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Why I Won't Remove the Word "Cis" From My Vocabulary
🕑 Added 2024-06-06 08:24:00 +0000 UTCThe English Language consists of around a million words. I love the word obfuscate. I hate the word cunt. I’m not alone in having favourites. The most hated words in English are <duh duh duhn>:
Moist
Bulbous
Fester
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I’ve used some of those words in my posts. Nobody has ever told me I shouldn’t use them because they don’t like the sound of them. This only happens when I use the word “cis”.
Cis is defined as “on this side.” In the context of gender and sex, cis means your gender matches the body you were born with.
We can't make room for the trans community without the word "cis" because it allows us to distinguish between trans and cisgender people. If I only used the word "men" I would be forced to make claims about trans people that were not true. In doing so, I would erase trans people from my writing, and they should never be invisible.
Let's say someone found the word "green" offensive, so we simply removed it from the lexicon. If I made a claim that all grapes make red wine, that would be incorrect. Green is an adjective that distinguishes green from red and black grapes. Without it, we'd find it pretty difficult to talk about grapes. Or plants. Or clothing. Or wine.
All grapes are grapes.
All who identify as men are men.
Cis is an adjective for the word “men” or “women.” It doesn’t suggest that you’re not a real man. It just demonstrates that trans men are real men, too. “Cis” makes you a man who is not trans. All its synonyms are transphobic, so no matter how much you scream, I can't give you a different word you might find more palatable.
Most of my posts consist of around 500 words. I don't list all of those words in advance so people can decide which of them they don’t like the sound of. Nor does the Oxford Dictionary ask the general public whether they like a word before including it in their dictionaries. You don't get a say. I don’t get a say. A word is valid if it's used often enough in the same contexts to be considered part of our day-to-day language.
The word "cis" is valid. It's in the dictionary. It has a common meaning. If you don't like the sound of it, your only power is to eliminate it from your own vocabulary, but you don't get a say in whether others use it. You might argue that I’ve defined or used it incorrectly, but arguing about the mere sound of a word strikes me as overly precious.</euphemism.>
If you don’t like grapes, you don’t have to eat them. You don’t get to decide if they remain on the buffet table because the world does not revolve around your preferences.
You don't get a say in which words I use in my internet posts. You don't get a say in which words are included in the dictionary. You only get to choose which words you include in your own vocabulary. My writings are not a democracy. I repair them when people point out I’m wrong or offensive, but I do not remove words because people dislike their sound, much less when their “preference” seeks to make an entire swathe of the global community invisible.
