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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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I'm OK with "cis" when the topic of discussion is already transsexualism/transgenderism/etc. But in ordinary language, yeah, a cis-man is just a man. And yes, this view is pretty similar to "trans-men are women" (or rather, "trans-men are not men").

What I find weird about the verbiage is that trans/cis is supposed to be about a boundary, i.e.: transalpine Gaul is from the other side of the Alps whilst cisalpine Gaul is from our side, from the specific point of view of Italians.

But through the mutations of language we've gone from the original term of cis/transsexual (well the translation from the German) to cis/transgender to cis/trans to cis/trans-man/woman.

So now not only is it a freestanding signifier, no longer about anything that can be conceptualized as a boundary, it's also lost any subjective content as to the position we're evaluating from.

Ironically the people who even use the word "cis" likely mean it to apply to people who are on the other side of whatever boundary we're actually talking about, which makes it all the more linguistically absurd.

I thought the metaphor was that a cis person is a person whose sex and gender both reside on the same side of the gender/sex binary, whereas a trans person is someone whose sex and gender reside on different sides of said boundary.

I'm fairly sure "trans" came first, from "transsexual", meaning someone who desires to cross the boundary between man and woman. Wikipedia suggests this (highly politically incorrect) article as the source in English, and refers to an earlier German source. Then "cis" is just the opposite of "trans".

I mean that's a good explanation for the original meaning but that doesn't really work with anything that uses gender, the concept, or any reasoning for transwomen being women.

We are so past the simple gender is social, sex is biological line of argument at this point that I doubt you could rescue some coherent definitions.

The gender-critical would say that a trans woman is a trans-identified man, or TiM for short.

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