Cisgendered People and Linguistic Marking
Posted on: April 14, 2012
- In: Xenologer
- 4 Comments
I am baffled by the existence of people who are outraged that they are being called cisgendered instead of “normal.” I guess maybe they consider every label to be inherently derogatory because it points out that a thing needs to be linguistically marked and I guess that is inherently degrading? Calls into question THEIR intentions when they refer to LGBT people, doesn’t it?
Maybe I just know too many chemistry geeks, but everybody I know immediately got that “cis” is just the companion term to “trans.” That’s it.
I suppose this is more from the files of people who don’t mind equality as long as by “equal” we mean “everybody is okay but I am obviously more so and please don’t imply that you are good as my kind.” As long as we can define “equality” so that it preserves their sense of natural supremacy and superior “rightness,” they’re okay with it.
Never mind that this makes no goddamn sense at all even linguistically. If these people were better at thinking about words and what they mean, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
For people who are confused that I am annoyed, here is your crash course on what folk sound like when they object to the idea that they can’t just refer to themselves as “normal” and define everybody else in opposition. “Other people are either failing or succeeding to be like me and should be classified accordingly and any implication that I am an asshole for classifying them this way is ZOMG CISPHOBIC OPPRESSION.”
This is what it looks like applied anywhere else. Thinking of people like this is… honestly kind of hard to avoid because it is taught and enforced in a lot of cultures, but you turn the corner into Asshole Town when you start defending this like it is acceptable or even desirable. Here are ways that you should not be classifying people:
Normal people and gay or trans people.
Regular people and women.
Americans and Black Americans.
Get it?
tl;dr: You can’t call yourself normal without calling someone else deviant. If that isn’t your intention, then accept that gracefully allowing yourself to be linguistically marked just like everyone else is the decent thing to do. If it is your intention, you are horrible and as I have seen threatened elsewhere I will literally change you into an animal using my magic powers.
(Disclaimer: This blogger does not have magic powers, nor was she processed in a facility that also processes magic powers.)
4 Responses to "Cisgendered People and Linguistic Marking"
April 14, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Excellent post! I don’t run into the “how dare you label me” thing much in real life, but I do include cis- in the definitions module of every Trans 101 course I give. I’ll have to use this as an example of how it works when confronted by it, and link to it when someone online needs some schooling. Thanks!
May 9, 2012 at 11:24 am
In a course dedicated to developing multicultural awareness I ran into some really really heavy resistance to understanding why it matters that there is a normal and a label for everything else. This was the first concept we were to get and the cis-straight-EuroAmerican-males in my group were put upon by the discussion. This attitude is prevalent and frustrating thanks for posting!
April 14, 2012 at 7:53 pm
Loved reading this! I got tired of seeing so many transphobic blogs scrolling through (I wasn’t even scrollign through Transgender so it’s not like I was looking for them!) and was really starting to get annoyed over how many people were there too condemn them compared to the people there to say ‘Hey! You’re ok!’. Thanks for brightening up my evening.
April 14, 2012 at 8:09 pm
Glad to help. I’m not trying to toot my own trans ally horn here or whatever when I say that I don’t really grok these kinds of mindsets. They legitimately MAKE NO SENSE and that makes them hard to understand except in this vague sort of “unexamined privilege is a helluva drug” kind of sense.