Last week, Elon Musk, the Lex Luthor of being divorced, announced that the word “cisgender” would be henceforth considered a slur on Twitter. In the days since, a veritable who’s who of anti-transgender reactionaries have poured out of the woodwork to applaud the outlawing of “cis.” J.K. Rowling called the term “ideological language” and “jargon” that others “have the right to refuse,” and Fox News hosts covering the story slyly referred to the word as simply “the way it used to be.”
Perhaps the loudest cheers came from Abigail Shrier, author of the infamously pseudoscientific book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. “Jews are not CisJews, Asians are not CisAsians, Blacks are not CisBlacks, And Women are not CisWomen,” Shrier wrote on Twitter Tuesday. “It’s a qualifier that adds an asterisk to our womanhood. That’s why it’s offensive.”
It’s almost impressive how thoroughly Shrier — intentionally or no — misses the point, and mangles her own language in the process. “Cisgender” is an adjective used to describe a certain set of people whose gender identities match the sex they were assigned at birth. Not only does it make no sense to haphazardly apply “cis” as a prefix to other descriptors, but in the real world, it’s used in exactly the same way someone might refer to “a Jewish person” or “a Black person.” Also, we usually put spaces between those adjectives and the nouns they modify; we don’t call someone a “LatinoMan.” But that would take all the wind out of whatever Shrier’s argument is.
The base emotion behind this backlash is fairly simple: cis people (yes, I said it) are indignant that their normativity is being examined. “While I only intended cisgender to be a neutral term,” Dana Defosse, who is credited with coining the word in English, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle this week, “people may sometimes be intimidated by the word because its universal acceptance reifies the fact that everyone has a gender identity.” For J.K. Rowling, the idea that people possess subconsciously held gender identities is anathema; for anyone with a passing interest in real science, gender identity is something that begins to form when we’re toddlers. (And for anyone who understands the way human language works, when certain social characteristics become relevant enough to generate an entire discourse, we usually use these funny things called “words” to describe them. When they didn’t exist before, we call them “new.” Wild!)
“Refusal to accept naming the gender identity of the vast majority of society preserves that veneer of normalcy, as in the ‘I’m not cisgender, I’m normal’ trope,” wrote Defosse. “This is the same as saying, ‘I’m not heterosexual, I’m normal.’”
But here’s the thing: even though all these individual events happened in the past week, this debate is nothing new. Cis people have been complaining that “cis is a slur” for almost as long as the word itself has found colloquial use. It wasn’t a new debate in 2020, when William Shatner grouched that the term was “being used as a pejorative slur”; it wasn’t new in 2015, when some clown on Tumblr gifted us the 100% fake “Down With Cis” bus story, claiming he and a friend had been assaulted by deranged transsexuals.
If the so-called “debate” over “cis is a slur” was ever fresh and new, it might have been back in 2012-13, around the time when various anti-LGBTQ+ activists were asserting that “TERF” and “homophobe” were also slurs. At the time, trans writer Natalie Reed derided the idea that “cis” was in any way a slur, using many of the same debunking arguments we’re stuck repeating today as the discourse still refuses to die.
But more than a decade ago, Reed actually did the haters one better. “I’ve figured out a solution, with a little help from my friend DJ Capelis. We’ve settled on a derogatory slur for you. ‘Grues,’” Reed wrote — “gender congruent” in infantilizing shorthand, with a grim darker side: “and also because you have a habit of killing us after it gets dark.”
It’s that bit of gallows humor that chills me most in Reed’s piece, because it underscores the lunacy of this entire fake debate. While cis people dig in their heels about a word that has no material effect on their lives, trans people have much, much larger problems we’d rather discuss, from the litany of unsolved murders plaguing our communities to employment protections and basic access to life-saving health care. But since too many cis people can’t stay out of their feelings, we’re stuck in a go-nowhere argument over language instead.
So yes, cis people: sometimes us transes talk about “the cis” in ways that are less than polite. Most of us do it because like white people, American Christians, and so many other identity groups that wield invisible power, y’all can be absolutely exhausting to deal with — especially when you refuse to see what’s right in front of you. If that still hurts your feelings, I can only cordially invite you to get over yourself.
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