This post provides a good jumping-off point for a discussion of “Cisgender.” I just want to deal with one particular point, this one:
Do not call me cisgender. I see that word as derogatory, more so when used in slang as a ‘cissie’.
Consider what you are doing to me when you presume to name me, and why I resist. You are naming me and as though I am powerless to name myself. You consider me less than. It is by your own words that you determine that you have the power to name me, that you have the power to define me … create a name for me, and that I have no right to resist.
Do not call me cisgender. You are demeaning me with your word.
I get to name me. You do not get to name me. You are not allowed to re-classify me according to what language suits your needs.
Males have been naming and defining women for a millennium and more. When you demand the right and proceed to take authority to name and define me, without my permission, you embody and keep company with male’s and man’s traditions. You violate me.
Historically, regarding all other human/civil rights movements, the idea was, oppressed people named THEMSELVES. They didn’t re-name their oppressors. To do so would have either been laughable or dangerous, mostly dangerous. Imagine black people telling white people that from now on, white people are going to be called ‘(whatever)’.
(I seem to recall at least a few instances of people of color using their own words to describe white people, often in ways that overturned unexamined white supremacy. It certainly has been dangerous, but I don’t see how it was oppressive. I also don’t think that transpeople have much power to impose their perspectives as the standard.)
(I also quibble with “cissie” as a slur. As the bleeding edge of insider queerspeak, “cisgender” is absolutely not used in a slangy way. I have never heard anyone refer to a cisgendered person as a “cissie,” let alone use that term as an epithet rather than, say, the counterpart to “trannie.” I’d also be really surprised if jokes about “cissies” from the traditional Sissy Elect were anything other than an attempt to point out the irony of describing the straight world with a term that sounded like an epithet historically deployed against the anything-but-straight.)
(I also do not think that “cisgender” is an “epithet.” “Cisgender” is not like “spritchhead.”)
This is a bad analogy.
Cisgender is not a word chosen to replace an existing term. There is no traditional self-designation for “people who are not transgendered.” Cisgender is a term created to describe a group so used to thinking of itself as the default that it had no term to describe itself. There’s “transgendered” (or “transsexual,” or “trans,” or “he-she,” or “shemale,” or “freak,”) and then there’s…everyone else. There’s [normal]. Sort of like before heterosexuals were heterosexual. There were the tommies and sapphists and sodomites who engaged in unnatural perversions and there were normal men and women doing what men and women are supposed to do. Sexuality wasn’t a set of orientations, just a single rule. When those people couldn’t be ignored, they were acknowledged only as outlaws.
Perhaps a better analogy would be the words used to describe disabled people. What’s the word for someone who does not have a disability? We’ve got “non-disabled” and “able-bodied.” The first term only says that someone is not one of those people; the latter–”able”–is another word for [normal]. Most people who are not placed in the “disabled” category do not think of themselves and their bodies as anything other than [normal.] There is no consciousness of any position but the center. The idea that not using a wheelchair or a vent or a cane or a medication or an assistant could be anything other than [normal] is frankly bizarre. There’s people, and then there’s people with disabilities. There isn’t a set of options, but a single standard.
“Cisgender” works the same way. That namelessness is an assertion of superiority: a category so unmarked that its prevalence and normalcy can simply be assumed. There’s people and then there’s transpeople. Recently, when absolutely necessary, non-transgendered people have used terms like “real,” “biological,” and, yes, “normal.” So, yes, it does arrogate the right to self-define, but only in the face of a definition which itself arrogates all legitimacy, all acknowledgement.
It seems to me that “woman” and “female” in this context are also understood as “people who are not transgendered.” These terms define transgendered as forever out of bounds. Transpersons do not have the right to self-define as female or as women. Moreover, they are denied that self-designation implicitly, as a matter of course. The dichotomy between “trans” and “female” is assumed:
It does not come from us, as its origins are from a trans perspective, a person said to be a man, created by trans persons and used to name females/women as a class. Women have not agreed to be named by others, as has been done to us through history, being named, identified and defined by others.
When “transgendered” exists as the other half of “people who are not transgendered,” or [normal,] “transgendered” is not a self-designation for the trans community. It can never be anything other than an acknowledgement of outlaw status, of one’s position as the deviation from the understood rule. There will never be parity, and transgendered people will always be illegitimate. In order for transpeople to descrkbe themselves as something other than freaks, there must be some way to discuss transgender as an option rather than a fluke. There must be some way to imply that the exploration is not unilateral. “Cisgendered” is a revolutionary way of thinking about “transgender,” a complete rearrangement of the terms of the debate. This is probably why it is so alien to the mainstream, and probably why it has not caught on and might never catch on even as “transgendered,” “transsexual,” and “genderqueer” are achieving a little lexical play. So far as the [normal] people are concerned, they need no word to describe themselves. They simply are.
*I am not aware of any terms for “people who do not have disabilities” that imply that their bodies are simply types alongside many others. “Temporarily able-bodied,” however, is an attempt to point out that “disabled” is a very flexible category, and one which most people find themselves in at one time or another. So it references a perspective on “able” bodies that doesn’t mesh with ableism, and places ableism under scrutiny.
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Damn right, piny. I agree wholeheartedly with you on this one and only wish I could express my views on this subject like this. The term “cisgender” is not opresion of anyone, it’s an attempt to challenge the notion that non-transgendered people are so much the default, so much the norm, the standard, that the only words needed to describe them ARE normal, standard etc. I see the current system akmost as saying there are people, and transgendered people. Not good at all.
What would she prefer to be called? “Normal”? “Regular-gendered”? You said it exactly right, “In order for transpeople to describe themselves as something other than freaks, there must be some way to discuss transgender as an option rather than a fluke.” I think that’s what most cisgendered people find “derogatory,” that they might be just another option instead of The Standard. And all I have to say to that mentality is too bad, so sad.
I’m reading the OP, and it sounds like she’s saying that cisgender only applies to women… is that right? I was under the impression that cisgendered encompassed men and women.
Most people who are not placed in the “disabled” category do not think of themselves and their bodies as anything other than [normal.] There is no consciousness of any position but the center.
Well said. I think it actually goes even a little further for some people- for many people, there’s not even a thought at all- there is no consciousness of position at all. Until we’re forced to think about our position, our status, there’s not even a thought given to what it might be. The assumed normalcy seems to go so deep that it’s never even something that we think about it. That’s precisely why the term cisgender seems so wonderful to me. It gives a name to something that has gone un-named and remained assumed for a long time, and draws some attention to it, to making it one option, but not necessarily something that should or can be assumed.
Yeah, the oppressed never rename their oppressors, or use derogatory terms against them. That’s why the terms ‘whitey’, ‘cracker’, ‘breeder’ show that blacks and gays are historical oppressors of white heterosexuals. :P
Not that ‘cisgendered’ is anything close to ‘breeder’. It has more in common with ‘heterosexual’, as was already mentionned, as it is a term that seeks to show that there are options rather than ‘normals’ and ‘others’.
When it’s a trans-related post, and Mary Sunshine, Pony and stormy approve, that’s when you know just how deeply stupid it is
I have never heard anyone refer to a cisgendered person as a “cissie,”
Umm… well… you see, about that… *sticks out tongue in embarassment*
What a thoughtful, well-written post. Damn. You rock.
it sort of reminds me of discussions i had in our gay-straight alliance in high school about how everyone should have to come out, to help abolish the idea that straight was “normal” and thus default, and everything else was other. (not to mention, it was also fun to see people’s faces when someone came up and gave a very solemn speech about needing to tell them something, ending with a very nervous, “i’m straight”).
i think the same can really apply to gender.
also, maybe this is terrible, but i rather like the idea of “cissie” as the counterpart to “tranny.”
as a person of privilege – a cisgendered male of northern european extraction – i have found it useful to use the handy term “White-He” for myself. most of you are probably more familiar with the colloquial spelling.
seriously – anybody coming from any sort of position of privilege had better keep their sense of humor, because all privileges are temporary. and when they’re revoked, one is often charged interest.
Some autistic-spectrum people refer to “normal” people “neurologically typical,” or NT. Maybe “physically typical” or “physiologically typical” would work, by analogy? Conveniently, they both abbreviate to PT. Over time, “normal” people might become “petes.”
Geeks refer to normal people as “normals,” although the sneer that accompanies that word might be counterproductive for the purposes of this discussion.
I’m reading the OP, and it sounds like she’s saying that cisgender only applies to women… is that right?
Specifically she’s one of hte transphobic “radical” “feminists” who thinks that transwomen are secretly spying on her everytime she pees in a public toilet as a prelude to raping her, and that transwomen are all secret patriarchal agents who have just on a whim decided to have their gender changed so they can sneak into MWMF and undermine the People’s Glorious Political-Lesbian Seperatist Utopian Revolutionary Movement.
Also they don’t believe that any transperson has ever been raped or killed as a result of transhate, which in turn is a thing that patriarchy made up to enable their trans-provocateurs.
Then they recycle some stuff spouted by MRAs and those “post-racial” white people – either the “if we note distinctions between trans and cis we’re enabling the patriarchy/cisgendernormative/heteronormative society” classic or in this case the variant on the “black people called me a cracker! Thereby proving that black people are the real bigots” cliche.
STILL WAITING FOR SOMETHING NEW CRAZY LADIES!
Frankly, given the tenor of the rest of that site, that entire post seems to be an attempt to deny the existence of and silence transgendered people, rather than a good-faith effort to start a debate.
– ACS
From the post under discussion:
Pardon? Wikipedia (that infallible arbiter of the internet) says that “cisgender” is derived from the latin prefix cis, which means “on the same side, and is the opposite of trans. It is not used “to name females/women as a class.” As you say, piny, it is used to name, as a class, people who previously went unnamed as the normative group.
This post reflects a pretty selective view of language and history, whereby “female” and “woman” are okay, presumably because they’ve been around for a while, but “cisgender” is somehow a novel affront to female sovereignty.
My favorite comment left on that post:
So “cisgender” = not okay, but “straights” = all good?
If someone wants to call me cisgendered, I really don’t care, but I do find it confusing. I am, perhaps, behind on some lexicography, so please pardon if I’m ignorant here, but what confuses me about the language described above is that transgenderism and transexualism, from the outside looking in, appear to be transitions from one gender (masculine/feminine) to the other or one sex (male/female) to the other, respectively. If someone has completed his/her transition by completing, for example, a series of operations to change his/her sex, he/she is now his/her destination sex and therefore sexed in the manner of his/her choosing — i.e., not transexual, but male or female, as the case may be. Because transitions are imperfect and because our society insists so much on genderizing and freakifying, I can see a person who has undergone such a transition wishing to acknowledge the transitional process and continue to refer to him/herself as transexual or transgendered, but such a person should be able to drop that trans- modifier if he or she so chooses as well.
Therefore, I retain some amount of confusion about whether the intention is to re-modify male/female/masculine/feminine with a cisgender prefix or whether the use of cisgender is primarily for making a distinction between people who have gone through a transition versus people who have not gone through a transition. If the latter is the case, then I have little confusion about its use, because it then replaces the more judgmental “normal” or its equivalents, and I don’t support such stacked linguistic otherism. But its use does seem unclear on the former point, and I’d like to know people’s feelings on the subject. Am I now to refer to myself as cisgender feminine or as a cisgender female, or is it sufficient that I just acknowledge that I am cisgendered?
cisgender seems to be in the same category as “person without color” which some people without color get real worked up about being called, but, you know, it makes sense. We can’t have “people of color” and “normal people”, disabled people and “normal people”, transgendered people and “normal” people. Not if we want a world without oppression and dominance, and shee-it, i thought feminism was all about struggling for a world without dominance and oppression.
i agree that the original poster’s racial analogy is not helpful. we already have many words to use to describe people by different races (i.e., “black” and “white,” or “African-American” and “Caucasian”), so there is no need to invent new words to describe different races. however, i really can’t think of a good term for non-transgendered people other than “non-transgendered” (or cisgendered–though i’d never heard of that word before reading this post). it seems to me that the point of the word “cisgendered” is not to oppress, but to describe.
regarding the “normal”/”abnormal” distinction, and the need to call non-transgendered people anything other than normal, i have to say that my initial reaction was, “well, duh, we ARE normal”–taking the condition where a person’s gender matches that person’s biological sex to be a “normal” state. however, i was able to better grasp the need to stay away from the “normal” label by thinking of the situation in relation to sexual orientation. i would definitely react with some alarm if someone tried to describe heterosexuality as “normal” (as many people do), and i would defend homosexuality or bisexuality as perfectly normal conditions. for me not to do this in relation to gender seems hypocritical.
i’d never really thought about gender in quite this way before, so hopefully this analogy is a little more accurate and helps people think about the situation differently.
I probably could have just said that I don’t understand why this is true:
Why would a person who has gone through a whole bunch of horrible stuff to become a female not be allowed to identify as female if such a person desired? I understand that the law is fucked on this score — I know there are specific ramifications preventing this self-identification on a lot of institutional levels — but changes in language won’t change those ugly and unfair realities. On a social level, where language changes will have an impact, why wouldn’t a woman through transition be able to call herself a woman?
I remember reading the word for the first time and thinking, “Hey, that’s clever”. And realising that there really wan’t a word, to my knowledge, that conveyed the idea so succinctly. It felt like a good word, in the same way that “heteronormativity” is a good word, it made me more aware of the alternatives.
If you don’t have the word for something, you don’t notice it as much if you are not affected by it. If you are affected, it becomes pretty hard to put your finger on, or describe, what is bothering you.
Thank you for this post.
Ahh, this kind of thing is why I love reading you folks. Keep it up.
(and yes, I wish I had something more germane to contribute, but if nothign else, I offer kudos.)
“That namelessness is an assertion of superiority: a category so unmarked that its prevalence and normalcy can simply be assumed.”
Yup. Self definition is not inherently just. What’s just about it is when all are given the equal chance to define, and differences in definition are mediated in a equitable fashion. It’s one thing to claim that one is a woman because one defines oneself as such…another to claim it as an ontological status, prior to culture.
Me thinks she’s actually doing the latter.
What’s the word for someone who does not have a disability? We’ve got “non-disabled” and “able-bodied.”
I like “currently able-bodied,” myself.
“It’s the name given me by your hatred, and every time it’s spoken it’s an insult…Call me X. That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen. ”
~Amie Cesaire -A Tempest.
I am not defending the above-quoted blogger, but seriously asking: isn’t “normal” a completely valid descriptor for those who are not transgendered? Doesn’t normal really just imply that a person’s whatever-trait-under-discussion is the default, the most commonly-appearing trait in a given set?
I don’t think that being not “normal” implies a lesser value. For example, wouldn’t a student with high test scores on a standardized test be thrilled to find themselves outside of the norm?
I don’t find the term “cisgender” in any way offensive, but I am left wondering why it is important to give non-transgendered people a term when “normal” doesn’t seem to be insufficient. I don’t agree with your quoted blogger’s argument so much as her basic point: there’s no reason to think that the normal gender-identity state is going to change to become a minority state, so why do we need new language, why must we shy away from a perfectly valid and, in my opinion, unoffensive and perfectly neutral term like “normal?”
Ah, bless you, that’s why I love reading here. I actually like the word ‘cisgender’, once I figured out the etymology of it.
Do you also feel that there’s no need for terms like “woman” and “heterosexual,” since those states are also not going to become minorities in the near future, or ever?
Hmm. Men and normals. I like the sound of that.
As I’m taking organic chemistry right now, this term cracks me up.
I am not defending the above-quoted blogger, but seriously asking: isn’t “normal” a completely valid descriptor for those who are not transgendered
Nope, the traditional, or cis, genders are largely socially constructed – sex (which is not gender) is almost an absolute and irrefutable fact, but only if you get really vague about how you categorise the sexes (hence intersex people) – because remember that the trans spectrum comprises more than merely M2F and F2M transexuals, and goes all the way over to transvestites and all manner of genderfuck stuff.
The cisgenders are only “normal” within a social construction that defines them as “normal” – and that normalcy marks and defines the starting point of transphobia because it marks transpeople as Other or “abnormal” when their state of being is absolutely fucking normal for them.
Normal also carries all manner of extra baggage along with as a term, one bit of which is that “normal” is right and anything not “normal” is wrong.
So no, actually, cisgender are not “normal”, we are oppressors because we by our socially constructed normalcy define transpeople as “abnormal”.
They are not.
I kinda like “men and normals” myself.
“Woman.” Funny you should use that as your example. Correct me if my public-school learnings have faded too far into the past and/or failed me, but wasn’t the “wo” just a modifier to the “man” to signify a female person, where “man,” by default, meant male person?
Is heterosexual even necessary? It has certainly become part of the language and has its uses. But where does the inventing of new terms to describe the flipside of any particularity end? Do we need names, for example, for people who do and don’t dye their hair?
Take another example: my old, crotchety, Bible-thumping grandparents that live in a little old house in a little old midwest backwater town. I don’t think that particular town has more than a dozen black people. Growing up, I was continually embarassed by the way their old-fashioned vocabulary.
“Now wasn’t that just the prettiest little girl in the line in front of us,” she’d remark.
“Which one, Grandma?”
“The little colored girl, in the blue T-shirt!”
I didn’t realize until college that my grandparents weren’t hopeless racists, they just weren’t current on the language, because it evolves in our culture, quickly. If I neglect to identify myself as “cisgender,” am I pissing off the anyone who declines to identify themselves similarly, because there’s a whole new language blooming that I am unaware of? Does calling someone who isn’t transgender “normal” really carry with it some implicit disdain of transgendered people?
Normal does imply a value judgement, though. While it would be difficult to find a word completely free of such judgements, I personally prefer typical to normal in this meaning. Normal, unfortunetly, is no longer neutral. It has been used in an overtly exclusionary manner. Abnormal has been used as a slur. We cannot wish away these meanings. Even if you don’t mean normal in a biased manner, it is used too frequently in such a manner to properly express its intended meaning. If lacking another option (such as heterosexual or cisgendered), I tend to think typical is better normal.
Am I right in thinking that there is a famous quote on this issue? I’ll try to look when I get home, but I think there is a really clever response to the semantics of “normal” that I don’t seem to recall.
For myself, using the term cisgendered is a convenient verbal shorthand that I might use to refer to someone in conversation who had not had to go through transition. It’s a time saver, nothing more. And it tickles me to no end to see a chemical term being used in greater society. I am, of course, a chemist.
ekf said:
am, perhaps, behind on some lexicography, so please pardon if I’m ignorant here, but what confuses me about the language described above is that transgenderism and transexualism, from the outside looking in, appear to be transitions from one gender (masculine/feminine) to the other or one sex (male/female) to the other, respectively
You are conflating ‘transsexual’ and ‘transgender’. Generally speaking, transsexuals are those who move from one designated gender category to another (the socially endorsed ‘other’). Again, generally speaking, transgendered people are those who do not identify with their assigned gender. Note that the latter does not necessarily depend on the binary opposition of woman/man.
R. Mildred – ah. I am disagreeing with loading of the term normal to mean something other than “most commonly occuring.”
What’s wrong with “abnormal,” in the meaning of “infrequently occuring?” There are a million ways in which being abnormal is completely awesome. No matter how many flavors of transgender there is, they are all “abnormal” now and probably will continue to be.
I think, if someone wants to say mean things about someone else, there are loads of better words to use besides “normal” and “abnormal.”
BStu – Hmm. Maybe I need to print up some T-shirts:
“TAKE BACK THE NORM”
Yeah, it needs some work.
Because, in the West, “abnormal” has always been associated with “must be fixed, preferably through medical intervention.” Which is why you have a lot of traumatized intersexed people — in an effort to fix their “abnormal” genitals, many of them were pushed into a gender where they didn’t fit.
Personally, I’m relieved to finally find out what the heck “cisgender” means. I was too embarrassed to ask.
Mnemosyne – the true nature of my puzzlement is revealed.
I’m a statistician. When I hear “normal,” I have visions of probability distributions. Poor old statistics word, so maligned. I guess the chemists get to be amused, and I get excavate some lesser-used neural pathways to some words in my brain.
Yeah, it does. Our society is based on a binary system, and marginalizes those who don’t fit into it. That is the subtext which use of the word “normal” carries in this context. You don’t get to choose your subtext, society chooses it for you. “Typical” might be the neutral term you are looking for. Statistically speaking, the cisgendered are certainly typical, and “atypical” doesn’t carry the connotations that “abnormal” does (yet). But there is a perfectly good word – cisgendered. Why not use it?
Practically speaking, outside of gender discussions, just how often do you think you will need to proclaim that your gender is cis, anyway? I’m guessing, if you are typical, that your gender is immediately identifiable just by looking, and whether you were born with the genitalia which our society assigns to that gender or not is nobody’s business. Don’t worry about proclaiming your cisgenderedness. Go ahead and keep telling people you are [whatever you are], and go ahead and keep it a secret that you were born that way.
ekf, I think the idea behind cisgendered as a counterpart to transgendered is that when someone is trans, their biological sex and presented gender (oy, that sounds awkward, please correct me if I’m not using the right terms) are not the same–the sex (as defined by, I guess, chromosomes) is male and the gender is female, or vice versa, so they’re “opposite,” whereas with cisgendered people, they “line up”–biology is male and gender is male, or they are both female. Trans=across, Cis=on the same side. Like someone above said, it makes a little more sense if you’ve taken a chemistry course, because in organic chemistry the trans and cis prefixes are used to distinguish between two formations of certain molecules, one where the matching sides are on the same side (cis) and one where the matching sides are across from each other (trans).
Nothing.
Now that we’ve answered your hypothetical we can go back to discussing language in the real world, where social context has resulted in ‘abnormal’ having negative connotations.
I don’t think there is anything hypothetical about it. How did queer get revamped into a word that people love to use to identify themselves? How do words gain meanings at all if people don’t give it to them? If all abnormal people stop using “normal” and “adnormal” because someone used them in a mean way one time, is that really going to solve anything?
“Does calling someone who isn’t transgender “normal” really carry with it some implicit disdain of transgendered people?”
In short, yes.
When one speaks math, “normal” is a neutral word. But in social contexts, being “abnormal” with regards to gender and/or sexuality almost universally means “lesser than”.
Furthermore, even if “normal” were a neutral word, I think it’s useful to have words to describe what’s “normal” in different categories. For example, I am a transman. That’s not “normal”. However, I am white, heterosexual, Christian, and upper-middle class, all of which is “normal” based on other rubrics. So am I a normal person or am I not? Should my “normality” be defined by my gender identity or my race? or my religion? Does one have to be normal in every way to be “normal”? There are a very small number of people who are normal by all of those rubrics.
Unfortunately, they’re the ones with the power.
And so I think, by placing words for what’s “normal” and what’s not “normal” on equal footing, the quandry above is removed. Instead of a person being normal except for being x, y, and z, a person is simply A, b, C, D, e …, X, y, and Z. (Where a capital letter stands for the “normal” and a lowercase letter for the “not normal”).
Dead on, piny.
“Cisgender” ought to be no more controversial than “heterosexual”. Arguing that there’s nothing wrong with the “normal”/”abnormal” distinction is pretty disingenuous, I think, and we should not have to explain the words’, well, normative connotations.
There are sub-groups within the disability community that have names for non-members – autistics use “neurotypical” as mentioned above, d/Deaf people use “hearing” or “hearies”, dwarfs will refer to LPs (little people) versus BPs (big people) or “talls” (and we sometimes talk about interspatial relationships … although I think that’s a pretty cringe-worthy term).
As far as more general terms go … I find TAB (temporarily able-bodied) fairly amusing, and sometimes use it. But it bothers me somewhat that it excludes people whose disabilities are not physical. This post makes me want to start using the term “cisabled” (although cis- and dis- look the same to a lip reader – I guess the lesson here is that all terms have their strengths and weaknesses).
I left “breeder” alone because I didn’t want to use a term that’s arguably really sexist. “Cissie” would be comparable to “breeder,” I think; I would class “cisgendered” with “heterosexual.”
Thanks. I’ve heard “neurotypical” before, but it didn’t come to mind.
That’s a good point.
It also doesn’t really dispute the able/disabled dichotomy–although if it includes aging it universalizes disability in a new way.
Don’t worry, Isabel, you got it right: “sex” is biological, “gender” is social. The term “gender” was being used to refer to both for quite a while, probably because people (like me, sadly) were too embarrassed to use the word s-e-x in a political conversation. But the distinction is too important to elide, I think.
In my head, the “s” in “cisgendered” always had a “z” sound to it (more like “cizzgendered” than “cissgendered”) but I’m notoriously bad at figuring out pronunciations by looking at the spelling of words.
I went to a Jesuit high school, so indulge me.
Comedian Bill Hicks joked that the reason we were all still stuck on this shithole planet was that we’d forgotten our tasks and were too busy in stuffing our faces in pancake houses and watching TV to finish up; one of Adam’s tasks was to name everything.
If you are so arrogant as to not name yourself, to simply define yourself in the style of “everything I am, is just normal,” then you’re basically naming yourself I AM WHO IS, which I think might be sort of prohibited in the first commandment or two.
Way I look at it, you’re either taking the time to name yourself in an objective manner, or you’re inviting yourself to be named. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, palefaces!
Yes, because as has been pointed out, “normal” and “abnormal” carry value judgments, as much as we might wish for a world where they didn’t. Don’t do it, please. You can’t make an insult suddenly un-insulting just because it might be statistically accurate somehow. Another useful test… would you consider it polite (beyond technical accuracy, to polite, please) to say something like “My friend and I are different, she’s black and I’m normal?” or “I’m not gay, I’m normal?”
A whole lot of the time, I see trans people use these words all the time in ways that don’t match up to those definitions either. Just to post a notice that this is ideologically slippery territory.
I guess it might be worthwhile to post some definitions, since this discussion is all about words.
To various people, transsexual might mean one or more of the following:
a) someone who has transitioned from their assigned gender to the other gender role socially, and has changed their body via hormones and genital surgery to match that gender role;
b) someone who has “changed sex” often meaning the above;
c) someone who plans or hopes to do a) , but has not yet;
d) someone who has accessed some sort of medical care mentioned above (hormones, some sort of surgery) but not necessarily any particular treatment, operation, or set of these things;
e) someone who plans or hopes to do d) , but has not yet;
f) someone who has transitioned to the other gender role socially, irrespective of medical interventions (less common)
To various people, transgender might mean:
g) someone who has transitioned to the other gender role socially, irrespective of medical interventions;
h) someone who does not identify with their assigned gender;
i) someone who does not identify with any gender at all, or with multiple genders, or fluidly (see also genderqueer);
j) someone who does identify with their assigned gender, at least to some degree, but who expresses their gender in a way that does not conform to societal standards, for instance by incorporating expressions associated with another gender;
k) an umbrella term encompassing all of the above and possibly anyone who doesn’t conform to gender standards, including transsexuals, genderqueers, andrognyes, crossdressers, drag kings, drag queens, butches, femmes, aggressives, gender-focused performers and entertainers of various sorts, populations of other cultures regardless of whether they’d use these words themselves, etc.
I post this stuff not so much to “correct” prosphoros who I think is mostly right, but also just to cast more light into various corners of “how we name gender” around trans-related issues. There is a lot of disagreement, and exclusion, and quibbling, even over words to describe trans people, even before we get to “what do we call everyone else?” Personally I am in favor of lots, and lots, and lots of words. And I agree with everything Piny said in the original post.
As far as “cisgendered” I think it’s kind of awkwardly latin, but it is a little better than “non-trans,” which somehow doesn’t stir up as much controversy even though it’s clearly an oppositional phrase (“you are not THIS”) as opposed to a descriptive one (cis = same side, trans = other side).
Everything else about who gets to name themselves has already been said, except maybe, seriously now, what are people opposed to “cisgender” offering as an alternative?
Normal? Been discussed above.
Bio? Also been done to death — as if trans people’s bodies are not “biological” somehow, or as if changes trans people go through aren’t biological. Plus, it foregrounds biology as essential, which is anti-feminist.
Real? Right, right… hopefully it’s not hard to grasp the problem with this… (hint: what is the opposite of real, and which is better?)
Women born women and
Men born men This idea came out of the radical feminist opposition to trans people being around, and there’s been plenty of feminist critique to the idea that we’re “born” a gender. Plus there is a lot of baggage around these concepts at this point. “Women who have had the experience of being a woman almost continuously since birth” might be a little closer to what is meant here, but it’s cumbersome and also posits a universal experience of womanhood.
Another common solution you hear is “I don’t care, just leave women out of it.” Which is not exactly a real response, or a productive one, or any kind of acknowledgment that hello, we all live in this world together under the thumb of the same oppressive forces, and often in the same exact communities.
I’ve also heard people use phrases like “female-assigned, female identified” — FAFI for short, to talk about their own identity and experiences around being cisgendered. Does that feel more accurate and experience-encompassing to anyone, I wonder? Although hilariously, the male equivalent would be MAMI. As in, ay, mami!
Its really not that I’m championing “normal” and “abnormal,” or polishing the statues at the feet of the shrine of “normalcy,” I’m just thinking about whether or not new words are really going to fix anything, or just create a greater divide between those that are hip to the New Language Order and the very large group of people who, upon stumbling upon new words, thinks, “wait, I’m what, now?”
I guess I should leave this now, I suppose I am starting to sound argumentative, when I’m not really even strongly opinionated on the subject, just freshly bitten by curiousity. I was really just intrigued by the turnaround quality of piny’s thought-provoking post. I’d never thought anything strange about someone wanting to call themselves “gay” or “queer” or what-have-you instead of having to awkwardly explain to someone, “well, see, I kinda like sex with other men…” and here was someone who was disagreeing with a naming.
Does it make sense to have a “cisgender” counterpart to “transgender?” Is just being “normally” gendered suddenly an insufficient classification? For everyone that’s telling me that it is necessary because of how oppressive our society is, aren’t we discussing “cisgender” as a viable term now because people can walk around being their natural, transgender selves now? Is adding “cisgender” to our cultural lexicon really going to fix anything, or are the people that would call someone “abnormal” and mean it derogatively just going to use other words to convey the same thing?
Today wasn’t even the first day I’d run across “cisgender;” I’m no newbie to Feministe and piny. It just seemed like a less than cut-and-dried concept to me. Sorry for dragging this unpopular line of questioning out so much.
Where is this happening, because a lot of people would really like to know, immediately.
Actually, in Old English, “mann” was comparable to the modern “human” or the Latin “homo”: it was gender (and age) neutral. A modifier (wyf for female, wer for male) was added if gender was desired (so a woman was a wyfmann, and a man was a wermann). In certain dialects, “wyf” by itself meant woman, and wer by itself meant “man”. “Man” gradually replaced “wermann,” just like “homo” became “homme,” “hombre,” “uomo,” etc., which all refer only to males, while “vir” virtually disappeared.
This would mean that a female lycanthrope is a wyfwolf. Try saying that three times fast. :)
Holly – heh.
Oops, am I making broad and sweeping assumptions that I shouldn’t be? My apologies. I suppose my personal, anecdotal experience, living in the large and fairly progressive city, has colored my perceptions a little bit.
Vir still exists in words like virile and (!) virtue.
As I’m taking organic chemistry right now, this term cracks me up. – scarshapedstar
I guess this begs the question of what happens if we try to make more rigorous the classification of cis/trans-gendered people — do we end up with new terms, E-gendered and Z-gendered?
* I was accused of being a closet organic chemist today, FWIW ;)
The computer swallowed my fake HTML (which appeared fine in preview) of a close stupid o-chem* joke tag. The asterisk serving as the reference point for my closing remark above …
Would I be right to say that you think normalcy exists (as an attribute, in a real, ontological sense), and isn’t just a term we apply to things?
That would go a long way towards explaining the apparent disagreement.
Yes and yes. To use the analogous case, those Christian organizations that purport to “cure” gays treat homosexuality as if it were behaviour deviating from the norm, and not an actual orientation. (You could even say they lack the concept of sexual orientation entirely; there’s just normal and abnormal sexuality.) They deliberately talk only about “homosexual attractions” or “urges” to reinforce this viewpoint. But in the wider world, the concept of sexuality as a homosexual/heterosexual spectrum (the Kinsey scale) has, for the most part, become the default.
This in itself does not entail less discrimination, of course. To use another example, women still face sexism even though we now think of “male” and “female” as unique gender identities. (That’s opposed to the conception of “woman” as “incomplete, inferior man” prevalent centuries ago — which sounds terrible in comparison.)
In short, the wide adoption of “cisgender” will not do away with transphobia. But it is a giant conceptual step forward.
You should just come along in comments and add appendices to all my posts. Thanks for doing the work; this is really helpful to have for purposes of this discussion.
Also, unfortunately, I’ve heard people use “transgender” to mean “transsexual” in the sense of “someone who has accessed some sort of medical care mentioned above (hormones, some sort of surgery) but not necessarily any particular treatment, operation, or set of these things.” My old primary care physician, for example.
Although he definitely wasn’t an authority on matters transgendered or transsexual, as it turned out.
I guess my difficulty with this is that I don’t see sexgender as some sort of package deal that needs a linguistic distinction for every conceivable combination. We already have perfectly good terms for biological reproductive differences: female/male. And we already have perfectly good terms for the drag with which we adorn and comport ourselves, to my resigned consternation: femininity/masculinity.
If we’re lacking in any way, it is in that we do not make enough of a distinction, in casual discourse at least, between sex in the sense of gonads/chromosomes and sex in the sense of outward genital appearance. I’m no skilled coinist of terms, so the best I can think of are ‘gonadally/chromosomally male/female’ and ‘genitally male/female.’
But if we had those terms, those far-better coinages for which my own stumbling mouthfuls will have to stand for the time being, they’d do a much better job at mirroring real people than ‘trans/cisgender.’
If everyone acknowledges that each of us has both a sex (biological reproductive and chromosomal/gonadal) and, regretably, but inevitable in this culture I suppose, a gender (behavior, dress) to some degree, then no one is “normal.” No one is transgender, either, though. We’re all individuals.
Interestingly, though, you could probably use that same term for intersexed people who were assigned a female gender despite ambiguous genitals and continue to identify as female.
Anyone else confused yet? ;-)
I meant (gonadal/chromosomal and outward genital appearance)
justicewalks: what about XO people? or XXY people? or androgen-insensitive people? Or the host of other intersex disorders that are part of our biological existence?
And what about genderqueer folk?
And by using the word disorder, I reveal how deeply language affects us all.
I mean conditions.
whoever wrote that is clearly not aware of their privilege.
eww.
I think it is the plethora of terms (that is a step towards the doing away with binaries as the dominant construct of the universe) serves the interest of those of us doing the work to deconstruct gender.
I hate binaries (which cis/trans is just another one) it is the multitude of individually defined gender expression that will create a future environment in which we no longer must know the gender of the person we are talking to in order to relate to them.
I think it is useful to come up with new words as we seek to make our language reflect our values as a culture. As an English major and a lawyer, I cannot conceive of language “not mattering”. In English studies it is language that is believed to determine consciousness and in the law precise language is essential. It is disingenuous to say these terms don’t matter because we already have words that communicate the same ideas. Well, this may be true, and if it is why aren’t they being used then?
It is feminist to reject gender binaries (and biological determinism, or sex) because it is what the patriarchy rests on, right?
Sigh.
I use the phrase “not cisgender” to identify myself all the time. I don’t ID as transgender, though, because I don’t think there’s any “trans” about what I am. I tend to think of myself as a consicentious objector when it comes to gender. I don’t have a problem with being biologically female, but I don’t like being presumed to be a cultural performer of womanhood. I’m not especially a cultural performer of manhood, either, though. That is perhaps tied in with my primary experience of being a person with a disability; there are all kinds of weird sex/gender issues going on there.
I personally really like the phrase “temporarily able-bodied,” which I like to use to needle my friends. I like that it has a sort of humourous connotation to it; it sneaks under a lot of people’s defense mechanisms that way. :)
Except I don’t think that what you’re trying to talk about is exactly what is meant by trans/cisgender.
I totally agree that there are a lot of different factors of sex & gender. In fact you’re talking about more than two right here. Chromosomal, gonadal, genital… all sex characteristics. Courts have already started talking about there being four more aspects that could be considered under the heading of “sex” without even getting to gender, the social part: hormonal, secondary sex characteristics, structural brain differences, and gender identity. The last two are somewhat controversial — we don’t have a real good understanding of brain differences, and a lot of stereotypes come into play, and nobody is quite sure what sex-as-biology might have to do with gender identity.
All of these factors are supposed to line up on “one side or the other” and then so are the corresponding gender attributes, though the system often allows for a wee bit more flexibility there. We have a bunch of words for talking about what happens when these things do NOT line up; one of those terms is “intersex” and other ones are “transgender” and “transsexual” and “gender non-conforming” etc.
Cisgender is a word that just means means “your assigned gender lines up with your sex characteristics.” Transgender, at its broadest, just means “your assigned gender does not line up with your sex characteristics.” Sex characteristics here most often means genital sex, since that is the “master indicator” that is used to assign infants at birth, although more and more people (including the medical establishment, and courts) are very slowly and gradually starting to realize that this “master key” is not all it’s cracked up to be for a whole bunch of reasons.
The reason we have words to talk about “not lining up” is because there are a lot of people around who experience all sorts of problems with discrimination, prejudice, health, well-being, etc. because of both the “not lining up” and the expectation that everyone “lines up.”
Talking about each of these sex aspects separately, which sort of seems to be what you’re suggesting, doesn’t seem like much of an improvement, or more economical! At best you’d have a bunch of weird portmanteau concepts.
Piny:
I would happily do that for all your posts! Sometimes when I don’t have time to, I already feel a nagging sense of something left undone! =D Because I like to contribute to stuff you’re talking about, generally speaking.
You know, it’s really incredibly difficult to successfully reclaim a word, or to change its commonly understood meaning. It doesn’t work out very well in an awful lot of cases, and it’s not a fast process. Words gain meaning by usage, which is why connotations and the way the word is typically used and understood are more imporant that denotations. It’s not a question of abnormal being used negatively one time, apart from the math and science world abnormal is virtually always used negatively and understood/assumed to represent a negative value judgment. If there’s a positive meaning behind the concept being expressed, then the word is virtualy never used. “Your test results are abnormal” is used if there’s a cause for concern. “You scored in the 98th percentile on verbal ability,” not anything about abnormality, is used to convey the positive side, except in the context of a joke. People stopped using abnormal in a value neutral way a long time ago, except in hypotheticals where words aren’t given their commonly understood meanings. It would be very hard to reclaim the word and try to redefine it in a strict math sense at this point when there’s so much associated baggage.
Ataralas Says:
justicewalks: what about XO people? or XXY people? or androgen-insensitive people? Or the host of other intersex disorders that are part of our biological existence?
And what about genderqueer folk?
I could have made my position clearer. I was specifically thinking of rare chromosomal configurations when I wrote about ‘chromosomal’ sex, but I guess when I used ‘male/female’ and conflated it with ‘gonadal’ I obscured that. My apologies. I think my argument, which is that what we need is language that specifically addresses these semantic deficits, rather than a term that attempts to lump them all under two categories, ‘trans/cisgender,’ still stands.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t know exactly what ‘genderqueer’ means.
Holly,
I think the space in which your explanation and mine differ is minute, if present, though you go into greater detail. My irritation at seeing transgender be defined as transsexual and the virtual erasure of nontranssexual transgendered people is what prompted my response; my irritation at the constant burden of education is what prompted my unwillingness to make it as easily digestible and accessible as you did. I’m thinking in my case the latter can at times work at cross purposes to the former.
Yeah, I totally agree re: cross-purposes, and I often think the “laundry list” of definitions is in service of people who are trying to establish some sort of hierarchy of trans-ness. I feel like that list of definitions needs some problematizing — like, talking about ways that some trans people have tried to use definitional structures against others — but I admit that I kind of shied away from that. Maybe it’s because it feels like a very “401″ conversation and we’ve been having a lot of discussions here at Feministe about how a lot of stuff is so “trans 101″ or 201 at best.
I think I’ll start a new thread, although I don’t know if I have any coherent thoughts as yet. I have certainly noticed hierarchies in practice–look at the conflation of “transgendered” with “transsexual.”
Justicewalks,
Genderqueer is a bit of a catch-all for people who don’t identify either as men or women. They may identify as both in parts, as ‘in the middle’, as genderless or neither, as a different named gender entirely (“butch” for example), or simply as gender-variant or non gender-conforming. To further complicate things, for some people genderqueerness is an identity, one which has an attendant lifestyle of ‘opposing the binary’ or what-have-you, (queering gender), and for others it is a (n often physically and mentally uncomfortable) state of being. For some people it is doubtless both.
Clear now? ;)
I appreciate the deconstruction, piny. I mostly avoid openly anti-trans webspaces b/c they just piss me off and upset me.
Piny and Holly, y’all f*kin rock! Beyond that, I’ve nothing to add. :)
we, as a society, are taught at a very young age to see the world in the context of binaries. i believe that context transcends language. at first, i started my sentence with “unfortunately”, but i’m not so sure that seeing the world in binaries is unfortunate. perhaps only when we begin to actually believe the world is binary, when in fact, the binary perspective is only, in my opinion, a valuable and effective tool. a tool that simplies the infinitely complex universe in which we live, such that we can make sense of it.
yet, even a binary as simple as light and darkness proves to be a perfect example of a binary’s opposite. there is no such thing as “total light”, and complete darkness can only be achieved in somewhat rare circumstances – a sealed, “light-proof” container. in reality, it’s literally all shades of gray.
i’d imagine sex was contextualized originally so that we could reproduce. gender followed, presumably, as a social solution to help build society and organize our labors. since we’ve (i hope) moved beyond mere survival as a species, the various shades of sex and gender have become clear (at least to some). perhaps those terms are no longer accurate or useful.
prosphoros, I’m sorry if I’m being overly defensive or taking your critiques overly personally, but I’m having trouble following how what I wrote conflates transgenderism and transsexualism:
My point was that transgender deals with gender (i.e., masculine/feminine) and transsex deals with sex (i.e., male/female), using the term “respectively” to construct a parallelism. Seeing how it’s been discussed above since my post, I recognize that I was vastly oversimplifying and not being detailed enough, and I appreciate the additional information and complexity, but I thought I made a fairly clear distinction between the two.
Cisgender is a word that just means means “your assigned gender lines up with your sex characteristics.
Is this like being both phenotypically and culturally (perceived and assigned as) black, as opposed to being phenotypically (perceived/assigned as) something else and culturally black?
Talking about each of these sex aspects separately, which sort of seems to be what you’re suggesting, doesn’t seem like much of an improvement, or more economical!
I’m not sure that economy should be language’s first concern. I do think that the more descriptive we can be, the better.
Yes, but binaries in US culture (and many others) have ceased, IMO to be a useful tool. Instead the “either/or” created by a binary understanding of how the world works has left people unable to critically consider that there might be more than two answers to a question, right or wrong, etc. It has destroyed the ability to see in shades of grey because we teach children, as you say, from the beginning to see the world in what ultimately limits thinking rather than expanding it.
There are cultures that functioned without gender/sex determining vocation or role in society (read the Invention of Woman, if interested in learning more). There are a endless list of possibilities about how society could have been constructed, but we went with the obvious the sex binary. It is easy after all. I don’t realyl care how we got here anymore (I have read those books) but I am interested in where we go from here given that we now understand that a binary division of gender based on anatomical or genetic characteristics does not serve the needs of the individuals or the community of which we are a part.
I do think it is time to move on from the sex and gender binary.
Thanks, Em.
eyeroll. does she really think cisgendered only applies to women? or is she bridling at the idea of having -anything- in common with some men? or is it even worth that much analysis…
Piny-
I want to thank you for posting this clarification about the term cisgender. I quite like the term and don’t believe it is intended to be offensive at all. UppityBiscuit apparently needs to educate herself on trans issues. As a transman myself, I’m extremely disappointed in her verbally violent, victim-mentally, misguided reaction. It’s women like her that initially turned me off to feminism – but then I realize people like her are not really into actual equality and freedom of gender expression, and that there are feminists out there who value trans rights. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for this post, piny.
Personally I love the term cisgender as (for me, at least) it seems to explain why I get such enjoyment out of the performance of femininity. Before hearing the term, when I was younger, I often used to describe myself as a ‘drag queen trapped in a woman’s body.’ Cisgendered works for me better, mainly because it doesn’t step of the toes of drag performers.
But as I read more about it I kind of think I’m misusing the term.
No, because race is generally a really poor analogy for sex/gender. It just doesn’t work. Speaking as someone who is trans, genderqueer, and also multiracial.
Yeah, I didn’t mean that economy was the only concern. But I’d suggest that perhaps clarity is just as important if not moreso than descriptiveness, and is sometimes at odds with it. You can get really descriptive if you describe every aspect of yourself in a 200-page paper. But nobody is going to read it. You could do the same with a 20-minute speech, but if your gathering of minds is only lasting two hours, you’ve used up an awful lot of airtime.
Oh, now I’m reminded of something from a previous thread that went into this topic. Something exangelena wrote on Piny’s next post (and which really ought to be here, to prevent derailing) reminded me of it too.
Whenever you create a binary division there really will be people who don’t fit into it. If you’re going to use “cisgendered” and “transgendered” then is it possible to also create some allowance for that? There are people out there who are definitely not cisgendered, in the ways they interact with, resist, are expulsed by systems of gender. Who totally do not conform. What are they, then? Are they “transgendered?” What if they don’t want to be? What if they want other words for themselves?
We need to respect people’s ability and reality to be neither cisgender nor transgender if that is, in fact, what makes the most sense for them… as a description of their lives, of who they are, of their gender and their relationship to capital-G Gender.
Vex said…
I’m a transwoman. I live in a large, fairly progressive city (Philadelphia, PA). I’m harrassed almost daily.
as i said, the binary perspective isn’t useful “when we begin to actually believe the world is binary”. since i’ve never been raised in a society that doesn’t contextualize a significant number of concepts in terms of a binary, i don’t know that i’m in a position to outright dismiss it. perhaps it’s necessary in the beginnings of ones internal organization of thought – i don’t know, or know that it’s even knowable.
certainly, it would be a major problem *if* the human brain requires binary thinking in order to begin functional internal organization, and the majority of people are subsequently unable to break out of the limits of a binary perspective system.
Well obviously terminology is going to be a bitch once we destroy heteronormativity (or pretend it doesn’t exist for a discussion), at that point the only uselful thing to label would be whether your body makes sperm, ova, or nothing.
Even though cisgender doesn’t do anything to destroy the gender binary, it still has utility in that it replaces “normal,” it’s clinical [sounding] enough that “I’m not cisgender” is going to be less… painful?… to say than “I’m not normal”
piny, Holly, thank God for you both.
When I get home from work, I’ll see if I can help bat cleanup.
RachelPhilPA, me too! (geographically, that is – I’m a ciswoman myself). There are some real creeps round these here parts.
I was originally confused about the term cisgendered, believing it referred somehow to two X chromosomes and was therefore female-oriented. Huh.
I think adding terms is really positive in a couple of ways. First, the more we are able to actively claim a part of society, the better, and if the best way to do that is language, then more power to us.
Second, given the vast array of distinctions within this discussion, it’s eventually going to become a big verbal mess. And I say that because it’s a good thing; at a certain point, we won’t bother with these hierarchical distinctions anymore. I could go from identifying as a heterosexual, cisgendered female who has retained her sex from birth and presents as female to someone who just presents in the way that feels right to me. I happen to study a foreign language with an absurdly complex grammatical structure, and eventually just gave up on learning all the variations on the paradigms and decided to just deal with each word in its own uniquely weird way.
(the term ‘weird’ being used here in the context of words in a dead language, of course, and not individuals.)
Holly, if I’m understanding it correctly, the term for neither cis- nor transgendered is ‘genderqueer.’
If it turns out I’m wrong about that, please someone correct me pronto.
As someone attempting to use language and words to make a living, I’m all for expanding our vocabulary in any useful way. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s no existant word for a useful lexical definition, then creating a word is all to the good. I’m quite delighted with cisgendered and my only gripe with the plethora of words on the trans/genderqueer end is the lexical confusion (as shown by Holly).
I find it helpful, in the appropriate discussions, to be able to refer to myself as a cisgendered, but not particularly femme, woman, and be pretty certain that I’ve given a description of my sex and gender that is both accurate and reasonably clear.
Genderqueer is another word that various people use differently, but generally speaking yet again… I understand it to mean that you reject or feel outside of the binary gender system. That can encompass people who don’t identify as any gender, who identify as between genders, whose gender feels fluid to them, etc.
Some people talk about it more as a state of mind (i.e. “I live my life as a cisgendered woman, but I feel and identify very much as genderqueer.”) and for others it’s more openly expressed, or just who they are and what their life is like.
You can certainly be transgender (i.e. “having had the experience of moving from your assigned gender to a different gender”) and also genderqueer (“not fitting into the gender binary”). I am! I was male-assigned at birth, then I transitioned. In the process of transitioning I figured out that I really was not too fond of the gender binary system or gendered requirements of all kinds. I am very politically identified as a woman, and people generally interpret me as a non-trans woman, but as a kind of gender-rejecting sorta-androgynous one. And that fits with my feelings about gender, which is that gender can go fuck itself and I don’t want to make more compromises with it than I have to in order to get by, and maybe mess around with it a bit so that it’s not as depressing.
Holly – Damn, didn’t mean to derail the other thread. I thought it was a fresh thread since this one had racked up +80 comments by the time I got here.
I guess I’m what’s considered “cisgendered” (assigned female at birth, dressed in pink, female name, F on my birth certificate, driver’s license, passport and certainly not male, still called “she” by everyone) but I dislike the term – I just think it’s ugly sounding, awkward and not something I relate to at all, so I’m happy to opt for non-trans or woman born woman.
I hate to rehash the race and gender thing, but it’s like the term “brown people”. Lots of people (mostly white liberals) use it in a non-offensive way, and many people of color are fine with referring to themselves as “brown”. However I don’t really relate to the term “brown person” and I’d be taken aback if someone called me that. I don’t feel that “brown person” describes my experience of race/ethnicity (because a lot of “brown people” consider me quite fair-skinned!) – Asian-American, nonwhite, person of color are more on target though.
Same thing with cisgender – I suppose it’s a category I could fall into, but it’s not an identity that I have a strong affinity towards.
*I am not aware of any terms for “people who do not have disabilities” that imply that their bodies are simply types alongside many others. “Temporarily able-bodied,” however, is an attempt to point out that “disabled” is a very flexible category, and one which most people find themselves in at one time or another. So it references a perspective on “able” bodies that doesn’t mesh with ableism, and places ableism under scrutiny.
Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland Thompson are two in the field of disability studies (and humanities or literature studies, too, I believe) who’ve written extensively on “normalcy.” Davis has written about how the social construction of “normal” is not even very old — it first appears in the 1840s (before that it was a carpenter’s term meaning “perpendicular”). In his 1995 book Enforcing Normalcy, he says:
“Why the modern binary — normal/abnormal — must be maintained is a complex question. But we can begin by accounting for the desire to split bodies into two immutable categories: whole and incomplete, abled and disabled, normal and abnormal, functional and dysfunctional.”
IIRC, it’s also Davis who has suggested that “disability studies” will and should eventually morph into “normalcy studies” just as “gender studies” is a more comprehensive way of looking at “women’s studies” and gender inequality.
Thompson, author of Extraordinary Bodies, coined the term “normate” for the constructed identity of normalcy, or “the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries…. If one attempts to define the normate person by peeling away all marked traits within the social order at this historical moment, what emerges is a very narrowly defined profile that describes only a minority of actual people.”
I haven’t seen Thompson’s term “normate” used outside of disability studies writing. I find myself consistently using “disabled” and “nondisabled.” If a term showed up that felt better than “disabled” (which, I feel, is itself an improvement over “handicapped” — a term with absolutely no complementary term for nondisabled folks) I would probably adopt it. Like the transition from “handicapped” to “disabled”, that new, currently nonexistent term would signify a progression of social understanding that doesn’t center “normal” and “able.” Cisgender is a great term for signifying a progression of understanding about gender, imo.
Great post, Piny.
Oh, just because I have it handy, here’s a link to a chapter in Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. (Apologies to those with vision impairments that the two .pdf files I’ve linked to appear to be those kind of .pdf files that are inaccessible because of how the documents are created. I’m afraid I don’t have access to any better ones.)
Last night’s conversation with my boyfriend:
Me: What do you think of the term “cisgendered” as a counterpart to “transgendered”?
Him: Huh?
Me: *explains term*
Him: Why do we need a word for it?
Me: How would you describe yourself in this context, then?
Him: Normal? Err… Hmm…
Which is the precise point of the whole word, I think.
My boyfriend is a Muggle. :-/
I had never heard the term cisgendered before, and this is a very interesting discussion. I’ve learned a lot. However, I haven’t seen a lot of people discussing “cissies.” I have no negative initial reaction to “cisgendered” but “cissies” is quite another matter. It’s such a loaded term, even if you spell it differently. I gather from the post that it’s not much in use, but if the quoted poster was reacting to “cissies” more than “cisgendered” I would understand her emotional reaction.
Just this morning, my drawing teacher slipped and said “so normal men can come to your lesbian party too?” -suggesting gay men aren’t normal. And then, before I even opened my mouth to protest, on his own, he realized he’d just said something that puts himself in a position of power, and immediately made amends. He didn’t say “you know what I mean” he blushed and explained he meant gay men but he doesn’t imply they are inferior.
So if only as a politically correct means of pressure, the definition of non-gay people as heterosexual *does* appear to have some effect. Cissexual isn’t readily going to catch, as Piny says… But if it did I expect it would have the same result.
On the other hand, if one doesn’t feel transsexual is derogatory (which implies that one has no idea how transsexual is more often than not an imposed label and identity) why would one feel cissexual is derogatory? My suspicion is, being called a cissexual takes away privileges or strikes a blow to one’s self-image by associating the person with transsexuals, whom they wouldn’t normally want to be associated with.
It might be perceived as an imposed act of activism for the rights of people whom they don’t readily accept or support. We’re all transphobic to some extend or another, but when a cisgendered person accepts the label, she/he sides with the legitimacy of transpeople’s claims and is an active supporter.
Conversely, denying the term “cisgendered” or any term that makes “normality” appear as legitimate as “abnormality” or “life choice” or “genetic condition” or the like, is more probably based on transphobia and denial of privilege.
hahahaha! I don’t mean to offend, but that’s right on!
She makes no real distinction between the two.
Personally, I’m not dealing with “cissies” because I have never heard the term used at all, let alone as a slur. I’ve seen one reference–so that’s secondhand–to a joke made about how, heh, this means the straight people are the “cissies,” but it sounded like pointing out the irony, not an attempt to actually label anyone a sissy.
Sorta like this, in other words:
I mean, this is not a sexist joke.
piny, you are most awesome. I’m pretty sure I first heard of the word “cisgender” here, on one of your posts, didn’t have a problem with it then, and I don’t now. I really don’t understand how anyone could think it was derogatory by any stretch of the imagination.
I’ve never once heard the term “cissies” and honestly, I don’t believe it really exists other than a creation of the author. I ran a search of my own message board’s some odd 20,000 posts and it appears exactly Zero times. Given that Uppity has in the past blogged against transgender women’s rights, I think it’s just another example of her transphobia.
I think it’s a Kristoff cabbie, myself. It is mentioned on this http://perttukitty.com/tg/wiki/index.php/Cisgender“>”trans wikipedia” article, but again, reference to a joke:
…And the author doesn’t say much about people actually using this term and doesn’t imply that it is itself either derogatory or derogatory as a sexist term.
ekf:
My point was that transgender deals with gender (i.e., masculine/feminine) and transsex deals with sex (i.e., male/female), using the term “respectively” to construct a parallelism.
You’re right. What I did was project the binary parallelism into my own issues with transsexual/transgender by way of transsexuality, generally speaking (I overuse that phrase) being specifically concerned with discourse framed in the binary of male/female, but with me not at all being content with transgender framed in the binary of masculine/feminine. I suppose a more accurate comment to what you had actually written would question your apparent pinning of all difference into the binary frame of masculine/feminine, male/female and how that structurally privileges the “norm” at the expense of the different.
And there’s a reference to an earlier wiki prime article here:
but it’s still not derogatory or derogatory as a sexist term.
Thank you, piny. This is awesome. Both good content and extremely well said.
I agree that cissies isn’t deragatory. (cisgendered, but androgynous) Also, post was good.
I’ve never once heard the term “cissies” and honestly, I don’t believe it really exists other than a creation of the author.
Ah, heh, umm… weeeell…
But remember that I am a complete asshole, I have a reputation to maintain ffs…
Thank you, Frumious B, this made my day.
Then yeah, I don’t think that’s appropriate. It’s fair to point out the irony, and fair to point out that, ahem, “trannie” isn’t exactly neutral, but “cissie” is also a derogatory term for effeminate people, and I can understand why a feminist would find it offensive.
Ah, I was thinking that sissy was the term for effeminate and cissy was made up. Regional?
I’ve seen it spelled both ways, although the former is I think much more common. But if it’s used to ridicule any group because it’s reminiscent of sissy, then it’s inappropriate.
prosphorus, thank you for your reply. I agree that my early post was deficient and agree with your objection. Thanks to you and all of the many posters who have been really helpful in describing the complexities and nuances.
Well, maybe southerners only use sissy, but if you use cissy to mock women for being girly well, you’re a douchebag. By which I mean I agree.
I don’t think anyone’s said this yet, or at least not in so many words, but I love having a word for “cisgendered” because it sets up a spectrum. I mean, I can’t claim to be transgendered. I’m not. But I am not exactly 100% cisgendered either. I used to contemplate transitioning before deciding that it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I should probably have explored my gender identity better than I have done, but lack of awareness of a spectrum, plus other personal factors kind of made it seem like a big, scary step to start deviating from “normal”. Can I be transcurious?
Anyway, my point is, once you have a word for “cisgendered” there is a possibility of examining the extent to which you actually are cisgendered. Similarly with “neurotypical.” (Would “physiotypical” work for disabilities? ) They are very freeing words. Which is of course exactly why people who have an interest in enforcing conformity would choose to reject such words.
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