Damien Grant v Alison Mau: Gender agendas and faux outrage

Wednesday, 5 December 2018

From public toilets to the census, there's often only two gender options, but things are slowly changing.

Damien Grant pushes back on being defined as 'cis', while Alison Mau rejects the 'paranoia' that comes with gender pronouns.

Damien Grant: 'My displeasure at being called cis-gender'

OPINION: I've been called a lot of things. Most of them deserved and I subscribe to the old adage: 'I don't care what you call me, so long as you call me'.

Lately, however, I've noticed I'm getting called cis-gendered. At first I thought it was a personal hygiene issue. I get that from time to time. But I eventually took to Google to find I'm cisgender because I was born a guy and I think I am a guy. I'm not sure why, but I don't care for this cis word. Which is why I guess people are using it.

The passive-aggressive types who embrace the term know it is annoying and feign surprise when people react badly. Secretly they are delighted to be able to trigger someone else for a change.

**READ MORE:

Damien Grant: At first I thought it was a personal hygiene issue. I get that from time to time.

* [Battle lines drawn over sex self-identification

*](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/106652172/battle-lines-drawn-between-feminists-and-trans-activists-over-sex-self-identification) Free speech battle involves feminist and trans groups

* Birth certificate changes 'will protect trans people'**

We have trans-women and cis is the Latin opposite of trans so, you know, it's Latin. Roughly, trans means 'on that side' and cis means 'on this side'. Latin also has a word for black that is now eschewed by polite society rather than bandied about in order to annoy people.

There is also an agenda. If you can have a cis-woman it implies that trans-women are in fact women and not merely men who would prefer to be women. We are asked to accept that sex is biological and gender is psychological. This hasn't always been the case and the distinction evolved in the social sciences as late as the 1950s.

Not everyone accepts this distinction and I am among them. Still, if you want to think you are demigirl or a genderqueer rather than a boy or girl, great. Politeness means I will not contradict you nor tell a guy wearing mascara and a dress what I think of his life choices.

Damien Grant is happy for you to call yourself what you like, but don't call him cis.

I am not going to impinge on anyone's right to live peacefully by confronting them with my small-minded opinions. Yet this same courtesy is not extended to those who do not wish to be defined as cis-anything.

My displeasure at being called cisgender is insignificant, however, compared to the frustration experienced by the Social Justice Warriors. They want to rail at the evil of the sexist Patriarchy, to tear at the bounds of oppression and to courageously march against homophobia.

Journalist Alison Mau likes to pay attention to the language and descriptors genderfluid folk prefer.

Unfortunately for these frustrated champions of the oppressed our Prime Minister is an unmarried breastfeeding mother and her finance minister lives with his boyfriend, and no-one cares. Which, honestly, is fantastic and something we can all be incredibly proud of, regardless of your politics.

There isn't anything real to campaign against, so these thwarted insurgents are reduced to defining their own genders and pretending to get annoyed when the rest of us laugh at them and get stuff done.

Alison Mau: 'Cis is a descriptor, not an insult'

OPINION: It's perfectly okay to want to have some control over how you are described.

Some argue trans women are actually people who are not women but belong in a separate category for documentation purposes.

This, after all, is why I pay attention to the pronouns that genderfluid folk prefer, and if they wish to be referred to as they/their, I do my best to comply. If your eyes rolled back in your head just reading the paragraph above, you probably don't like the word 'cis'.

That's okay. What's good for the goose, etc. What's not okay is the paranoia that seems to go along with the rejection of the word, and the accompanying rejection of the existence of its opposite (trans.).

'Cis' is most often used as a simple descriptor, not as an insult. The simple use of the word is not a passive-aggressive act. If you're triggered by it, then that may say more about you than it does about the word.

New words are absorbed into the lexicon all the time. There are still a (very) few who are grumpy at the 'hijacking' of the word gay; which was once a synonym for happy, and now means something else entirely. It took time, but most people got used to that long ago. The likelihood is that we will all get used to cis, too.

More seriously, the questioning of gender identity is not new. Defining one's own gender is not a fashion, nor the product of a lack of other things to worry about.

To reduce gender-questioning to a throw away line is dangerous for one of the most marginalised groups in our society, a group who deserve respect and preservation of their human rights, just like 'cis' people like me, have enjoyed, well, forever.