Talk:cisgirl

Is it offensive without the space, as "transwoman" is said to be?

Equinox ◑ 21:56, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

That's an interesting question; for transwoman the offense comes from it suggesting the referents are a third non-woman category and not trans [adj.] women [n.], but for any cis* term the main reason I see referents say they find it offensive is that they want to redefine bare girl/woman alone to refer specifically to cis women, so I don't know if they'd find cisgirl any better or worse than cis girl.
Still, I'd expect the most common / 'standard' form to be cis girl, though both are too rare for Ngrams. I wonder if one reason a lot of these have been entered unspaced (by various editors over more than a decade) is partly because the spaced forms are SOP (but protected by COALMINE). In the case of relatively less common terms like this (compared to much more common trans woman, cis woman), it may be that for one individual word or another a greater number of the (few) cites are unspaced, or hyphenated, etc, but IMO it might make sense to treat these systematically; at least two of the cites also use transwoman, so it doesn't seem like people space this word and that one differently. - -sche (discuss) 23:04, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

COALMINE is indeed the reason I created an entry for the unspaced form. Cis girl appears easily attestable but I'm lazy. Transwoman is a special case. -sche is correct as to the reason it has generally come to be regarded as proscribed. Transwoman took on negative connotations beginning in the late 2010s. Ciswoman doesn't carry the same connotations. It isn't selectively used over the spaced form cis woman as an expression of critical political sentiment. In my experience, if someone is still using ciswoman or synonyms such as cisgirl, it usually comes down to one of three reasons: 1) an out-out-the-loop trans-supportive person using outdated terminology, 2) a non-native English speaker whose native language favours compounding nouns (does their Twitter profile say they're in Munich?), or 3) a GC person who uses transwoman pointedly but also uses ciswoman to be hypercorrect. It might be prudent to add a usage note to ciswoman/cisgirl/etc. explaining that the co-ordinate terms transwoman/transgirl/etc. are now generally considered proscribed. Personally, I wouldn't be very pleased to be called a "cis girl", but only because I dislike being called a "girl" in any context. I'm fine with either cis woman or ciswoman but tend towards the former now because I've stopped using transwoman. WordyAndNerdy (talk)