I wholeheartedly agree about the bastardization and mutilation of language. Both by people who want to change and progress the way we speak, and by the people resisting those people. Annoys me. Words mean things.
“Cis” isn’t a slur, but it’s used out of ideological imperative to remind the people it refers to that they are the obliged privileged people, as per that ideology. It is a subtle form of discrimination with cis people being the relative moral-positional inferiors. People understandably don’t want to be forced into signing up for that stuff. That’s more peeve-inducing for them than misdiagnosing it as a slur, and I get it.
I see what you mean by not wanting to be forced into a certain ideological framework by "identifying with" the word. But identifiers like "white," "male," "straight," etc are used in the same way without getting really any pushback. I just don't see much of a difference there.
In a vacuum, "cis" could function similarly to "white" and "straight", and so there's a kind of desire to just go along with it because whatever, why not.
But their histories, are very different (unless there was some forgotten history to "straight" I'm not aware of), and in the case of cis the history is very recent. More to the point, the process was inorganic, imposed from a minority - or rather, an activist minority within the minority - and appeared in close proximity with its "die cis scum" type variants. (I'm not alone in having encountered both "cis" and "die cis scum" for the first time on tumblr).
This kind of thing is simply not reliably felt by human beings as trivial. And when all pushback is dismissed as thoroughly misguided small-c-conservative fear of change and/or bigotry, this reinforces the pushback. (I mean of course it does.) So "cis" does rather inevitably come off as a polarized-tribal shibboleth we're all supposed to pay respects to.
From a purely functional sense I can see all this being eye-roll-worthy. Kind of like "can we stop arguing about whether to call it Israel or Palestine and just call it Canaan or something" (10 million foot view example). Unfortunately cultural stuff flies in the face of being efficient happy economical but occasionally harmlessly deep beings.
“Straight” got pushback when it first appeared, decades ago, but people gave up. The gist of the objection was that creating categories of human beings that were analogous to races, which have immutable characteristics, was inappropriate. There are men. They have male bodies. They do things with their male sex organs with themselves and other people. If they do things with another man, they’re engaging in homosexual activity. That doesn’t make them a different category of human being. They could put that same sex organ into a different type of body the next day. But this mindset obviously gave way to the idea that being “gay“ is a fixed and permanent feature that exists from before birth, and lasts throughout a lifetime. While there are countless contrary cases, it became the dogma that this was the basic reality, and all others were inauthentic, and that being “gay“ was like being “Black.” (we will leave aside the inconsistent dogma that race is a social construct that has no biological or material reality.) To be gay was something you are rather than something you do. This understanding permitted a repurposing of the entire black civil rights struggle as a historical predecessor for gay rights, which was, of course, politically effective in the American context. So if there’s something that you are, which is gay, then it means that people who are not gay, must also be a different category or type of human being, hence the need for “straight.” Adopting that terminology meant accepting an entire framework, which was at least initially resisted. (As an aside, It’s interesting to see now the idea of fluidity, and a continuum or a spectrum, which is inconsistent with and antithetical to the idea of a fixed and immutable gayness.) In short, to concede the word “cis” is to concede the entire political struggle. I don’t think it will be as easy to get the overwhelming majority of the population to characterize themselves as “cis” the way most of them will characterize themselves as straight. Trans is a tougher sell than gay.
I think you're absolutely right. They're a fundamental difference that people feel even if they aren't articulate in expressing it. You mention the "race is a social construct" thing as a foil in this "immutable characteristics" thing, and that's part of it, I think. People don't intuitively feel that this stuff really is on a spectrum. Perhaps claiming everything exists on a spectrum is too abstract to make sense the the population at large, or too vague to be fully correct, anyway.
That's interesting about the word "straight" and the pushback it initially received. I thought there probably was some at the beginning, but I've never seen it (or paid attention) in my lifetime.
That said, the idea that sexual orientation is immutable has always seemed so intuitively correct that I haven't bothered taking seriously the idea that it could be anything else. All I've really heard about are some random religious "ex-gay" stories that seem entirely unbelievable. I'm curious about the cases you cite, because I think context is important. In my younger, more partying days, I definitely "experimented" with women, but never really considered myself gay or bi. It was just a fun thing to do sometimes. I know men who've done the same and still consider themselves straight. But you're usually going to be attracted primarily to one or the other regardless of your behavior.
So I agree that there is homosexual behavior that isn't necessarily indicative of actually being a gay person, but it's pretty difficult to think of all the gay people I know (a lot; I'm from Minneapolis and it is very gay there) and consider just about any of them to have even a little naturally-occuring attraction to the opposite sex.
> because he actually doesn't know any trans people, or anything at all about this mythical group of creatures he heard about once on facebook.
At the far end of this phenomenon is someone like Ian Miles Cheong, endlessly commenting on America while never leaving Malaysia. While the sacralization of ‘lived experience’ often goes too far, the opposite is its own flavor of clownery. People are losing their minds daily over topics they have zero personal experience with.
It simplifies and clarifies to use the words “men” and “women” for, you know, men and women, the phenotypes that are organized to produce small and large gametes, respectively. That is, the terms refer to the sex of the person involved, with no further complications needed. It makes it no longer necessary to say “prostate havers” and “people who menstruate”: they’re just men and women, respectively. It eliminates “AFAB” and “AMAB”, because elaborate pretense is no longer involved. It’s much easier and clearer to say “those men on the bench” than “those people on the bench are a man and a trans woman”. A “trans woman” is not a kind of woman, the “trans” type, but rather a man who desires or even demands that others pretend he is a woman, that is, he is a trans-identified man. When you say that a trans-identified man took first place in a women’s cycling event, the situation is not as blurred as if you were to say that a “trans woman” took first place in the women’s cycling event. You avoid the absurdity of “After sentencing, the rapist came to realize that she was a trans woman”. (A profound personal realization that has struck more than one rapist, by the way.)
As we all know, moving the goalposts (eg cripple->handicapped->disabled->differently-abled) is to signal status and in-group affiliation. If you don’t speak the jargon you don’t belong in the club.
I wholeheartedly agree about the bastardization and mutilation of language. Both by people who want to change and progress the way we speak, and by the people resisting those people. Annoys me. Words mean things.
“Cis” isn’t a slur, but it’s used out of ideological imperative to remind the people it refers to that they are the obliged privileged people, as per that ideology. It is a subtle form of discrimination with cis people being the relative moral-positional inferiors. People understandably don’t want to be forced into signing up for that stuff. That’s more peeve-inducing for them than misdiagnosing it as a slur, and I get it.
(I myself use “non-trans” and call it a day)
I see what you mean by not wanting to be forced into a certain ideological framework by "identifying with" the word. But identifiers like "white," "male," "straight," etc are used in the same way without getting really any pushback. I just don't see much of a difference there.
In a vacuum, "cis" could function similarly to "white" and "straight", and so there's a kind of desire to just go along with it because whatever, why not.
But their histories, are very different (unless there was some forgotten history to "straight" I'm not aware of), and in the case of cis the history is very recent. More to the point, the process was inorganic, imposed from a minority - or rather, an activist minority within the minority - and appeared in close proximity with its "die cis scum" type variants. (I'm not alone in having encountered both "cis" and "die cis scum" for the first time on tumblr).
This kind of thing is simply not reliably felt by human beings as trivial. And when all pushback is dismissed as thoroughly misguided small-c-conservative fear of change and/or bigotry, this reinforces the pushback. (I mean of course it does.) So "cis" does rather inevitably come off as a polarized-tribal shibboleth we're all supposed to pay respects to.
From a purely functional sense I can see all this being eye-roll-worthy. Kind of like "can we stop arguing about whether to call it Israel or Palestine and just call it Canaan or something" (10 million foot view example). Unfortunately cultural stuff flies in the face of being efficient happy economical but occasionally harmlessly deep beings.
“Straight” got pushback when it first appeared, decades ago, but people gave up. The gist of the objection was that creating categories of human beings that were analogous to races, which have immutable characteristics, was inappropriate. There are men. They have male bodies. They do things with their male sex organs with themselves and other people. If they do things with another man, they’re engaging in homosexual activity. That doesn’t make them a different category of human being. They could put that same sex organ into a different type of body the next day. But this mindset obviously gave way to the idea that being “gay“ is a fixed and permanent feature that exists from before birth, and lasts throughout a lifetime. While there are countless contrary cases, it became the dogma that this was the basic reality, and all others were inauthentic, and that being “gay“ was like being “Black.” (we will leave aside the inconsistent dogma that race is a social construct that has no biological or material reality.) To be gay was something you are rather than something you do. This understanding permitted a repurposing of the entire black civil rights struggle as a historical predecessor for gay rights, which was, of course, politically effective in the American context. So if there’s something that you are, which is gay, then it means that people who are not gay, must also be a different category or type of human being, hence the need for “straight.” Adopting that terminology meant accepting an entire framework, which was at least initially resisted. (As an aside, It’s interesting to see now the idea of fluidity, and a continuum or a spectrum, which is inconsistent with and antithetical to the idea of a fixed and immutable gayness.) In short, to concede the word “cis” is to concede the entire political struggle. I don’t think it will be as easy to get the overwhelming majority of the population to characterize themselves as “cis” the way most of them will characterize themselves as straight. Trans is a tougher sell than gay.
"Trans is a tougher sell than gay"
I think you're absolutely right. They're a fundamental difference that people feel even if they aren't articulate in expressing it. You mention the "race is a social construct" thing as a foil in this "immutable characteristics" thing, and that's part of it, I think. People don't intuitively feel that this stuff really is on a spectrum. Perhaps claiming everything exists on a spectrum is too abstract to make sense the the population at large, or too vague to be fully correct, anyway.
That's interesting about the word "straight" and the pushback it initially received. I thought there probably was some at the beginning, but I've never seen it (or paid attention) in my lifetime.
That said, the idea that sexual orientation is immutable has always seemed so intuitively correct that I haven't bothered taking seriously the idea that it could be anything else. All I've really heard about are some random religious "ex-gay" stories that seem entirely unbelievable. I'm curious about the cases you cite, because I think context is important. In my younger, more partying days, I definitely "experimented" with women, but never really considered myself gay or bi. It was just a fun thing to do sometimes. I know men who've done the same and still consider themselves straight. But you're usually going to be attracted primarily to one or the other regardless of your behavior.
So I agree that there is homosexual behavior that isn't necessarily indicative of actually being a gay person, but it's pretty difficult to think of all the gay people I know (a lot; I'm from Minneapolis and it is very gay there) and consider just about any of them to have even a little naturally-occuring attraction to the opposite sex.
> because he actually doesn't know any trans people, or anything at all about this mythical group of creatures he heard about once on facebook.
At the far end of this phenomenon is someone like Ian Miles Cheong, endlessly commenting on America while never leaving Malaysia. While the sacralization of ‘lived experience’ often goes too far, the opposite is its own flavor of clownery. People are losing their minds daily over topics they have zero personal experience with.
It simplifies and clarifies to use the words “men” and “women” for, you know, men and women, the phenotypes that are organized to produce small and large gametes, respectively. That is, the terms refer to the sex of the person involved, with no further complications needed. It makes it no longer necessary to say “prostate havers” and “people who menstruate”: they’re just men and women, respectively. It eliminates “AFAB” and “AMAB”, because elaborate pretense is no longer involved. It’s much easier and clearer to say “those men on the bench” than “those people on the bench are a man and a trans woman”. A “trans woman” is not a kind of woman, the “trans” type, but rather a man who desires or even demands that others pretend he is a woman, that is, he is a trans-identified man. When you say that a trans-identified man took first place in a women’s cycling event, the situation is not as blurred as if you were to say that a “trans woman” took first place in the women’s cycling event. You avoid the absurdity of “After sentencing, the rapist came to realize that she was a trans woman”. (A profound personal realization that has struck more than one rapist, by the way.)
Great essay
As we all know, moving the goalposts (eg cripple->handicapped->disabled->differently-abled) is to signal status and in-group affiliation. If you don’t speak the jargon you don’t belong in the club.