From Fuck Yeah Gender Studies:
Anonymous asked: Cis is when you’re gender and behaviour aligns to your genitalia. So my previous ask was pretty valid, actually. Remember? The whole ‘manly man’ analogy? And what I said about cultural and visual cues – I am, apparently, ‘cis’ if I have muscles, facial hair and my voice is deep, right? That’s pathetic, and a low blow from the feminist/queer community who really should be more astute and sensitive with this stuff. To be labelled for feeling comfortable in my own skin is ridiculous…
From Taking Up Too Much Space:
I think it’s high time we admitted it: “Cis” IS an insult.
That’s right. Because by calling you cis, we’re calling you no better than a fucking tranny*, and THAT, my friends, is one of the worst insults we’ve got in US culture. We’re calling you no more real than us, and we’re not real. We’re calling you no more a woman than us, that you deserve no more respect than us, and in your eyes, that means tranny-alert.com, that means Ann Coulter jokes, that means it’s fine for the general public to post videos of your genitals all over the internet with big purple arrows and random fetishizing speculations, and fire you unless you show us photos of your genitals. It’s saying you can’t apply makeup. It’s insulting your penis size and your manhood. It’s saying that the only difference between us is that you think you’re better than us.
Hell yeah, it’s an insult. Well, that is, so long as you’re unwilling to give up on cis supremacy.
*Obviously, I mean this in the un-reclaimed, insulting sense of the word.
Point being, people who understand that transgender men and women are equal and normal don’t get upset about the word “cisgender”, which is a term meant to establish equivalency. Whereas transphobes and haters clearly would get upset about it because in their own minds they are better than trans people, words that describe them never need to be qualified, and, by this person’s own reflective self-admission, it would not be ridiculous at all to give labels to people who are not comfortable in their own skin (which doesn’t even always describe the trans* experience, but certainly does apply to many cis people I know).
Hopefully this guy was just a troll.
I just saw this. The commentary is great.
It definitely bears reblogging, because i do get quite a few comments/asks about cis and how it’s “objectifying” and shit. Yeah, it’s not.
I also believe that much of the offense originates from the fact that they (cis males) didn’t come up with the word that names cis as a marker in the first place. How many of the words that define the oppressed actually originated within the oppressed group itself? Few I can think of. In the vast majority of cases, the oppressed reclaimed the word and gave it a new meaning, throwing it back at the face of the oppressor and, through active work, rendering it untouchable for the oppressor (the N word is a good example of this; but there are many others, almost all derogatory terms related to race that have been reclaimed by the minorities to which the word refers to fall in this category).
Cisgendered, on the other hand, is a word coined by either a transwoman, Dana Leland Defosse or a transman, Carl Buijs (there seems to be a dispute over who of them used the word first, although there is a general agreement that both thought of the word independently from one another). The word caught up and became widely accepted and common. And I believe that is part of the problem: it is one of the few instances I can think of when an oppressed person/ group actually named something that became meaningful. And that is why it is perceived as an insult, because within oppressive structures, the oppressed should never denote or assign meaning.
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