Is ‘cis’ a slur?
The term ‘cisgender’ is used to refer to people who identify with their sex as assigned at birth. To put it simply, it is the opposite of ‘transgender’, and is a way to differentiate between the two categories. The term was purportedly coined in 1994 by Dana Defosse, Ph.D., MPH, who was writing a paper on trans youth and, in her own words, “was struggling because there did not seem to be a way to describe people who were not transgender without inescapably couching them in normalcy and making transgender identity automatically the ‘other.’”
The prefix ‘cis-’ is a Latin term, and means ‘this side of’, with its opposite being, unsurprisingly, ‘trans-’, meaning ‘on the other side of’. Defosse chose to use the prefix in part because of its usage in science, specifically the cis–trans isomerism — also known as geometric isomerism — which describes certain arrangements of atoms within molecules. And I’m telling you all of this because it provides much-needed context in order to answer the question I’m asking here. Is ‘cis’ a slur? No. That’s the short answer. The long answer is noooooooooooooooo. Because, no, of course ‘cis’ is not a slur. But we live in a world where we have to ask this question because, well, gender critics and those of the anti-trans persuasion seem to have a real weird hang-up about the word, and they keep insisting that it is.
A slur, as it is being used in this context, is a derogatory term designed to insult someone or damage their reputation and, well, since ‘cis’ is literally just a prefix meaning the opposite of ‘trans’, then claiming it is a slur is ridiculous. Still, that doesn’t stop the ‘phobes from constantly claiming it is one. That didn’t stop Elon Musk from essentially banning the usage of the word on Twitter… sorry, ‘X’… vom. So, I suppose the question we should really be asking isn’t so much ‘is ‘cis’ a slur?’ and more, ‘why do transphobes keep insisting ‘cis’ is a slur?’ There are different schools of thought on this.
The reason I see suggested most often is that they view ‘cis’ as a slur because they themselves use ‘trans’ as a slur, and while this line of thinking makes sense, I’m not convinced. The problem I have with this is that it presumes the ‘phobes are working on a level playing field. It presumes that they’re accepting that there are trans people at all. But it’s my experience that most transphobes seem incapable of acknowledging our existence to begin with; they mostly seem to view us as either mentally ill or people with some sort of fetish. What they don’t ever seem to view us as is trans because, in their minds, trans people don’t exist.
This is why you’ll often see transphobes say something along the lines of, “I’m not cis, I’m normal!” The word ‘normal’ here being a stand-in for, ironically, ‘cis’. Normal requires a standard or expected form, so this is just another way of saying that, in their minds, trans people don’t exist. Trans people aren’t ‘normal’ because, in the eyes of a transphobe, trans people don’t meet the expectations of the standard. If pressed, you’ll often find that these people define normal in terms of one’s ability to procreate, which is unsurprising since transphobes usually tend to seek to uphold patriarchal standards of sex and gender. Ask one what a ‘normal woman’ is and how quickly they start spouting off about one’s ability to carry children.
And this brings me to what I think is the most important part in understanding all of this: more often than not, what a transphobe says and what they actually think are seldom the same thing. Transphobes don’t want to outright state that they don’t think we exist because they know that makes them sound ridiculous and it makes them sound bigoted, so instead they’ll lie or skirt around the issue. They’ll claim ‘cis’ is a slur, for example, because to accept that cis people even exist at all is de facto also the acceptance that trans people do. It’s the same reason they’ll argue that transphobia doesn’t exist, or that they don’t have a problem with people dressing however they want, they just don’t wanna lie and call a man a woman.
Their arguments are all built from the foundational thinking that there is no such thing as a trans person. Of course, when they say they don’t want to call a man a woman, they’re arguing against no one. No one is asking anyone to call a man a woman. A man is a man, a woman is a woman. But they don’t really mean that they don’t want to call a man a woman; what they mean is that they don’t want to call a trans woman a woman. And they don’t want to do that because if they do, they have to admit that trans women exist. And again, remember, they don’t believe trans people do exist. At least, they don’t believe we exist as trans people.
Transphobic arguments are fundamentally dishonest by their very nature. There are no ‘reasonable concerns’ or whatever, there is just the refusal to acknowledge the existence of trans people. The framing of their arguments around biology or women’s safety or, yes, whether or not ‘cis’ is a slur is all just a way for them to attempt to justify their single, bigoted belief: that trans people do not exist. This is why their movement is inherently genocidal; in order for us not to exist, we must be removed from existence, and whether you care to admit it or not, removing a group of people from existence is a form of genocide. Soz.
So, what do we do when faced with the old ‘cis’ is a slur argument? Well… nothing. Keep using the term because, again, it is not a slur. Ask them to explain why they think it’s a slur, or better yet ask them if they think ‘trans’ is also a slur. It doesn’t matter because they’ll very quickly reveal their true motives. To quote Dana Defosse once more, “Cisgender is just a straw man. It is easier to attack a word than to address the reasons people feel intimidated by discussions of gender identity. The word is a threat because it linguistically separates biological sex from socially constructed categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’.” Don’t play on their level because they don’t deserve that level of respect. These people are bigots, and there should be zero tolerance for bigotry.
