Cisgender
Usually I am merely annoyed when all forms of communication are completely overrun by a word or phrase. “Raise the bar” was a phrase that had been around ever since I can remember but rarely used until for some unknown reason during the years 2000 to 2010, you couldn’t find a single essay, editorial, political speech or news commentary that omitted this phrase. It was relentless.
Raise
the bar’s best days are behind it now and the new overused omnipresent term is
“transparent”. The word is used today by
seemingly everyone to indicate that things are, or will be, open and above
board. I am as usual annoyed by the mindless
excessive reliance on this word, but in addition I am also disgusted by the
fact that the manner in which this word is now used has nothing to do with what
the word means.
When
it comes to a word or phrase being overworked the reigning champion is
“awesome”. It doesn’t look as though any
of us will live to see this word become passé.
A similar word “groovy” had a good run many decades ago but nothing
compared to what’s going on with awesome.
The British are undergoing the same phenomenon with the word
“brilliant.” Is this as far as we have evolved
that once a word gains momentum it totally infiltrates the entire human race simply
because we are so dumb, lazy, insecure and lacking in creativity that we are unable
to think of another word? What makes the
overuse of this word so insidious is of course when everything is described as
awesome or brilliant, then nothing is.
Last
week I saw a word in The New Yorker
that I’ve never seen before, I Googled it and discovered that lo and behold, it
was describing me. The word was
“cisgender”, an adjective meaning any person who is comfortable with the
original equipment issued to them. In
other words, they think the gender assigned to them at birth based on their reproductive
organs was and still is awesome.
This of course was a new word altogether rather than the overuse or
misuse of an existing one, but I was clueless as to how anyone could possibly provide
a rationale for why this word was needed.
It
would be best at this point in the interest of transparency to clarify how
I acquired the lenses through which I currently observe the world around me. In
addition to being cisgender, I am a 70-year-old, heterosexual, white male
atheist. Compared to life in 2015, I might
as well have lived on an Amish commune from the ages 5 to 15. It’s no exaggeration to say the years 1950 to
1959, instead of being a scant 60 years ago, might as well have been 600. The world of the 1950s had a superficial
appearance of innocence because almost everything and everyone was repressed,
heavily censored and wrapped in plastic.
There was no internet, cell phones, Facebook, iTunes, 24/7 news broadcasting,
twitter, recycling, co-ed dorms or frontal nudity. Everything was sanitized including song
lyrics, school shootings were unimaginable, there was one professional sport –
baseball, and no one would ever consider driving at night with their headlights
set permanently on high beams. When I
was 18 I went to a theater in Pasadena
Once
I finished reading the definition of cisgender, I saw that the word
“transgender” was listed as an antonym.
This made me wonder if csigender had been created because every word,
including transgender, was required to have an antonym. As a product of the 1950s, it took me a full
two weeks to realize that the words “straight” and “heterosexual” do not cover
the same ground as the word cisgender.
Initially I wasn’t at all confident that I knew precisely what
“transgender” meant so I Googled it and discovered the University
of California at Davis ’
LGBTQIA Resource
Center
I
was puzzled to find so many words. It
made me think of that cliché claiming that Eskimos have 70 words for snow,
which according to the internet is not quite accurate. Although there are differing accounts, it
seems there are somewhere between 39 and 100+ words used by various natives of
Arctic regions for snow, ice and sea ice.
I always found the idea of 70 words for snow to be plausible since I
pictured snow and ice as being 99% of one’s existence as an Eskimo. The demographic data on the internet
indicates LGBT individuals amount to somewhere between 4 and 8 percent of the
population in the USA
Being
a fairly typical male I immediately displayed my prowess as an ignorant and
insensitive ass. Noticing that the
glossary had entirely overlooked the sex act itself I began my own glossary of
sexual preference terms with the intent of submitting it to UC Davis as a
logical expansion of their work. I began
with the following:
Roadsturtiums – Individuals that prefer sex in the backseat of an
automobile parked in a garage with the motor running.
Illuminescents – Individuals that prefer sex under fully lit
tungsten-halogen lamps.
Wobblinicians – Individuals who prefer sex while atop a washing
machine during the rinse cycle.
I
began to feel like a jerk when I looked more closely at the 60 words in the UC
Davis glossary and discovered that 30% of those listed dealt with the various
forms of discrimination experienced by individuals covered by the LBGT umbrella. I was suddenly reminded that as a white,
heterosexual, cisgender male I am incapable of relating to discrimination never
having experience such. This became even
more evident when I read about Mitchfest.
The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is an international feminist music
festival held annually since 1976 in the woods of Oceana County
"At Michfest, she can experience a degree of
safety that is not available to any woman any time anywhere except at the
festival. And what does that mean? It means she achieves a level of relaxation,
physical, psychic, cellular, that she had never experienced before. She is
free, sisters. She is free. Often for the first time in her life."
To further underscore my lack of awareness I need to mention
that my first reaction to Carolyn’s statement was, “Gee, is it really so constraining
to be a female?” I eventually figured
out by reading further about Mitchfest on bitchtopia.com that the angst is
about more than gender.
Of course just when I
think there might be some hope that I will eventually catch up with things, I
am thrown off stride again. It seems
that 2015 will be the festival’s last year.
The event’s policy to admit only “womyn-born-womyn” has generated so
much controversy that the event’s organizer, Lisa Vogel, has decided to close
it down. The controversy stems from the
concern that “many trans and non-gender binary people feel unsafe in the
festival’s cis-lesbian-centered environment.”
Intellectually I can almost track with this but it’s like Einstein’s
theory of relativity, my grasp of it is at best momentary and fleeting.
The UC Davis website also has a section that students can use
to direct them to restrooms on campus that are “gender-inclusive.” Once again my ignorance came to the forefront and I was completely mystified.
I looked for and found more information about this and finally figured
out what they were talking about.
Although different words were used, establishing gender-inclusive restrooms
is an attempt to eliminate for certain individuals who have to take a piss, a
range of possibilities from border-line humiliation to being bludgeoned into a
coma. I am an old Caucasian straight
male that finds it disheartening that there may be as many sick and vicious
people in the world as this would indicate.
If 60 words will contribute to removing this sort of insanity then I’m
all for it.