Is that right?
No, of course it’s not. There’s no need for a “prefix to describe people who identify with the same gender as their birth” any more than there’s a need for a prefix to describe people who identify with the same species as their birth. It’s a prefix too many.
The point of it of course is to nudge people into thinking there is such a need, and that being “cis” is a form of privilege, and that “cis” people – or to be honest “cis” women – have to admit they are “cis” and feel guilty for it and do everything they can to make it up to people who are not “cis.”
The issue isn’t that it’s “insulting” but that it’s dishonest and manipulative.
Comments
18 responses to “Just a prefix”
There is a large literature in Linguistics of the concept of “markedness”. Which is used for a great many things, but prominent among them is the matter of which side of an option will be literally marked with something like a prefix/suffix or an inflection.
And in this case, the condition of a mismatch between observed birth sex and later felt gender is the marked alternative semantically, so it makes sense that it would take an overt marker, in the form of “trans” as a prefix (or lately a detached word). The unmarked case semantically is a match between those classifications, and there is no need for a lexical marking most of the time. When a contrast is being drawn, then “cis” is available to contrast with “trans”; but “cis” is superfluous otherwise.
I don’t refer to myself as a goy, or an infidel, or even a heathen for that matter, except in jest. I have no obligation to label myself os non-Jewish -Muslim -Christian. But even those labels don’t bother me much. The problem for me is the assumption that I recognize that there is a need to reference a gender identity to describe myself.
And also, transactivists use cis as a slur frequently enough that Twitter is right to consider it a slur in the context of targeted harassment.
As well as the privilege aspect, I think that ‘cis’ is used for another dishonest reason. Having the descriptors ‘women’ and ‘transwomen’ makes it immediately obvious that they are two separate categories; ‘women’ and ‘not-women’. By throwing ‘cis’ into the mix we suddenly have ‘cis women’ and ‘transwomen’ looking like equal subsets of the category ‘women’, and just like that, transwomen are women.
Wait—what does she mean, “gender of their birth”? I thought there was no birth gender. I thought it was “assigned.”
Oops!
AoS – Definitely. That’s why I flatly refuse to say it except when trashing it.
Some other prefixes in English:
–“Counter-“, as in “counterfactual”
–“Non-“, as in “nonsensical”
–“Mis-“, as in “misogynist”
(Of course “cis” is often used as an adjective these days, as in the phrase “cis scum”.)
Actually “miso” in “misogynist” – Greek for “I hate” plus gyne, woman.
Ah right. Well, in my defense, I’m not an ancient Greek.
But that does make me wonder, how would Aristophanes respond to an offer of miso soup?
WaM, #7:
You clearly didn’t get the memo that PZ put out today.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/28/is-everything-a-binary/
Cis isn’t an insult, silly, it’s a social advantage and that’s a fact. Oh, and the reason we don’t like it is because it carries
Oh for fuxAKE – PZ in that post:
Come on. All those spit-flecked tweets blaming “white cis-women” for everything?
There’s opprobrium. Lots of it.
And of course even aside from that, we disagree that “cis” is a useful or meaningful word because we don’t believe in the religion that coined it.
And notice how ‘trans woman’ is considered offensive, the ‘correct’ form being transwoman, but ‘cis woman’ is totally fine. An internet search for ‘ciswoman’ automatically corrects to ‘cis woman’.
I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around – “transwoman” is the nono.
Aside from Mike B’s point about the moronic conflation of sex and gender — a purposeful conflation that they deny they’re doing while doing it openly, and which gives away their entire game — the TAs elide the “identify with” or “identify as” gender premise, which does not apply to a great many people. I, for example, have no “gender identity.” At all. Ever. I reject gender ab initio as made up nonsense. I have never “identified with/as” the imprisonment that is gender. Stick that in your cispipe and smoke it.
Yes, that breaks down why it’s so infuriating.
You’re right Ophelia. I got that one wrong. Early morning brain fog …
It’s not easy to keep track of all the rules, especially early in the morning.
I have a lot of time for Ash Sarkar, but not on this subject.
Re “…the implicit acknowledgment that if cis people exist, then trans people do, too.”
Aside from looking at the problem the wrong way around, I note that any statements interpreted as “trans people don’t exist” supposedly imply that all the trans people should be rounded up and executed, but a statement saying “cis people don’t exist” does not seem to carry the corresponding implication.