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.
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.
@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."