If you want to trigger a flurry of annoyed commentary, changing the language in some way will generally do the job. New words, or old words used in new ways, have reliably gotten under the skin of mostly older people since the year dot.
As a quick glance on most social media sites will tell you, one word that’s firmly lodged under many an epidermis right now is that little three-letter number, cis.
Soon after I ran a newsletter two weeks ago that included the word, a reader who I’ll call Paul wrote to me:
“Cis male” now seems to be bandied about by the media and socially progressive types as if it is a normal part of our language, either deliberately virtue signalling or just not wanting to “offend”.
To me at least, it appears the tactic of planting and propagating that word in society has been very successful, primarily led by the trans community/academics and media.
For me it raises more questions than it answers about language and appropriation and adoption of words.
For anyone concerned about transgender rights, it may be tempting to condemn Paul’s note as outright transphobia. But while much of the criticism around cis does come from people short on tolerance, people sympathetic to trans rights may also struggle with the word. In 2019, for example, Irish author John Boyne wrote an opinion piece titled Why I Support Trans Rights but Reject the Word ‘Cis’.
Boyne is author of My Brother’s Name is Jessica, a novel about a boy, Sam, whose brother comes out as transgender. At first horrified, over time Sam begins to understand his sibling’s world and restores his love for the person who is now his sister.
Nonetheless, in his opinion piece Boyne wrote, “I reject the word ‘cis’... I don’t consider myself a cis man; I consider myself a man.”
Whatever else John Boyne is, I don’t think you can call him transphobic. It would be unfair to assume Paul is either.
However, Paul’s objections to cis don’t stack up.
Take the statement that cis “now seems to be bandied about by the media and socially progressive types as if it is a normal part of our language” (emphasis mine).
The bad news for Paul is that cis, the prefix, has been a, quote unquote, normal part of the language for centuries, used to indicate that something is “on the near side” - in relation to the speaker - of the object following. Two of the more common usages have been cismontane and cisalpine, both meaning on the speaker’s side of the mountain/s.
Chemistry also uses cis in the phrase cis-trans isomerism, which concerns the spatial arrangement of atoms within molecules. (My thanks to reader Ali Broadbent for pointing this out.)
In the mid 1990s, cisgender was floated in a Usenet newsgroup as a term to describe people who identified with the sex they were assigned at birth. With the prefix cis being the opposite of trans, cisgender was a useful and natural antonym to the already widely used transgender. From Usenet it found its way into academic circles and, by the 2010s, everyday language. Along the way, it got shortened - as words are apt to do when they cross over into non-specialist circles - to cis.
Its date of birth makes cisgender/cis the same age as blog, a word that no one I know regards as anything but a normal part of the language. It’s also older than equally unremarkable words like paywall, unfriend and photobomb.
As for Paul’s gripe that someone has been foisting the word onto the rest of us, he’s on shaky ground indeed. Many of the words you and I use without a second thought followed the same route as cis, from specialist (often academic) circles into wider circulation. Examples include emoji, algorithm and PTSD. I don’t hear anyone floating conspiracy theories about their emergence.
When a word makes its way from specialist circles into wider use, it generally does so because enough of the rest of us find it useful too. To think anyone can “plant and propagate” the word deliberately is, frankly, a little paranoid.
Not that people haven’t tried. A few years ago, Canadian six-year-old Levi Budd coined the decidedly handy levidrome as a name for a word which, spelt backwards, forms another (like loop and spit). His parents then undertook a bold and energetic venture to have the word widely accepted.
You can find more in this article from 2018. The end result? They failed.
The thing is, language is the ultimate democratic institute. Words flourish or wither by popular vote, not by the wishes of any person or group, no matter how academically qualified or precocious they might be.
Because word invention is open to everyone, language sometimes throws up words that some people embrace but others have no use for, and may even find distasteful or offensive. One thing neither I nor Paul nor anyone else can do is make those words disappear. They’re part of the “normal” language - not because some shady interest group pushes them, but because enough “normal” people like Paul and I use them.
Of course anyone is free to reject a particular word as a descriptor for themselves. Even then, however, I’d say mind you don’t step into some logical cow-do. If you’re okay with trans, it’s hard to see a case for rejecting cis. Likewise with other terms you may use to describe other people.
Nor should anyone’s objection stop others using cis for those who identify with their birth gender. Unlike some terms, there’s nothing inherently disparaging in the word, and without words like cis, trans, Pakeha, Māori, disabled and able-bodied, many important conversations would be ridiculously unwieldy.
Paul has no grounds that I can see for rejecting cis as a normal word. He has every right to reject its use as a descriptor for him, but that’s not the same as having the right to expect people to stop using the word.
Except about him and to his face. Anyone who did that aware of Paul’s objection would be a jerk.
That’s not a matter of language, but of basic decency.
Bits and specious
On the subject of language being used to further specific ends, here’s an interesting article on the recent spike in coded language on social media.
RIP Gordon Lightfoot. I remember properly listening to his music for the first time in the early 80s when I was heavily into Elvis Costello and Talking Heads, and deeply suspicious of anything with a folk or country flavour. Then along comes this remarkable storyteller with a raft of tunes that made my cheap cynicism look, well, cheap and cynical. Bob Dylan was a fan too, which carries a lot of weight with me.
Quote of the week
We lucked in; we almost became The Commodes.
Commodores singer William King on how the group chose its name by choosing a word at random from the dictionary.
Kisgender. That sounds like a very pleasant form of gender activity to me.
Re the "Paul and I" vs "Paul and me" thing, I wondered if someone would spot that! I don't accept the argument that you suggest and I may do a post on it. The essence of my counter argument is that "like Paul and like I" isn't the equivalent of "like Paul and I", regardless of what our teachers said.
I accept the adoption of cis from Latin to English, but the change from Latin pronunciation seems awkward - we learned the prepositions “circum circa citra cis “ with a hard “c” - so I would be kisgender.
(Note: Shouldn’t you have written “ normal people like Paul and me use them”? You wouldn’t say “like Paul and like I”.)