Transgender people want to be recognized for who they are, and called accordingly. Nothing could be more reasonable. Why do they insist on slapping labels and names on non-trans people?
Now You’re a Cis
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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The gay community does the same thing to its own members. Queer used to be a vicious insult. Now it has been “reclaimed” as a tool (sorry, instrumentality — six syllables vs. one) of self-empowering liberation or some such jargon, and those members of the community who don’t like the term are stuck with it. The n-word comes to mind too. Remember that segment of the black community that didn’t want the word used even by black people? Yeah, they sure got shoved to the corner of the “discussion” fast, didn’t they?
The technique is not new. The feminists do it. The right-wingers do it. Pretty much every underdog group does. The user group elevates its jargon and talking points to a level where only the people who devote large quantities of time and energy are able to follow along with the discourse. Those fast-talking grifters gain control of the discussion and warp it based on their own personal desires and unresolved psychological traumas. I think the trans community is particularly susceptible to this, and, as surely as Facebook has 58 gender expressions, the conflict between those members’ conflicting traumas will result eventually in a lot of trans people feeling that they’ve been ignored by their own.
Not a label, as such, and not derogatory at all, just a simpler, easier way to say “none of the above.”
I haven’t ever heard “cis” used as a slur. As @Liebchen says, it just a way to say “people other than trans people.” “Cis” is common in chemistry as in trans-fats vs. cis-fats.
Along the lines of what @alex_the_tired said, … there are multiple languages being spoken, to the point that people who mostly agree on the fundamentals can nonetheless get into heated arguments and conclude that they are diametrically opposed — because the words they are using mean something different to the other person. It would be good to have politicians who are multilingual in this sense, and could help us to achieve the common goals by translating between groups.