Uh, hey, some of us were there when Aravosis publicly made the case that we [transgender people] don't belong in his cisgender gay-rights movement. It's not ancient history for us. It's the way Aravosis treats trans people. We've borne the scars; we're the ones who had our comments deleted or edited, earned our bans from his site.
And you wonder why we hate the guy? ...

That's the exact comment in the Aravosis thread that first injected the term cisgender into our recent discussions. And, That's not my emphasis in that comment above, it's the blender's emphasis.

In that comment, the term cisgender wasn't used to explain privilege to people who didn't understand it, but instead used to angrily -- accusatorily -- pointing a finger at John Aravosis for being a gay white male who doesn't care about the civil rights of transgender people. It was that weaponized use of that cis- term that began the current Pam's House Blend debate over cisgender and cissexual terminology here at The Blend. When I've mentioned repeatedly that the two cis- terms have been weaponized at The Blend, this is the is starting point as to where I feel the term was weaponized against gay white men.

Frankly, my transgender peers, this is where I began seeing the terms cisgender and cissexual as weapons in the Pam's House Blend threads. When, in my opinion, these terms should be used to teach -- as Julia Serrano and others use the term -- I saw the term cisgender used to express anger and hate.

The writer of that comment has now written her own blog about how I've shut down discussion of the cis- terms here at The Blend. She's also commenting that I shut down discussion -- many comments to that effect in her twitter feed.

In my opinion, this blender began this recent Pam's House Blend a discussion of cis- terminology with a can of gasoline and a match, and then has responded with anger as I tried to put out the fires.

How did the T get in LGBT?

The 30-year fight for a federal gay civil rights law may fail because activists insist on including rights for transgendered people too. Has gay inclusiveness gone too far too fast?

By John Aravosis

Like an ever-expanding mushroom cloud of diversity, every few years America's gay leaders and activists welcome a new category of member to the community.

[...]

In simpler times we were all gay. But then the word "gay" started to mean "gay men" more than women, so we switched to the more inclusive "gay and lesbian." Bisexuals, who were only part-time gays, insisted that we add them too, so we did (not without some protest), and by the early 1990s we were the lesbian, gay and bisexual, or LGB community. Sometime in the late '90s, a few gay rights groups and activists started using a new acronym, LGBT -- adding T for transgender/transsexual. And that's when today's trouble started.

[...]

I have a sense that over the past decade the trans revolution was imposed on the gay community from outside, or at least above, and thus it never stuck with a large number of gays who weren't running national organizations, weren't activists, or weren't living in liberal gay enclaves like San Francisco and New York. Sure, many of the rest of us accepted de facto that transgendered people were members of the community, but only because our leaders kept telling us it was so. A lot of gays have been scratching their heads for 10 years trying to figure out what they have in common with transsexuals, or at the very least why transgendered people qualify as our siblings rather than our cousins. It's a fair question, but one we know we dare not ask. It is simply not p.c. in the gay community to question how and why the T got added on to the LGB, let alone ask what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I'm not passing judgment, I respect transgendered people and sympathize with their cause, but I simply don't get how I am just as closely related to a transsexual (who is often not gay) as I am to a lesbian (who is). Is it wrong for me to simply ask why?

Uh, hey, some of us were there when Aravosis publicly made the case that we don't belong in his cisgender gay-rights movement.