Jeez Louise This Whole Cisgender Thing
Posted by helenboyd on 09/17/09 9:33 PM
http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/2009/09/17/jeez-louise-this-whole-cisgender-thing/Since Alex Blaze took it on, & since we've been discussing this whole "is it okay to call someone who isn't trans cisgender?" question on the boards, I may as well put it down here.
First, I'm going to claim a difference between cisgender & cissexual. Cisgender, the problem seems to me, is not the easy opposite of transgender. Cisgender implies, or means, or could mean (depending on who you talk to), that someone's sex and gender are concordant. So your average butch woman, who is not trans, or is, depending on how she feels about it (see Bear Bergman), is now somehow cisgender. So is someone like me. So is a femme-y gay man who maybe performs a more gender normative masculinity for his job. That is, those of us who have variable genders, who maybe are gender fluid or gender neutral but who don't identify as trans, are now somehow cisgender.
& Honestly, that's bull->-bleeped-<-. There's a reason I use GVETGI to describe myself = Gender Variant Enough To Get It, is what it stands for.