No One Actually Believes That Cis Is A Slur, Here’s Why They Pretend To
They’re saying it to waste your time and to stop you talking about the oppression of trans people
Adult Human Baby, Elon Musk, making it clear that he doesn’t believe in freedom of speech for trans people, or the concept of logic.
Cis is a 2400 year old Latin word that is the antonym of the word trans. In the original context it meant “on the same side” and trans meant “on the opposite side”, for example trans-atlantic vs cis-atlantic meaning on the opposite side of the atlantic ocean to the speaker vs on the same side. In the context of LGBT rights a cis person is a person who isn’t a trans person, similar to how a straight or heterosexual person is a person who isn’t a gay or bisexual (or pansexual etc) person.
Yeah, that really is all there is to it. I know.
A few years ago I had written out an article addressing the arguments from the anti-trans movement as to why we shouldn’t be allowed to say the word cis, but I didn’t end up publishing it because it felt kind of embarrassing to stoop down to that. It’s very clear under even the most surface level analysis that none of the arguments they’re saying make any sense or are really worth anyone’s time at all. “Women are not a subset of their own sex” is such a trivially poor argument, especially when transphobes often spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the subset of women that is lesbian women. “Cis is a made up word” and “cis is meaningless” are equally stupid when all words are made up and it’s pretty clear they know what it means from their reaction to it. They can claim that they don’t believe that trans people exist so therefore cis isn’t a concept that exists, but… you know… we do. And even if you are a science denier and you believe being trans is just a mental illness or a delusion or whatever, there are still people who aren’t that. It’s all just so boring and tedious, and their favourite argument “cis is a slur” is no different.
We could go into detail about the definition of what truly makes a slur and talk about how they’re used by oppressors against groups without power to further oppress them, and how that obviously doesn’t apply here. We could point out how they haven’t actually offered an alternative word that means “not trans” and if we picked one they’d all be offended at that too. We could even point out how historically all oppressor groups are desperate to portray themselves as the real victims. We could do a lot of things, but it’s all a waste of time because they don’t really believe it. They are wasting your time and controlling the conversation, that is their real goal here.
Quite often you will see a trans person say something like “In the UK 25% of trans people are homeless at one point in their lives vs only 0.4% of cis people” and the top reply will be “cis is a slur” from @ILuvJKR1488, followed by 25 people engaged in a multi-hour long argument about the dictionary definition of the word cis. If you get involved in this argument you may well feel like you absolutely humiliated that anonymous idiot, but they managed to get you to talk about something absolutely nonsense that they don’t believe in, for hours, rather than talking about transphobia causing homelessness. I’m not saying humiliating idiots is a bad thing - it can help community morale, it can help you formulate arguments in your mind, it can show losers that they can’t do this without pushback. But you aren’t changing minds or even really educating passers by because no one believes it and it’s trivially stupid.
Another key part of anti-trans activism, and unsurprisingly all anti human rights activism, is trying to frame the conversation as if it’s just two equal opposing sides with an arbitrary disagreement. “Side A’s favourite colour is green and side B’s favourite colour is blue, so who is really to say which side is right? We must treat each view as if it’s morally identical, and anyone not doing that is clearly too irrational to be involved in the discussion. They must just not be able to handle disagreement over their opinions”. This strategy lets them frame trans people and feminists as unreasonable, not playing fairly, or even as the aggressors. It also plays very well with the “balanced” liberal media who love treating everything as a debate for outrage clicks. You will often see them saying “Well trans people want to not be called certain things, so I’m asking the same”. Again we could point out how they don’t actually respect what we want anyway, and that being asked to be called your name like everyone else is not the same as demanding we not even be able to describe 99% of humans in a neutral way. But it doesn’t matter because they don’t care. They don’t respect you as a person at all, they don’t believe what they’re saying. It’s all just a game and a propaganda strategy.
Press For Change were one of the first organised groups of trans people that campaigned for our rights!
The main reason that transphobes don’t want you saying the word cis is because they want to shut down all discussions about transphobic oppression and talk about how to liberate trans people from it. Could you talk about gay rights if you weren’t allowed to say straight or heterosexual? Could you talk about ending racism if you weren’t even allowed to refer to white people? Well you could but it would be much more difficult, and you would end up just recreating the words straight, white, abled, male etc but in more clunky ways, because those concepts exist and that’s just how language works. Trans people have been around since the dawn of time, but we’ve only really been able to organise and talk on a community level for the last couple of decades with the advent of the internet and generally less hostile attitudes towards LGBT people. In that time we’ve seen terminology change a lot, and that is because as we gain wider community understanding of the trans experience we get better at communicating it, and that in turn allows us to campaign for our needs more effectively. It is really easy to miss just how important this is. When I was little I knew I wanted to be a girl, but I didn’t know the word trans. It wasn’t until I really learned what it meant that I was able to research about it and talk about it with others, which helped me realise what I am, which then enabled me find the help I needed to get where I am today. Without organising and talking with other trans people about how our lives are unnecessarily worse than cis people’s we wouldn’t be able to form a campaign to change that. Lots of us wouldn’t even truly understand it!
So here is what I do when I get “cis is a slur” as a deflection: I explain what cis means clearly once for passers by, and then I force us straight back onto the original topic. For example…
“Trans people don't have it any harder than anyone else”
“Over two thirds of trans people have been sexually assaulted in their lives, vs a third of cis women and less than one in ten cis men, so obviously that is false”
“Cis is a slur”
“Cis means not trans, that’s it. Very clearly the disproportionate rate of sexual assault against trans people is a sign that they are oppressed as a group. Either provide evidence that this statistic is false or concede that your original comment was false.”
DO NOT get bogged down into wasting your time addressing their “arguments” as to why you shouldn’t say cis. They don’t have real arguments, they don’t care, they don’t really believe it. They just want to waste your time and to stop you organising against cis supremacy.
One of my cartoons inspired by the line “If cis is a slur then how come 16 year old boys don’t call me it on Call Of Duty”
