Things you just don't get

[Find Finn]

We have it here, so I would be surprised if it wasn't in the uk.

 

[otc]



Why does everyone like miran? He's one of the more awful posters we've had in awhile, I get bored just seeing that he has posted.

Also, what is this cissexual garbage about? Is it just a convoluted PC way of saying straight?

No, I think you could be gay and still be cis.

Its a convoluted way of saying "if you have a cock, you are a male, if you have a ******, you are a female"

 

[munchausen]

Cis is the latin opposite of "trans". So the opposite of a transsexual is a cissexual. Yeah it's dumb but I guess most stuff is the first time you hear it. I expect this to be the thing my grand children freak out about me in the way I used to freak out about my grandfather's casual racism. "Omg grandpa just said "normal" instead "cis". What a transphobe!" "You have to take it easy on grandpa. He grew up in a different time."

 

[L'Incandescent]

The cis thing is really quite easy (unlike some other things, which are difficult). If you are cisgendered, that means that your gender identity matches up with your biological sex. So, for example, if you are biologically male and you feel like you are a male, you are cisgendered.

Straight and cisgendered are not the same, as a gay man can identify as a man (be cisgendered) and still be sexually attracted to other men.

 

[otc]



The cis thing is really quite easy (unlike some other things, which are difficult). If you are cisgendered, that means that your gender identity matches up with your biological sex. So, for example, if you are biologically male and you feel like you are a male, you are cisgendered.

Straight and cisgendered are not the same, as a gay man can identify as a man (be cisgendered) and still be sexually attracted to other men.

If you are gay and trans, are you actually gay? (serious question)

 

[L'Incandescent]



If you are gay and trans, are you actually gay? (serious question)

I think that's actually a really tricky question, in part because cis and trans are probably best viewed on a continuum, rather than as a simple duality. So I imagine a biological male could identify fairly strongly as a woman, but still view himself as gay. (I'm thinking of some **********ers here especially.) But certainly there are biological males who identify themselves very strongly as women, and view their attraction to men as an opposite-sex attraction, and so wouldn't think of themselves as gay at all.

Don't take what I say here as authoritative, though, because I'm really just thinking out loud.

 

[Piobaire]



The cis thing is really quite easy (unlike some other things, which are difficult). If you are cisgendered, that means that your gender identity matches up with your biological sex. So, for example, if you are biologically male and you feel like you are a male, you are cisgendered.

Straight and cisgendered are not the same, as a gay man can identify as a man (be cisgendered) and still be sexually attracted to other men.

The need for the term "cisgender" is to inform us of the gender binary fascism.

 

[MrG]

I was born a 10-fingered male whose testosterone levels are, by all accounts, completely within the "normal" range. However, I've always felt like I really ought to only have 7.5 fingers total, with five fingers like you'd find on a cishand and then five that cut off at the second knuckle. Also, I've felt like my fingers should alternate lengths. In addition, I've always thought I should have all of the physical features and behaviors that tend to be created by extraordinarily high levels of testosterone.

Given all of the above, I intend to find a doctor who will surgically alter my hands and give me enormous doses of testosterone so that I can finally be on the outside what I've always felt on the inside.

I will hear no argument that this is mutilation or that I harbor a pathological need to alter my body. I was born this way, and it's not my fault that my body doesn't match who I really am.

 

[Piobaire]

You clearly have BIID. Body Integrity Identity Disorder. http://www.biid.org/

 

[HRoi]

since we're sharing, i'll go next.

i was born a male, with male parts, and am sexually attracted to women. however, i feel immense pressure to have a ****** attached to my body. the reason is that so many people keep telling me to go **** myself, so i really feel that i ought to be able to oblige them.

 

[L'Incandescent]

If anyone has gotten to the point where they are calling themselves transgendered and asking for people to treat them as members of the gender they identify with (pronoun use, etc.), they have gotten there after a very long struggle. If you are biologically male but cannot experience yourself that way, you'd typically want very, very badly to keep that a secret. (Obviously, that is because you will stand a very good chance of being rejected by all the people who love you, and by most other people too.) And so if a person gets to that point, it's because they can't keep it a secret anymore. These people's lives are filled with real, serious hardships; I don't understand the need to mock them or to trivialize their experiences.

The medical ethical questions regarding sex reassignment surgery are another kettle of fish.

 

[MrG]



If anyone has gotten to the point where they are calling themselves transgendered and asking for people to treat them as members of the gender they identify with (pronoun use, etc.), they have gotten there after a very long struggle. If you are biologically male but cannot experience yourself that way, you'd typically want very, very badly to keep that a secret. (Obviously, that is because you will stand a very good chance of being rejected by all the people who love you, and by most other people too.) And so if a person gets to that point, it's because they can't keep it a secret anymore. These people's lives are filled with real, serious hardships; I don't understand the need to mock them or to trivialize their experiences.

The medical ethical questions regarding sex reassignment surgery are another kettle of fish.

It's not them we're mocking, or at least that's not who I'm mocking.

My point is that I find it ridiculous that we have carved out a niche for "transgender" and are now expected to condone behaviors that are considered pathological in every other context. The post I made above was intended to illustrate that point. If I go to my doctor and tell her that I've never felt like my fingers matched on the outside what I feel they should be on the inside and, thus, want them surgically removed (or turned into a best-we-can-do version of some other body part), she's going to send me to a psychiatrist, not a surgeon. However, if I go in and say the same thing about ********, the trans community would tell her she should send me to the surgeon (or the surgeon and the psychiatrist).

I don't mean to trivialize the struggles experienced by people whose psychology doesn't match their physiology. They are very real. My problem is with the way it is treated.

Now, I like to think I'm a reasonable person who tends to be progressive, or at least pragmatic enough to be progressive-ish. However, I've never been given a satisfactory explanation as to why transgender is treated the way it is from a medical perspective. I'll be happy to shift my position as soon as that explanation is provided, but, frankly, the cynic in me believes there isn't a satisfactory explanation, largely because I suspect the move to trans acceptance is much more political than medical.

 

[L'Incandescent]

I don't think you can separate the medical from the political that neatly. "Pathological" is a very rough and contested concept. (That's not a criticism; some concepts by their nature are less precise than others.) It is inseparable from wider, not specifically medical ways of thinking. (The history of homosexuality is an example of this.)

I don't think the trans community's view on sex reassignment surgery is as glib as you suggest it is. That is, I don't think they believe that anyone who goes into a doctor requesting a sex change should get one on the spot. (Of course it's always difficult to say what a "community" thinks about something.) And I think they have a right to resist the practice of treating their lived experience as nothing but a pathology. Again, I think the parallel with homosexuality is apt. A political struggle is often a demand to be taken seriously on your own terms, and that's exactly what is denied to trans people by the pathologization of their lived experience (and what has historically been denied to homosexuals by the pathologization of their experience).

 

[HRoi]

i'll be honest with you guys. i'd be pretty ******* annoyed if anyone called me "cisgendered". i mean, what the **** is that? the irony isn't lost on me that that's probably how transgendered people feel when they get labeled.

i have a bit of experience with transgender people at work. one employee of mine was hired post-reassignment, and i didn't know that she wasn't always a woman until 3 months into her tenure. didn't really matter to me one way or the other - she's a woman who works in the office and that's that. another one was a longtime employee who went through reassignment while with us. that was kind of interesting - i didn't realize that it was that long a process. her doctors made her basically live life as a woman for more than a year before performing the surgery - that was a little tricky because the other women felt uncomfortable using the rest room while she was there - - so we built a private one-occupant rest room that either gender could use.

i guess my point is, i don't care what other people do, and i support it as long as it doesn't hurt or bother me. so if Chris is now Christina and wants me to treat her as a woman and use female pronouns and build new bathrooms, that's cool with me. but i am semi-amused, semi-annoyed at learning that we've created "transgender" and "cisgender" labels for people. get the **** out of here with that ****.

 

[L'Incandescent]

I've been genuinely confused about this point since it first come up on SF: why do people feel so aggrieved by the existence of the term "cisgender?" It's not a pejorative in any way. Its only function is to express in language that we take seriously the experience of transgender people. It does this by situating different lived experiences of gender on one scale. It looks to me like people who object to the term "cisgender" are objecting to being thought of on the same scale as transgender people. I can't think of any other reason why people would be so upset at a term that they'd never even heard of a week prior.

At the risk of belaboring this point, we have words in English for people who are not homosexuals, i.e., who have the more normal sexual orientation. Does anyone who's straight really feel aggrieved by the existence of these terms? What they do is situate different sexual orientations on the same scale, thereby treating heterosexuality as one sexual orientation among others. I can't think of why a person would object to this unless that person thought very badly of homosexuals and didn't want to be thought of as existing on the same scale with them.