles... Even English is a qualified entry on that list and yet we have no issues taking about it. Coming from a way more gendered language natively, I can tell you it only makes this situation harder. English didn't have to deal with a "women are doctors now, but doctor is a male word" issue. I can have a whole conversation about someone in English and you wouldn't know their gender, but in other languages I know, I couldn't say a single sentence without it.
You can have a whole conversation about someone in English without revealing their gender, but it takes some skill. There's even a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game
I am not at all sure that most languages are genderless. I just get that impression. Once I even picked some random unrelated languages "at random" from a big list and then investigated them, painstakingly, and found that a large majority of them were genderless. It was hardly scientific because not only was it a small sample but I don't even know how to go about picking unrelated languages "at random" or even what that means. Definitely more research required! Though probably someone has already done the real research so I should just search the literature more diligently than just using a search engine.
Of course most of the languages that English speakers are familiar with are Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic and both of those language families happen to have genders (though Persian, in the Indo-European family, has lost the he/she distinction, and I think I read somewhere that one of the Afro-Asiatic languages has similarly lost the distinction: like Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic is a huge family).
Yes, though perhaps I'm not using the best terminology. English doesn't have "grammatical gender", so a noun like "table" or "wisdom" doesn't have a gender like it would in French or German, but there's a distinction in pronouns ("he" and "she") which many (perhaps most) languages don't have.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't seem to have a list of languages that lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of. It would be nice to have such a list, or to refine the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... so that it contains that information.
Finnish and Hungarian lack gender in the sense I'm thinking of, and so does spoken Chinese or old Chinese: I'm told that gender was introduced into the modern written language by Europeans. (I have often heard Chinese people say "he" instead of "she" or vice versa when speaking English. I don't think I've ever heard a French or German person make that mistake. I'm thinking of cases in which the speaker knows the gender of the person being referred to but is making a language error. I don't mean cases in which people incorrectly guess the person's gender, which is also interesting, but a different kind of error.)
Some people believe sex and gender are different things and gender is just sex based stereotypes. These views are legal and in the UK considered protected.
You wouldn't call someone transgender if they didn't believe they were trans, or someone a christian if they didn't believe in the bible, it's the same the other way round. If someone doesn't think gender is real, calling them it is putting a label on them they don't agree with.
I've then seen the label used to devalue people's opinions on things, so yes it can be a slur. Unfortunately these debates end up being so toxic due to people on both sides.
> calling them it is putting a label on them they don't agree with.
That does not follow from your examples. I don't have religious beliefs, therefore I'm an atheist - a label which wouldn't exist without religious views. The fact people have religious views does not devalue my ideas in any way and isn't insulting in any way.
People who don't believe gender can be different than gender/sex at birth do not even disagree with the idea of being cisgendered. They just don't agree that other options exist.
The objection to cisgendered is that it is based on the disputed belief that the categories of woman and man are further split into the subcategories trans and cis. Such that what was previously understood as woman (as in, an adult female human) is, per this belief, cis woman, and man who desires to be a woman (or some similar description) is now trans woman.
Many people who don't hold this belief oppose being referred to as cisgender or cis woman or cis man or cis, because it implicitly regards this belief as being true.
This is unlike the term atheist, which acknowledges that theistic beliefs exist, but doesn't imply that any of these beliefs are true.
This is a factual description. Is your gender on the same side as your biological sex? That's all cisgender means today. Like tall, or blonde, or young.
“Mentally retarded” is a factual description of those with a certain degree of mental impairment.
Yes. People are allowed to have a preferred label. If there is a different label preferred by those people whose gender identity matches their gender assigned at birth/biological sex, please tell us what it is. We'll use it.
Unless, of course, the term is insulting to other people. In particular, words like "normal" are not useful, because they imply that other people are in some way defective. Trans people are not defective; they are perfectly healthy trans people.
So if you can tell me your preferred label, let me know, and I'll use it. But if you're really just saying you don't want to be labeled at all, then you're out of luck.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy to be labeled "cisgender". It seems accurate. The term has never been used as a term of opprobrium. Nobody has ever be threatened with it. So I'm perfectly happy.
If your experience differs, then let us know and we'll find a better label.
As much as I like Elon and think the term cisgender is stupid, this is such a bad look for him if X is meant to truly be the free speech platform. This is just woke but inverted.
> Common courtesy seems like a nice thing to do? If cis people don’t want to be called “cis” then we should use the label they prefer?
That is completely fair! My next question is: what proportion of cis people are offended by the word? I personally couldn't care less, and I can't think of anyone around me who cares more than me. I'm all for common courtesy, but it has to be based on something. "I don't like being called cisgenre and therefore I can conclude that all cisgenre dislike it too" seems a bit wrong to me.
It's not because of any "conspiracy theory". It's just parasitic ideas that infect young minds and spreads like a religion. This collection of ideas have evolved to appeal to people's emotions and paints a cynical picture of history which is then used to justify extreme actions.
Like I said, a lot of people are blind to this and take these parasitic ideas on good faith, when in reality we can have equality, human rights, etc., without thinking there is another group of oppressors that have been keeping humanity back... as you have just illustrated with your own opinion there.
If you think there is such a group of "horrible" people, you might want to reflect to what extent you have been affected by these pseudo-religious ideas.
> Why in the first place u need a separate word for that?
'Cis[whatever]' means 'Non-trans[whatever]', essentially. 'Non-trans' is an incredibly awkward phrasing; there is already a way to say that, and it is 'Cis'.
I wonder, in the more right-wing-aligned US universities, do history lectures have to talk about Julius Caesar being made governor of Non-Transalpine Gaul, to avoid offending the snowflakes by using the Forbidden Prefix. Cislunar space? Surely you mean Normal-lunar space, praise be to Musk.
Hmm you seem to be saying two different things here:
1. Words describing concepts you don't like are "slurs". Would you say that "genocide", "murder", "mobbing" are slurs, too?
2. Merely using a word means "forcing an ideology". If I talk about a genocide, would you think that I am trying to force my ideology (which would be... I guess an ideology of genocide, somehow)?
Do I get that right? I'm genuinely trying to understand.
The way I see it is this: there are people in the world who identify themselves with a gender that differs from their sex societally designated/assigned at birth. That is not an ideology, that is a fact. Instead of using this whole sentence when referring to them as a group, the word "transgender" (or "trans" for short) can be used. It is just a descriptive word.
Now if someone wants to refer to the group of people who are not trans, they can say "non-trans". I don't really see that as a word, but rather as a language construct ("not trans"). Instead of saying "non-trans", one can say "cisgender" ("cis" for short).
In my view, those words just describe factual groups of people. I genuinely don't see how they force an ideology (what ideology would that be?).
We should start calling all "normal" people as "non-murderers" since they don't murder people. Obviously since we have the word murderer, there needs to be a word for other section too. Isn't it. Calling them "normal", I guess is too much to absorb by fragile made-up trans egos.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this is exactly what the more sensitive right-wing snowflakes were professing to get upset about in the late 90s and early noughties, only about the term 'straight'.
It's astonishing to me, as a (WARNING: slur coming up if you happen to be Elon Musk) cis gay just how much they're copy-and-pasting 90s and noughties anti-gay tropes to go after the trans people. Extremely lazy hate movement.
(Obviously it's not like transphobia is new, but 20s-transphobia seems modelled after noughties-homophobia in a way that noughties-transphobia wasn't.)
I remember back in the 90s, certain weirder straight people getting upset about the term 'straight'; after all, they weren't straight, they were _normal_! It's extremely weird to see this playing out again 30 years later.
reply