Disclaimer: I thought of this while using this command line. I actually think Celeste and Matrix are good and trans rights are human rights.
Image description: [ First pannel; character turning his back on the Trans flag, Madeline from Celeste and the Matrix movie title screen : “I am not Trans”. Second pannel; character hugging a box labeled ‘gender’: “I enjoy the gender I was assigned at birth.” Third pannel; character typing on a laptop with the Arch Linux logo while wearing programming socks. A bubble shows the line on the screen : ‘makepkg -cis’. The character says: “When I compile an AUR package, I clean install files, install the program, sync dependencies; in a single line.” ]
All of the allegory went completely over my head, which is not unusual for me. And since I’m cis I have the privilege of not having to think about how gender roles affect me in day to day life. The “red pill” thing does make it pretty funny when you consider how right-wingers, who are super transphobic, took it as their own.
Writing this got me thinking that I hated the term “cis” when I first started hearing it years ago. It just sounded unpleasant, like “sissy” or something. But it’s grown on me through repeated usage.
Yeah a lot of cis people really reject the term. Some don’t like the way it sounds and wants to self identify with a word that they like more… A certain number stick to their guns in wanting to make sure that there is no word that is used for people who are not trans.
Sometimes they opt for wanting to be called “normal” without realizing that there is a value judgement implicit in that word. If you have a “normal man” and a “trans man” you are saying that transness is abnormal, pathologizing gender. You reach the same effect by omission of a word. If there is a man and a trans man then one of these things is assumed standard and the other the deviation.
Of course they don’t see a problem with this because under that model they personally don’t take on the psychological burden of constantly having to referring to oneself by terminology reserved for either the deviant or somehow inferior. To those unused to questioning their centrally held power the idea of just having a word to describe them in relation to others is seen as an oppression.
If enough people disliked the term cis they could band together and just come up with another value neutral word…That’s basically how we arrived at the less science centric terms for other sexuallities like “gay” as an example. “Homosexual” being a relatively new classification wasn’t exactly loved by the people to whom it was applied to beyond their consent as it sounded clinical. Other euphemisms had always existed but gay was purposely adopted as a synonym by the queer community.
I don’t think there would be objection from the trans community long as the term synonymous for cis was essentially was not trying to imply that it is somehow the default state of being.
Think of the potential slang we are missing out on!
Agreed. I recognized that we needed a neutral term for non-trans people, and since we weren’t champing at the bit to present one, it was done for us. I see it so often now that it’s strange to think it ever seemed unpleasant to me.
There’s a great example of a word that’s been completely reclaimed that still makes me wince a bit because of how it was used when I was growing up. I’m glad it’s been fully defanged now!
Not fully defanged yet. Queer can still be used as a pejorative just like if someone said “That’s so gay!” in the 90’s schoolyard usage to synonym for dumb, uncool or bad… We did however make it kind of harder to pull off as a lot of the time unless you make your tone or context explicitly negative it just comes across as using it in a neutral way.