(no subject)

[gfish]

People have problems with the term cisgender? That's... I don't know what that is. Quite an impressive knapsack, I guess.

Comments

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

(a) I certainly think he is claiming just that and (b) I never said anything about the relative rankings. I think you know perfectly well that I am capable of being annoyed about more than one thing at once, and I hope you know perfectly well that I'm opposed to the marginalization of transpeople and recognize that it's more substantial than my issues with language. But that doesn't make the latter cease to be.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

I'm sure all of the born-intersexed people will be pleased to hear that they are no longer "biological".

Also, I didn't mean to imply that you personally are (or are not) transsexual, only that you were arguing on that side of the discussion. I regret any misunderstanding.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I understand where you're coming from, but your phrasing is often such that it sounds like you've lost all perspective. I'm sure you haven't, but you don't equivocate very readily.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Man only a full-on sucka fool would use "biological" and "medical" and "physiological" for sex as though it described some absolute, unchangeable, one-axis state. :(

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

I'm not referring to anything but gfish's snide remark. As I implied, I haven't read the essay in quesion (partially because I haven't seen a citation / URL for it, partially for other reasons). So if a misunderstanding has arisen from that fact, mea culpa.

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

Depends on what one means by "sufficiently"...

In trying to establish a biological basis for gender, the best I can do is this: no-one is ever both male-fertile and female-fertile, even at different times. Still, our concepts of "male" and "female" are certainly not restricted to the fertile! The consensus definition of "female" seems to be something like "appears that at some time in their life they might be female-fertile".

If ever transgender people become fertile in the other gender, then clearly they have sufficiently transitioned to be gender-coherent. But furthermore, this would mean transgender people who haven't become fertile in the other gender, but look like they might have, would also have sufficiently transitioned.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

But appears at what level of detail and in what level of examination? Further, what about people who appear to not be but who are fertile? It's an arbitrary distinction, attempts to quantify it do everyone a flat-out disservice. See also when various states in the US tried to quantify race. (Some aboriginal groups still do at the insistence of the Federal Government for a number of reasons.)

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Too, only such a one would consider 'transsexuality' to exist along a one-dimensional axis. Which is another reason the use of cis- is absurd.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

I don't have a citation to back this up, but from (possibly fallible) memory, "no-one is ever both male-fertile and female-fertile, even at different times." is provably and factually false.

It's *certainly* false when you consider non-humans, who do after all have a sex, and may well have a gender.

This may or may not be meaningful to your argument. :)

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Also Also, plenty of people are non-fertile, by choice or otherwise. Do they no longer get to have a gender? Or do they just no longer get to be coherent?

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

The level of detail and examination depends on the individual observer. Each observer will make their own judgement, and maybe there's some kind of consensus and maybe there isn't. I can call myself "coherently male", and believe it reflects a consensus of informed observers.

This is for instance why I don't really distinguish "sex" from "gender". The average person in the street observes someone, and we call that "gender". The obstetrician observes the newborn, or the botanist observes the tree, and we call that "sex".

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Well, this is why some of us attempt to qualify such statements to be about people presumed to be or perceived as being one or the other, since the societal distinctions that are most problematic (and where e.g. privilege is concerned) are one-dimensional. When you talk in more specific contexts that changes, but for the general case it fits the core assumptions that are made. If an XX woman without breasts, vagina or uterus is ignored by EMTs it is likely to be because they perceive her as a transwoman, for example, because that's what the societal assumptions and biases are. Not because of the specific anatomical differences for their own sake.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

The obstetrician judges solely on reproductive organs, likewise the botantist (there are edge cases for both, which you gloss over) not so for people in the street, and neither can you reasonably say that they're inferring about genitals, they're inferring about gender/sex and thinking about genitals from there if at all. Fertility is a proxy, but not what the arbitrary distinction actually is, even if the arbitrary distinctions and assumptions themselves inform evolutionary processes that are fundamentally concerned about fertility. By that measure, all one needs to transition is hip pads and greasy hair. But those aren't the only factors being looked at, because social pressures and evolutionary ones have built up all sorts of standards perhaps best described as gender (in the linguistic sense of attributes/classes of nouns; since certainly other measures of fitness than simply fertility are evaluated) rather than sex per se.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

The term mostly just confuses me, as I have no idea where it came from or how it was decided that it was the best term to use. So I tend to get distracted by it's use in that way.

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

My usual approach here is to consider whether information is hidden. If there is nothing you can reveal to dissuade a consensus that you are male, then you are male. If there's a consensus that can be dissuaded, then I suppose you have a secret identity.

How do people typically judge gender? In the case of both the obstetrician and the average person, they do so with reference to fertility, something like "resembles sometime female-fertile". For both observers, sometimes they will have no clear judgement. And they both make do with the evidence they have.

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen an explication of this inconsistency. You've made some points about the non-binary and multidimensional nature of both gender and sex, which is obvious to all involved, nonetheless there is a socially constructed gender and sex binary and a socially constructed identification between them; the condition of a person's satisfying that identification might use a name. You also made a faux-unpacking of the term as 'on the same side of gender' which I can't even begin to take seriously or believe that anyone worth talking to would think etymology works like that. All these points seem not to be relevant as far as I understand the intended usage of cis-. Cna you explain in more detail rather than just saying you have a problem with it?

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

I'm confused about "can't even begin to take seriously or believe that anyone worth talking to would think etymology works like that." Could you elaborate, perhaps without bringing into issue my personal worth to talk to?

Quoth the OED:

prefix, repr. L. cis prep. ‘on this side of’, opposed to trans or ultra, across, beyond; also used in comb. as in cis-alpnus, cis-montnus, lying on this side the Alps or the mountains, cis-rhennus on this side the Rhine, cis-tiberis on this side the Tiber. The two first of these esp. continued in use in med.L. in reference to Rome and Italy, whence It. cisalpino, F. cisalpin, cismontain, CISALPINE, CISMONTANE.

Note that 'opposed to' doesn't mean 'is an antonym of', as I trust you know.

The only words listed in the OED that begin with cis- as a prefix (as opposed to 'cistern' and its derivatives, which derive from Latin /cista/) are /cisalpine/, "on this side of the Alps", and /cismontane/, "on this side of the mountain". I fail to see how you can draw any reasonable conclusion but that "cisgender" must mean "on this side of [the] gender", and I fail to see how you can reasonably conclude that such a meaning is appropriate.

I'm happy to be enlightened, especially if you can do it without insulting me.

(There's also /cisoid/, a technical adjective describing a cis- chemical structure. I don't feel it's relevant, but I suppose we could argue about it.)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

A discussion elsewhere yesterday uncovered the fact that a lot of people dislike terms like 'cisgender' when used in otherwise jargon-free conversation, because they feel it is somehow elitist (as would be your reference to the knapsack, because if you haven't come across the essay or references to it - and a lot of people haven't - it's effectively meaningless). I can vaguely see their point, because it isn't a word everyone is familiar with, and I read the comments above about etymology with mostly-amused interest, but there really isn't a better single word to use so... *shrug*

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

I had supposed it was a straw man argument, but it seems you actually do think morphology works like that. I don't see how you could, as you can see immediately from the preceding sentence that "straw man" refers to a thing you don't have if you just look up "straw" and "man" in the OED and mash them together, expecting all words or phrases composed of morphemes to have meaning fully determined. A "crackpot," I don't know what on earth that has to do with busted cookware. "Ambidextrous" does not mean you have two right hands.

As to the semantic content of derivation, the best you can say is that the modification of meaning given by adding a refix prefix is sometimes predictable. Given two obscure words "cisalpine" and "cismontaine" we have two obscure data points. It is, indeed, unreasonable to expect two data points to make a rule, especially when hardly anyone has encountered the words. "Transsexual," "transgender" and chemical "cis/trans," on the other hand, actually exist in people's minds (at least those of the neologizing crowd.)

As you alluded to it elsewhere: 'cislunar' also derived from 'translunar' via the 'cis/trans' analogy to chemistry and not by applying the 'cis' entry in the OED. 'On the same side of moon' makes just as much or little sense as 'on the same side of gender.' WHAT is on the same side of moon? Moon's a three dimensional object, who gets to privilege binary 'sides' and I don't see which side is specified in the OED entries? The side facing the earth, REALLY? Et cetera.

We assign words as shorter mnmemonics to larger concepts. Expecting all morphemes to adhere in a determined relation and morphology to support fully general semantics is pointless; one might as well go around saying "gender and sexual identities aligned according to the generally constructed identification" because without the opportunity to leave something out via mnemonic there can never be a word to capture that actual meaning.

You object, as far as I can tell, that "on the same side of gender" leaves something out. But that's the whole point of having a word to refer to a concept.

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

what were the other reasons, out of curiosity? (http://tinyurl.com/nghzzt)

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

1. There's no particular reason to think that noun phrases such as 'straw man' and 'crack[ed ]pot' should obey the same rules as nouns combined with established and well-defined prefixes. Or will you seriously claim that I shouldn't expect to be able to derive the meaning of 'microscope' from micro- and scope?
2. Even if there were, the etymology of those is pretty clear from their individual definitions ('pot' is well attested as a slang term for head or brain, as is 'dexter' for adept rather than stictly right hand).
3. Even if they weren't, the mere fact that things have been done badly in the past is no argument for doing them badly in the present and future.
4. The data points don't make the rule, they simply support that the prefix as used in English (which is admittedly rarely) consistently has the meaning given by the OED for the prefix and the meaning one expects from the Latin.
5. It is absurd¹ to suggest that cislunar is somehow derived from translunar by analogy to chemistry. 'Cislunar', like 'cisalpine', simply means 'on the same side of the moon [as the speaker]'. It happens that all of the speakers involved in the orbital planning are on the same side of the moon as each other, so it happens that no ambiguity arises; if they weren't, it would.
6. My objection has nothing to do with 'leav[ing] something out'. The moon, like the Alps, has sides, and one can be reasonably said to be on the same or opposite side of it as another. Gender can in no reasonably-conceivable sense be so said. Even if it did, the term 'cisgender' would be meaningless as used and would only make any kind of sense to describe someone who is on the "same side of gender" (whatever that would mean in this strange hypothetical universe) as the speaker is, which is clearly not the sense intended by its advocates (nor one of any real use whatsoever).

(The chemical use of the terms (and para-/ortho-/meta-, and R/S, and others) arises only from chemistry's unpleasant obsession with the anthropomorphizing of atoms, and it's a serious mistake to try and reason by analogy therefrom without considering this fact. It's also worth pointing out that IUPAC has deperecated the use of cis/trans terminology partially for this reason and prefers the German E/Z (entgegen/zusammen) notation, which is much more rigorous.)

---

¹ Of course, the mere fact that it is absurd doesn't necessarily mean that it's not true, but it does mean that I (reasonably) won't believe you without a credible source. If you do have one (people have been known to do absurd things), I'll refer you to point #3.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

With all due respect, I don't think anything good would come of going into them...

[rollick.livejournal.com]

I'm in the category of people who apparently hasn't read the relevant info, because the phrase "Quite an impressive knapsack" is meaningless to me. Unless you're complimenting someone's camping gear, in a fairly random non sequitur.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

(*wonders where she knows your user name from; reads user profile; aha, fireandcheese is our link*)

Yes, until about 12 months ago I was in the same boat. It keeps turning up in a vaguely-feminist community I read, so eventually I went and found the original, fed up with being told about it without anyone ever bloody citing it properly! White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, by Peggy McIntosh (actual full title "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies" but it's known most places by the short form). It's a decent enough shorthand for 'you don't know you're privileged because you never have to think about it', but if, like me, by 1998 you'd pretty much stopped reading new political writing, it's easy enough for it to have passed you by. (It also passed me by partly for geographical reasons.)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read the "invisible knapsack" but felt like I understood the metaphor as having "baggage" i.e. people who have (roughly) reactions that 1) derive from past experiences and 2) negatively affect their ability to interact with others.

But now I know about the essay bopeepsheep mentioned, I do think I understand more specifically what was meant.