Things you just don't get

I don't wish to get drawn into this argument (anywhere on the Internet) but it strikes me that "cis" is required not for those who are cis but those who aren't. If you're part of a community who discusses your shared abnormality (for lack of a better word) then you will eventually need a word other than "normals" with which to refer to people outside of your community. Cis serves as a more specific "them" not a needless "us".

I don't need to define myself as something, but if a stranger is forced by language to call me normal he is by definition abnormal, and I can understand why that self designation as abnormal might be troubling.

Also, I mentioned last year that I have always read L'inc's posts in the voice of Eddie Izzard and the last few pages have been orders of magnitude more entertaining because of that.



Piobaire said:

Speaking only for myself it just seems a bit contrived to come up with the term "cisgender."

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Blackhood said:

I don't wish to get drawn into this argument (anywhere on the Internet) but it strikes me that "cis" is required not for those who are cis but those who aren't. If you're part of a community who discusses your shared abnormality (for lack of a better word) then you will eventually need a word other than "normals" with which to refer to people outside of your community. Cis serves as a more specific "them" not a needless "us".

I don't need to define myself as something, but if a stranger is forced by language to call me normal he is by definition abnormal, and I can understand why that self designation as abnormal might be troubling.

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I do not think my original statement is in opposition to what you have just said. You feel the trans group wanted a contrived term and I said I felt the term seems a bit contrived. I think we are in agreement.

Oh I totally agree, and certainly wasn't siding with either side of the argument, just trying to explore why a contriving may be nesaccary for a trans community but pointless from a normal/cis point of view.



Blackhood said:

I don't wish to get drawn into this argument (anywhere on the Internet) but it strikes me that "cis" is required not for those who are cis but those who aren't. If you're part of a community who discusses your shared abnormality (for lack of a better word) then you will eventually need a word other than "normals" with which to refer to people outside of your community. Cis serves as a more specific "them" not a needless "us".

I don't need to define myself as something, but if a stranger is forced by language to call me normal he is by definition abnormal, and I can understand why that self designation as abnormal might be troubling.

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I think this is true. Similar to how we don't usually need to specify that someone is not gay, and when we do, we say straight as opposed to digging into a more technical term and calling them heterosexual.

However, my introduction to the term (and most of my subsequent references outside of SF) did not occur on a trans blog or message board. It was in a blog post about **** (with no mention of transsexuality in it or other posts I saw on the same site) some woman was writing where she was trying to frame her comments with "I'm an average white woman in middle class USA...[so I don't have any first had experience, but here are my thoughts]". Instead of saying that, she said something like "As a cisgendered straight woman..."

I had no idea wtf she was talking about and assumed she had some disorder. I looked it up and figured it out, but it just came off as some pretentious girl-blog circle jerking. She wasn't writing about trans issues, she was just using the term to appeal to a certain in-crowd of political correctness fanatics who don't know quite what to do when a black person tells them they are full-american and don't even know anyone who has ever been to africa. If blogs had real editors, the term would have been scrubbed from the post.

I've read many other posts like it since then--If you aren't talking about trans people...it just seems wrong to try and apply a technical label. We don't typically insist on calling ever straight person heterosexual, and there are far more gay people than there are trans people.

The ultimate struggle: deciding whether someone is an early adopter of new terminology or an outrage-hobbiest on this weeks soapbox of moral indignation.

i was watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen tonight and i didn't get why it took seconds for our heroes to drive from Petra to Cairo. does Chevrolet have some super Autobot speed technology and are we going to see this on the coming Corvette Stingray?

To: L'Incandescent

Understand the logic, but I just think America has too much PC going on these days. I am sure if I was to add a qualifier for everything I am then it would take forever to just introduce myself (context dependent though).

That song, "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" is really ******* weird. If you look up the lyrics to the alternate live versions it is even weirder. I think I love this song. My new number one favorite song (not including some of my number one Blink 182 songs)

I also didn't get the Decepticon behavior in the first movie, at first. I mean, there's a race of sentient machines far more advanced than us, and they really want this old pair of glasses that's for sale on ebay because it has the coordinates to the allspark. So I initially thought, well why don't they BIN the damn thing instead of blowing all this **** up?

But then I realized the answer - of course, Paypal won't confirm any accounts with a Cybertron billing address, duh! You guys probably all got that immediately, so sorry for being a little slow. But I'm proud for finally figuring it out, so I poasted



L'Incandescent said:

...to express their gender identity ...

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If, in this brave new world, one can legitimately (cough) hold a "gender identity" which has no relevance to one's physical sex with the social and legal expectations to be treated as such, can we not also hold a "racial identity" with no ties to race ("I feel black/asian/jewish"), a "professional identity" ("I feel like a Pilot/Architect/President"), an "acceptance identity" ("I feel like George Clooney/Brad Pitt/Jonathan Goldsmith") or an identity for any other aspect* we so choose, err, feel?

If not, why not? Rather, why is it that those who feel they were physically born sexually different than how they want to act get a monopoly on forcing the rest of us to accommodate their wishes? Surely, others have similar grievances along other lines; isn't it discriminatory to only provide these remedies to a single, narrow group?

(* I specifically chose some examples that weren't commonly seen as physically delineated but are likely driven by genes just as much as sex)



clee1982 said:

To: L'Incandescent

Understand the logic, but I just think America has too much PC going on these days. I am sure if I was to add a qualifier for everything I am then it would take forever to just introduce myself (context dependent though).

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Nobody is asking you to introduce yourself in any particular way, and it's silly to focus on that. Has anyone ever introduced himself to you by saying, "Hi, I'm Steve. I'm a CPA, I live in Brooklyn and I'm gay"?

I feel like chicken tonight.



patrickBOOTH said:

I feel like chicken tonight.

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You should choke yourself.



imatlas said:

Nobody is asking you to introduce yourself in any particular way, and it's silly to focus on that. Has anyone ever introduced himself to you by saying, "Hi, I'm Steve. I'm a CPA, I live in Brooklyn and I'm gay"?

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Actually, yes. I was at a bar this one night and this man came up to me and said, "Hello, my name is Andrew, and yes, I am a real, live homosexual." I lol'ed. I see him around a lot actually.