Bronze Medal in the Oppression Olympics

Which comes first, “wilderness” or “civilization”? Sociology professors have used this question on first-semester students for generations. Most people assume that wilderness precedes civilization, because humans had to carve permanent settlements out of undeveloped wild land. But that’s deceptive: nobody needed a name for “wilderness” before they invented civilization, wild land was simply everything that existed. Only once humans built “civilization” did they name everything else “wilderness.”

I remembered this lesson recently, when some message board dummkopf repeated a popular conservative claim: “’Cis’ is the n-word for everyone outside the alphabet soup, and anyone who uses it is a heterophobic racist.” My initial response was to consider this statement obviously silly and beneath contempt. People simply reached into Latin and coined a term to describe something nobody previously gave a name to, that’s hardly racism or bigotry.

Yet on consideration, I realized the claimant had a legitimate point—just not the one they intended. This joker probably wanted to participate in the Oppression Olympics and pretend to be marginalized because one-half of one percent was mean to them. But this person raises an interesting point about how we create categories, and equally importantly, how we enforce them. The process begins, obviously, by giving the category a name.

We could extend the wilderness/civilization dichotomy out through similar pairs. Nobody had to be heterosexual, for instance, until the word “homosexual” was invented in 1836—and extended its definition to include people’s identity following the international scandal surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde. Ian Haney López has written that the White race didn’t exist in America until lawmakers needed to formally define the Black race. New categories create their opposites.

America’s growing willingness to admit that transgendered people exist, requires the creation of a category for people who aren’t transgendered. People like me, who simply accept (or, arguably, have learned to accept) our bodies, previously didn’t need a category name. We invented names, many derisive, for those who wanted or attempted to change their bodies: transvestites, catamites, queers. But we had the luxury of considering ourselves merely “normal.”

Of course, this normality was enforced; it didn’t merely exist. Laws about gender expression, traditions about “male” and “female” attire, and the occasional violent put-down of nonconformists, all served collectively to push everyone into a ready-made box. A rising left-libertarian coalition has decried this enforcement for what it is, violence, and called for a cessation. Many people, for the first time in generations, feel safe expressing their inner selves externally.

The rise of a peaceful demographic that calls itself “transgender” undercuts the previous terminology. The previous concepts of “normal” and “aberrant” no longer apply, because the violence used to crush aberration has fallen on political disfavor. People like me can no longer passively accept ourselves as “normal”; we must define ourselves in a positive, proactive manner. Thus we reached into the Greco-Roman lexicon and found a corresponding moniker: “cisgendered.”

Therefore this person complaining that “cisgendered” is an oppressive word, isn’t really complaining about the word; they’re complaining about the stacked presumptions that make this word necessary. Pushed outside the comfortable domain where they were simply “normal,” they must accept the “cis” handle and accept that they’re part of a demographic group. Maybe not a literal minority, but treated like one in America’s winner-take-all social order.

Which returns us to the Oppression Olympics I mentioned earlier. Historically, the “winners” have determined law, policy, and economic advantage, while forcing “losers” into subordinate positions. Subordinated losers must accept the scarlet letter category names enforced upon them by society’s winners: Black, refugee, homeless, gay. By forcing cisgendered people to accept a category name, they’re admitting the winners’ circle has been rewritten.

For instance, when we think of “gender studies,” we think of women, and women’s issues. Because men, fundamentally, aren’t a gender (or weren’t, until recently), we’re simply normal. Likewise, racial issues refer to Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous issues, while Asian issues have crept up latterly. Because White people aren’t a race, we’re simply normal. Newcomer groups, like the Irish and Italians, have competed to become seen as “White”.

My initial inclination, to simply make fun of this joker as ill-informed and outdated, is mistaken. This person has a legitimate, if poorly founded, grievance: for the first time, they have to think of themselves as belonging to a group. And if they belong to a group, then society could, potentially, push them outside that group. For the first time, this person’s grasp on America’s levers of power is slipping.