A true sign of narcissism, reblogging myself here but some of this got buried between a bunch of other posts and I want to have it at hand to elaborate on this idea more, about the fact that many cisgendered people consider the word to be an insult.
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 anyone outside the oppressed group (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 with many cisgendered people thinking it is an insult: 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.
I also believe that, when the oppressor names an oppressed group, they do not do so out of good intentions. The signifier is meant to offend, to hurt further, to dehumanize. I suspect they apply the same logic to words that name them: if an oppressed group or person coins a term to define the oppressor, their logic goes, it has to be dehumanizing, hurtful and insulting. Because those are the rules of the game they established when they started naming the other.
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