I personally dislike it when people refer to me as "cis-gender". This is both because I dislike the concept of gender and because I don't identify as my sex, nor the other sex, nor neither sex, I don't identify as anything, I simply am my sex. I don't really understand what identifying as transgender is supposed to mean. I am frequently told that it means "What you identify as" which doesn't help my understanding because I don't know what it means to "identify" as something. I am also told "that one's sex feels wrong" which I can understand and I refer to as dysphoria. I consider it similar to body integrity identity disorder. I believe that people who experience dysphoria or BIID truly do feel that their body parts shouldn't be part of them and its sad that people feel uncomfortable with their bodies.
I fully support people breaking traditional gender roles, be it in terms of hair, make-up, clothing, choice of occupation, social activites, who pays for a date, whatever. If a man wants to grow his hair long, put on lipstick, wear a dress and learn belly dancing while he's not at work as a secretary he should feel free to and all power to him.
I feel like the concept of defining one's gender is restrictive as to me it seems almost like saying "pick one of these options for a set of gender roles which you then have to follow". The idea that one should define their personality by the sex that they would like to be is wrong because one should not have to restrict their personality in such a way nor should there be a "right" personality for a certain sex.
I support the usage of the terms dysphoric/non-dysphoric.
lunavixen said:
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I'm not cisgender (I'm pretty sure I'm genderqueer, I don't really identify as female, but I don't identify as male either), but I have no problem with people using the term. To be honest, I find cisgender less offensive than "normal" as a term because "normal" implies that those that aren't, need fixing.
Hi lunavixen,
I'd be interested to hear whether you identify as a tertiary option and/or if you identify as not being male/female. I would also be interested to hear if you feel like the cis/trans nomenclature makes you feel like you are confronted with a binary option.
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Best wishes to both of you.
PS If one was to use the word transgender, then cisgender is the correct choice for an antonym.