Rejecting the term “Cisgender” is inherently transphobic
A while back, I asked the readers of Ask Addi to make comments on why they may have a problem with the term cisgender. The answers I received ran the gamut from “it just sounds weird” to “it’s a slur you trans people made up to attack people like me.” There were also a few who said that people should be able to identify as they wish and not have a term forced on them. Those people are usually cisgender, straight and white; people who have never had an identity marker forced on them. Well, at least not since birth.
The impression I got was that a lot of people didn’t think that they needed a term to describe them because they are “normal.” Trans folx, like me, are the weird ones, so we need a word to define us. Rejecting cisgender is just a symptom of believing that trans people are the other, a sign of transphobia.
Let’s step back and look at what these terms mean. Transgender is an adjective that indicates a person’s internal gender identity doesn’t match the gender that society, in general, would assign them usually based on external physical characteristics. This means a person whose experienced gender is a man, but they were born with a female body or vice versa. It can also include people whose internal gender doesn’t fit nicely into the societal definition of man or woman, otherwise known as a non-binary identity…
