WhatFinger


Say it loud, say it proud

I am a woman, not a cisgender


Tina Trent image

By —— Bio and Archives November 30, 2017

Comments | Print This | Subscribe | Email Us

I am a woman, not a cisgender A mere few years ago, yet what seems millennia as measured in loss of civilization, I warned conservative friends that their sexual identities were about to be involuntarily drafted in service to the cultural revolution. Henceforth, they would no longer be male or female: they would all be “cisgenders.” What is “cisgender”? Technically (pseudo-technically, actually), it means that you feel you are the sex you were born, for example: men who think they’re men; women who think they’re women, but also gays and lesbians who think they were born gay or lesbian but don’t need surgery or chemicals to transform their bodies into gay or lesbian bodies.

The gender warriors

The gender warriors in the universities felt it was unfair to continue to refer to any sexual identity as being normal or natural, so they created “cisgender” to identify all people who thus opt out of choosing new sexual identities with the frequency of changing one’s socks. And unlike all the shiny, happy, “non-binary” sexual identities popping up in human resources training manuals and court dockets these days, calling someone “cisgender” is, by design, a pejorative. Think of it this way: in the world of gender politics, “cisgender” is the new white — white privilege, that is. The original reason for inventing the word “cisgender” may have been to, in the words of the gender warriors, “destabilize hetero-normativity,” but, as revolutions will, once the giant ball of cultural crazy began rolling down the slippery slope, it mowed down others too. Old-fashioned gays and lesbians soon found themselves labeled “cisgender” by their angry ideological offspring, the hipper, “gender fluid” crowd. “Cisgender” has such negative connotations that some of these “born gay and lesbian” activists are now vociferously complaining about being lumped in with all those “born heterosexual” women and men. As one gay HuffPo writer complained: [A]s a “cisgendered” man I’m not allowed an opinion, not allowed a voice, not allowed to disagree, not allowed to have a lived experience of embodying a gender identity that is diverse and varied and absolutely out of step with the norm I’m ascribed to by the word “cis-.” Instead, I’m supposed to reflect on my privilege before I am allowed to interrupt the people whose opinions matter. I’m supposed to “check my privilege.” I am a binary male within a binary “cisgendered” vs. transgendered paradigm. I’m the enemy . . . Welcome to the schadenfreude buffet, buddy. Way back in 2014, when I warned my friends that “cisgender” was about to become a thing, and that thing was them, I suspect that their lack of alarm stemmed from the belief that the academic sex theorists were just too radical and too crazy to ever be taken seriously outside the insane asylum of higher education.

Failure to conform: Huge fines, Negative consequences affecting housing, schooling, employment, Criminal charges, Imprisonment

It’s fair to say that nobody makes that mistake anymore. In the seeming blink of an eye, “cisgender” and dozens of other newly minted “sexual identities” began rolling off the tongues of elected officials and newscasters and major corporation diversity trainers and – most chillingly – that eagerly self-deprecating “cisgender” woman in the school down the street teaching your grandchildren their ABCs. New York City’s government now officially lists 31 “genders.” Transit employees are no longer permitted to say “ladies and gentlemen” on intercom announcements. Public spaces in that city are plastered with guidelines for people to report instances of not having their specific sexual identity or gender expression properly recognized. Thanks to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, such gender miscreants may be fined up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of “willful, wanton, or malicious” mis-gendering of someone. And in pure, distilled, high-octane Maoist strategizing, even those reports of discrimination have their own disinformation campaign. After conservative outlets reported on the mis-gendering fines, leftist media sites complained that the conservatives were utterly mistaken. Gothamist huffed that the fines weren’t “new” because they had been around since December 2015; therefore, conservative outrage was fake news. [Is Gothamist where George Soros’s Media Matters minions go after they realize that working for David Brock won’t help them land a job at the New York Times or Washington Post? – Editor] Fines also don’t apply to everyone, Gothamist said, just to the deep-pocketed, namely, employers, landlords, business owners, and service providers. And they won’t all be $250,000 because the Commission determines the severity of individual cases. Feel better now? In Canada, which lacks our First Amendment protections, failure to conform to similar gender identity and expression laws can result not only in huge fines and negative consequences affecting housing, schooling, and employment, but also criminal charges and imprisonment.


We need to learn to say no to these people

However, Americans must never presume that the First Amendment will forever keep us safe from criminal sanctions for failing to deploy the proper Ze or Zim when addressing a potential tenant or employee. As we have learned again and again and again, from Chairman Mao chic to Bruce Jenner hagiography, cultural revolutions don’t stay optional for long. The gender warriors’ relentless ambition is not merely to transform society but to salt the earth and stomp on the ashes of the past. Here’s a binary they don’t disagree with: on the one side there are all the people who may be saddled with “cisgender” and other slurs, and on the other side there are the enforcers du jour, who may have different names from the enforcers of yesterday and the enforcers of tomorrow, but they all share the same boot-on-the neck tactics in their march towards utopia. And still, too many of us keep turning away out of embarrassment – or fear. A nation being virtue-signaled to death by idiotic Kindergarten teachers leading their charges through recitations of the 31 genders before naptime is not a nation worth saving. We need to learn to say no to these people. No, you cannot invent a bunch of pet names for your personal pathologies and force them on everyone from toddlers to tech coders. No, it is no more acceptable for you to bring your sexual demands to the workplace than it is for anyone else to do so. No, I am not a cisgender, and neither is anyone else.

Tina Trent -- Bio and Archives | Comments

Tina Trent writes about crime and policing, political radicals, social service programs, and academia. She has published several reports for America’s Survival and helped the late Larry Grathwohl release a new edition of his 1976 memoir, “Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen,” an account of his time infiltrating the Weather Underground.

Dr. Trent received a doctorate from the Institute for Women’s Studies of Emory University, where she wrote about the devastating impact of social justice movements on criminal law under the tutelage of conservative, pro-life scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Dr. Trent spent more than a decade working in Atlanta’s worst neighborhoods, providing social services to refugees, troubled families, and crime victims. There, she witnessed the destruction of families by the poverty industry, an experience she describes as: “the reason I’m now a practicing Catholic and social conservative.”

Tina lives with her husband on a farm in North Georgia. She blogs about crime and politics at tinatrent.com.


Sponsored