So hey, I've just spent several hours in the quagmire that is the comments section of a post about transgender issues. Let's talk about that.
(Note: This might get a bit heavy.)
The thing that first got me into it was seeing women who insisted that they are not cisgender. This was... weird to me. To me and probably a lot of other people, cisgender is just the opposite to transgender—just as heterosexual is to homosexual and yin to yang.
It was pretty weird to see statements as seemingly self-contradictory as "I am a woman. I don't identify as a woman." I questioned why they opposed to the term. They said that they rejected gender as a whole, because gender was a socially-enforced construct that oppressed women.
And I had never really heard it described like that before. I, personally, have always seen gender *identity* and gender *roles* to be separate things. To me, gender and gender identity has always been a personal issue, largely unrelated to the social construct.
There were a lot of other arguments that ultimately spun off that I didn't agree with and won't entertain here, but it is pretty interesting that so many people fell over one another on this single semantic difference.
@kimpegasus i think that the non-cisgender thing is something typically used by 'gender critical' feminists. their definition is the one that is off.
@eimbers Yeah, that tracks with their self-description as being "gender critical."
Is mine or their definition of these terms just way off? Or does the lexicon of the LGBTI+ community just ascribe totally different meanings to them?
I'd quite like some other views on this, if folks are willing to provide them.