Queer? No ta.

I hate the word "cis" too, I think it was first used by a German sexologist (yup, that's a thing) in the late 90s but really gained traction when the gender studies crowd picked it up around 2010. Even when you lump in all of the male to female / female to male transitionees and people who are gender fluid / variant / non-conforming, they still make up less than 1% of the population, so why is it necessary to have a term at all? For all the talk of "we have more in common than that which divides us" we aren't half desperate to categorise everyone into their individual groups and harp on about how nobody else understands what we're going through. Ahhh f**k off.

I think the idea is to make cis people feel guilty for their cis privilege. Or at least that is how I keep seeing it being used.

I hadn't heard of CIS before today, it sounds like something you'd treat with natural yogurt to be honest.

Amen.

I don't think of it as creating many new sub-categories of gender identity though, we're just naming them now. I had a conversation with my dad recently; he thought it strange that there are so many transgender people around now and that they just didn't happen historically, but all it really is is that people are more able to talk about it as it becomes more normalised and we develop the vocabulary to do so.

It is when I see lists like this: genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/gender - that I really do question how far things should be allowed to go.

(as far as I can tell, that link is a genuine, sincere posting aimed at helping people - even though it does, in places, read like a parody)

Orientations list:  genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/orientations/

Pronouns list:  genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/pronouns/

I have no desire to belittle anyone who sincerely wishes to identify as having one of the more unusual orientations - but it is hard to take some of them seriously.  

The idea behind having cis-male and trans-male as options is that it sets them up equally, whereas if we don't have cis-male and just use plain ol' "male" as the default, then someone who is trans-male is automatically othered, made to feel less valid and like an outsider. And, okay, there are way fewer trans-male people than cis-male people, but that doesn't mean they're not normal. There are more dogs than pandas in the world, but the panda is still valid.

Whilst I can see that, the desire of many people who transition is to live as their new gender not to be something other.

There are those who also wish to constantly proclaim their otherness by putting the focus on the trans part of their identity.

Cis is being overused by a very small but very vocal minority of academics and activists to create division where most people want to see unity.

As I said earlier, no one should be blamed for how they were born. Cis is being used for exactly that purpose and that, to my mind, diminishes any positive intent behind the creation of that label.

I'm pretty sure there is no difference between those two things. By "born transgender" do you mean intersex? That's an anatomical problem where you're born with a chromosome imbalance or more notoriously with genitalia that doesn't correspond to your biological sex.

I think there are definitely people who use transgender-ism (not a word) as a trend. They're usually the ones who want to shout the loudest about how oppressed they are. As someone who experienced debilitating gender dysphoria all through my childhood and teenage years, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. It's like a toothache that at its best is a dull nagging pain and its worst is like someone clamping your face into a vice and inserting a small chainsaw into your mouth. It's completely counter intuitive because my brain is as female as could be, but I have a male body, and it's like both are constantly fighting against one another. It's not a social trend, it's not something cute to put on a T-Shirt, it is a severe mental illness. We can't even say it's a mental illness any more because that implies there's something wrong with it but there is, your brain just doesn't work properly.

I don't think hormones or puberty blockers should be given to children except under very extreme circumstances. Children change. One week they like Spiderman, the next they like Batman. It is child abuse to inflict upon someone too young to even express their thoughts coherently something that is irreversible, leads to infertility, and could substantially increase their risk of various health conditions down the line. It's just wrong. In my case it would have been the right thing to do but nobody could have known that, I could have reached 13, changed my mind, and been totally screwed.

I still don't like the word "cis". I also don't like the concept of "privilege". Instead of saying "this group have had a rough time of it, let's make things better for them", you're saying "this group have had it TOO good, let's remove those benefits they have". It's not privilege if you're able to walk down the street at night and notfeel threatened, it's a basic human right. It's not privilege to be able to see yourself represented on television, it's what everyone should be able to expect. The reason there is such opposition to social justice is because a) a large proportion of it is stupid and counter-productive and b) the whole concept is framed around bringing people down and not building people up. The fact that in the last few years it's become acceptable to make abhorrently rude and unsubstantiated comments about entire groups (white people, men, cisgender people, straight people) illustrates that it's completely missed the mark.

That is not what "privilege" means, or least it's not supposed to. It simply means acknowledging the various complex ways our identities affect our treatment in the world filled with unspoken systems of oppression and power interchanges (eg a patriarchy). A person can experience privilege in one respect and dis-privilege in another respect.


"When You're Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression"
 

You are right- but also the use of the term by some facets of 'Social justice warriors' is often twisted and I think that's the issue Martello was talking about (and certainly I was referring to). I fully appreciate I have privilege in some aspects (being white, living in a Western country etc) but I'm not in others (Being a woman). And that's good to be aware of as a person going through life and as a person wanting to affect change. However it's not a stick to beat people with which is where some extremes of the movements fall down.