Response to ‘Burns Brash’

Cis Women Don’t Oppress Us. And Cis Is Not a Slur.

There’s a big misunderstanding around the word “cisgender.”

A reader responded to my article ‘Define “Woman” ’ with the following:

It’s wild how “woman” has never been hard to define when it came to treating them as 2nd class citizens. Males have wielded institutional power across every slice of society throughout history yet you call female people cis to claim they oppress you

I understand the emotional aspect of your position. But it’s a wildly inaccurate over-simplification.

First off, it’s not wild. It’s misogyny.

For two or three millennia males have wielded institutional power across every slice of society in most cultures. Women didn’t. AND, queer people didn’t. “Eunuchs” (and non-male presenting queer people would be lumped in this category) didn’t. Trans women certainly didn’t. And yes, cultures across history recognized a spectrum of genders. The Talmud lists six genders. The Vedas listed eleven. Hawaiians recognized three. The South-Sulawesi Bogi nation has always recognized five genders. The people of the Dine’ nation (Navajo) recognize four genders. Pacific Islanders recognized three.

Of all these, in most cultures, MALES had institutional power in patriarchal societies across the world. And that’s patriarchy and misogyny.

The Christian religion has patriarchy and misogyny backed in from the very beginning — from the notion that an all-powerful MALE being impregnated a Brown teenage girl against her will, and then sent an employee to carry to term (!) to Genesis, with Adam claiming “Eve made me do it.” It’s sick.

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The word “cisgender” (‘cis’ for short) was invented by sociologists to allow people to refer to biological women in such a way that doesn’t automatically cause harm to trans women. Just saying “women” to describe biological women harms trans women, because it erases us. Saying “normal women” or “regular women” implies that trans women are abnormal, irregular. Cis is not a slur. It’s just a way to define two different types of women — biological women (cisgender women, cis women) and transgender women (trans women, women of trans experience).

In other societies, using different frameworks, we’d be called Mahu, or Muxe, or Bakla, or Calabai. But the Eurocentric framework only allows for two genders, ergo “trans women.”

Cis women do not oppress us. A large majority of cis women accept us, and a good number of cis women are extremely kind to us. It’s just TERFs who oppress us, vilify us, invalidate us, erase us.

Trans women carry all of the oppression of a patriarchal, misogynistic society AND oppression from within, by trans-exclusionary “gender critical” women.