I am suffering from a monumental bout of cis-titus, I have been reading extensively on the subject for 24 hours – and found myself in a world of such venom, such rancor, such toxic spleen, that I am truly shocked.

Let me explain. Cis-titus has nowt to do with that burning blazing infection of the bladder, and everything to do with being forced to live in a state of Cis – on pain of death. Still puzzled? That’s because it is a new word, conjured out of nowhere, to describe the human condition, and avoid giving offence to those who’s place in the human condition is a tad confused.  Those of us happy to remain as designated at birth, male or female, are Cis; those who feel that God’s best effort would be improved with a cut or paste job don’t like the term ‘biological female’ or ‘genetic male’ – it reminds them that some people feel that being feminine or masculine amounts to more than having your big toe cut off and transplanted onto your forehead, or whatever surgical intervention they chose.

It was a chemical term originally, Cis-trans isomerism, which I shan’t even try to explain – look it up for yourself. I started reading because I was puzzled by the Suzanne Moore Twitter fracas. Suzanne writes for the Guardian, that bastion of inclusiveness and liberal thinking, an inclusiveness and liberality that does not extend to anyone mentioning the word transsexual. What she said was that women were expected ‘to look like Brazilian transexuals’ – it appears to be an innocent enough remark, complimentary even, given that it suggests that looking ‘like a Brazilian transexual’ was too high a standard to expect the average woman to attain, and that the average inhabitant of the (British) female race should be content to aspire to the level of ‘overstuffed DFS sofa’.

She forgot to morph off into a monologue on the hardships faced by Brazilian transexuals, the high murder rate (allegedly 1 in 12 – personally I’d move house) and the disgusting slurs and vile remarks cast in their direction as they go about their daily business. Cue a Twitter uprising. The politically correct mob was on the march, demanding an apology of behalf of all Brazilian transexuals. Suzanne didn’t apologise for describing them as an unattainable standard of feminine appearance, and eventually flounced off Twitter with a parting ‘cutting’ remark – “People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me. Good for them.”

Dearie me, Twitter wasn’t going to stand for that. When Julie Birchill piled in to defend her fellow ‘working-class feminist journalist’ (lurve the right-on credentials!):

 “To have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women – above natural-born women, who don’t know the meaning of suffering, apparently – is a bit like the old definition of chutzpah: the boy who killed his parents and then asked the jury for clemency on the grounds he was an orphan.”

It was not so much oil on troubled waters, as napalm on a fiercely blazing bonfire. How dare she defend a woman who had mentioned transexuals without whining about their special disadvantages in life? Now Suzanne Moore could have easily said that women were expected ‘to look like the singer Cher’ after God-knows-how-much-plastic-surgery, without going off on a long dirge about the hardships faced by your average multi-millionaire crooner and that would have been OK, but to mention the word transexual in a national newspaper and not take the opportunity to promote the idea that they are ‘different’, more ‘maligned’, more ‘vulnerable’, more in need of ‘special protection’ (hang on, I thought the idea was that they were the same as we ‘Cis’?) was unforgivable – for another feminist to take advantage of Free Screech and pen a coruscating defence, equal in every way to the bile that had been sent Suzanne Moore’s way, was the cue for a Government Minister to rise up from the Equality slurry whence she had been resting, and demand that the newspaper editor curtail said Free Screech and remove the article. Which it did.

This was the point at which I picked up on the word ‘Cis’ and started reading – and met the Militant Tendency of the Transgender world. Only in print fortunately, you wouldn’t want to meet them in the flesh on a dark night.  They have a charming meme that they publicise. ‘Die Cis Scum‘ – they are so fond of it that they tattoo it on their arms, on their fingers, and mention it at every opportunity. Google ‘Die Cis Scum‘ – it’s an education.

Now I was under an unfortunate handicap, in that I do have a good friend who has made this difficult journey from married man and father to legally female. He was a highly intelligent and gentle man, in every sense of the word, who has thought through his transition to highly intelligent and gentle woman carefully. I say handicap, because he-now-she had so coloured my judgement that I imagined that all those who termed themselves transgendered were of the same ilk.  I suppose if Gordon Brown was the only politician you had ever met, you might imagine that all politicians were barking mad incompetents. Er, hang on…

Anyway, far from being vulnerable, in need of protection, or needing to be vigilant that they didn’t find themselves on the wrong end of bullying – it is they who are doing the bullying. Promulgating the idea that anyone who doesn’t think that a baseball bat wielding, shaven headed, not-quite-sure-whether-its-heading-for-male-or-female is a perfectly normal member of the human race – and should quite literally die!

Needless to say, they don’t think their free screech should be curtailed.

I find the idea that someone can think I should die because I don’t hold the same views as they, utterly repulsive. That really is hate speech. They can chop off as many bits, or add bits to their hearts content, but they will never be cis-ters under the skin with me. Nothing to do with their genitals, or their gender; I no more care what is in their trousers than in whether they prefer the missionary position or swinging from a chandelier. I do care that a Government Minister steps in to an infantile argument on Twitter and demands that a newspaper editor remove an article, not for libel, but for offending a cabal of bullies. Several of the transgendered community have said that Birchill’s article made them feel ‘suicidal’. Can I respectfully suggest that if the Militant Wing of the Transgendered Community had not launched such a hysterically vile and unnecessary attack on Suzanne Moore in the first place, the Birchill article would never have been written. Take some responsibility folks.

Is any Government Minister going to step in and demand that tattoo be removed because it is offending my right to consider myself in a different league from the person sporting it? I doubt it.

Now it seems we are going to have an inquiry into Julie Birchill’s column – wouldn’t it be more to the point to have an inquiry into a Government Minister demanding that an article be removed – and the Editor complying? How many inquiries can one country afford?

FrankS January 19, 2013 at 20:24

Burchill’s splendid cornucopia of scathing scorn may have been “vomit” (as
Featherstone said) but it expressed bluntly what most people think.
It’s
still around online – Toby Young at the Telegraph and in Spiked, last time I
looked.

I love the BBC
January 19, 2013 at 12:26

From the Pink News link above: ‘ Suzanne Moore who last week was severely
criticised for suggesting women were expected to look like “Brazilian
transsexuals”. Many considered the term to be offensive – not least because
Brazil has an appalling record on transphobic hate crime.’

WHAT??????? How exactly does Moore’s remark have anything to do with
Brazil’s record on hate crimes against transexuals? That is truly stupid.

SagaxSenex January 19, 2013 at 12:14

Burchill’s article was salty in the extreme. It should be a
cut-out-and-keep piece for aspirant writers. Polemic! Invective! Sarcasm!
Crudeness! All good knockabout stuff. Burchill is a cheerful contrarian. I
referred to her (talking to my daughter while reading fragments aloud) as a
self-troll. Her attitude to the bile “under the line” in the comments section
seems to be, “Bring it on!” And good for her. The British tradition of
scabrous, scurrilous humour is a long one. I’ve just finished reading Swift’s
A Modest Proposal. Now, that really is outrageous. I laughed my socks off
(wryly, of course).

Jeremy
Poynton January 19, 2013 at 12:14

Mama mama we’re all victims now….

Bar the likes of us white males. We just victimise. So I am told.

Woman on a Raft
January 19, 2013 at 12:02

Strange times which put Bea Campbell, Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer in a
boat with Burchill and Moore, especially when you consider Greer’s historic
cat-fight with Moore. Even stranger when one feels the need to defend them.
Ordinarily they can fight their own patch, but when it comes to any of them
being told they can’t say something and the agent of the state in the form of
Lynn Featherstone attempting to stick a scold’s bridle on them, then it’s time
to pick up a torch and pitchfork and stop sodding around with blogs.

Woman on a Raft
January 19, 2013 at 12:12

P.S. thanks for the pic, it can be used to force Featherstone to comment,
although she’ll probably say it’s a photoshop or a piece of black-hat
propaganda. I have to admit that I had misread it as cod-Latin and thus
utterly failed to notice that it was an insult at all, so it’s just as well
you explained it. After due consideration, I’ve decided I’m still not
offended enough to worry about the tattoo but I am still furious that the
minister thinks she can tell me or you or anybody, even Mr Tattoo up there,
what to say or think or write.

Jeremy
Poynton January 19, 2013 at 11:56

On the matter of offending people, one side effect of all the PC and insult
laws is that now large hosts of the Left wait around desperate to
offended; indeed, they are even more desperate, it seems, to be
offended on behalf of others or other groups, who themselves are not in fact
offended.

Sod that.

Jeremy
Poynton January 19, 2013 at 12:16

“be offended” … der…

Jeremy
Poynton January 19, 2013 at 11:51

The tyranny of minorities rears its ugly head higher and higher every day.
Hardly surprising, given the government’s clear intention to enshrine this in
the statute books. As and when gay marriage is approved, gays will have the
choice of marriage or a civil partnership, whereas straights will only be able
to be married. Hence a minority group garners more rights than a majority
group.

Fuck PC.
Fuck minority militants. Shut the fuck up and get on with your
lives, like the rest of us. Just stop making such a FUCKING noise all the
time.

I never thought the day would come that I would stand up and cheer Moore
and Burchill, but I do. Well done ladies, well done, and thanks!

Brass Monkey
January 19, 2013 at 17:48

Seconded

Ted Treen January 20, 2013 at 00:59

“I never thought the day would come that I would stand up and cheer Moore
and Burchill(a), but I do(b).”

a) Me neither

b) Me too.

Engineer January 19, 2013 at 11:39

I know this is probably not the positive sort of response expected of the
Raccoon Arms, but can’t we just ignore them and let ‘em get on with it? As
long as they don’t start swinging handbags (manbags, whatever…) around in the
snug, and don’t start breaking the barstools in the public bar, it doesn’t
really bother most of us, does it? Can we not just sling them out into the
carpark and tell them to resolve their differences without bothering the rest
of the pub?

alan January 19, 2013 at 11:07

Sounds like a 4chan meme that has got out of hand.

Love is all around
us January 19, 2013 at 10:38

Many years ago, i was one of those fathers getting mightily shafted in the
family courts by a right-on feminist ex. After a while i got quite drawn into
the ‘war against men’ the sisters were waging.

One day i was in a gift shop and saw that they were selling novelty signs.
One was along the lines of,’The more i get to know men, the more i like dogs’.
I wondered what the reaction would have been had the word ‘men’ been replaced
by ‘women’, ‘blacks’, ‘muslims’ etc.

Knowing how feminists would never tolerate such without claiming
victimhood, i thought it would be interesting to see how it would pan out if i
challenged it with the store staff. I first spoke to a middle-aged male member
of staff and pointed out the sign, asking if they had anything derogatory
about women i could purchase. He told me they hadn’t and on pressing him if he
was happy about the sign, he disclosed that he felt it wasn’t right but it was
a predominately female staffed store and he wasn’t going to say anything.

I then asked for the manager and a young woman in her mid-20′s came out. I
pointed out matters as above and outlined the discrimination i had received as
a male. She agreed it wasn’t right and said she would remove them from
display. I was gobsamcked, a pretty harmless light-hearted sign and i had
‘won’ the right to have it removed because of a feigned offence taken on my
part.

I don’t know how much of it was just to keep the customer happy as opposed
to appeasement of someones ‘victimhood’. It taught me that i would never play
the victim card again, despite it being effective. It’s a sad and hollow life
for those that fall into it. The phrase, ‘get a life’ should be stamped on
their hands to remind them.

This victimhood agenda has gone on too long. It is not a ‘mans world’ as
per the song, but a ‘victims world’.

AlexB January 19, 2013 at 10:21

Anna, I’m certain the majority are like your friend. A lot of trans people
just want to keep their heads down and get on with their lives. As with
everything, the vocal minority ruin life for the rest of us.

To be fair, I think the “Anti-Cis” thing started when the militant
feminists started their Womyn-Born-Womyn shtick, claiming that trans women are
male spies and trans men are traitors who have turned their backs on their
sisters for a shot at “male privilege”. Yeah, about that, no.

But the militant aspect has been there since before that. I’ve been on
forums where they wanted the Bounty/Plenty kitchen roll adverts banned from tv
because they portrayed men in women’s clothing in a mocking fashion. If a
trans person tells them they are going overboard, you get the whole “by
condoning such things you are accepting a culture that treats us like second
class citizens and leads to the beating, rape and murder of transfolk”, and
there is often a recent example available to make them feel justified in
thinking this way. If a non-trans person does it, at best they can’t possibly
understand, at worst they are one of those evil bigots.

Yes, bad stuff does happen to some trans people purely for being trans. But
I thought we were taught growing up that becoming a bully in turn was never
the answer.

Spam avoider
January 19, 2013 at 06:41

I wonder how long I might be allowed to freely walk around if I carried a
tattoo that said “Die, lesbian scum”

Anna
Raccoon January 19, 2013 at 07:35

Precisely my point.

JuliaM January
19, 2013 at 07:47

I suppose it would depend on exactly where you had it…

JOHYN MALPAS
January 18, 2013 at 23:44

Doersn’t the sisterhood protect the gays and minorities in order to have
the 50% plus vote when it comes to showdowns in power distribution.
So in
the end there will be criminals, feminists and minorities.

Small Town
Man January 18, 2013 at 22:32

Thankfully we would never allow such people to come to Smalltown – if
you’ll forgive the expression.

carol42 January 18, 2013 at 22:15

Seems to me the only people you can’t offend it white people, especially
men, hetrosexuals and Christians, they are fair game but every other group can
take offence at anything, however innocuous, I can’t see what the problem with
the original comment was either. I also find it chilling that a Government
Minister calls for a journalist to be sacked and that even the Guardian
removed Julie Birchill’s column, that shouldn’t have surprised me given the
way they censor the comment section. What happened to live and let live?

I love the BBC
January 18, 2013 at 19:07

I’m mystified by the whole affair. The original comment was innocuous
enough, indeed a kind of compliment to transexuals for being so physically
‘perfect’ in a way few of us born women can ever attain.

just me and my
cat January 19, 2013 at 10:00

I thought the Twitter response to Suzanne Moore’s original throwaway
phrase was totally disproportionate. I have read that her tweets in response
to her critics got more offensive, but I haven’t read those. Burchill’s
article was really nasty, and I think the Guardian probably should not have
published it – not because it attacks trans-people but because it was
nothing but bile. I don’t think articles should be removed retrospectively,
though, and certainly not because government ministers throw a hissy
fit.

m.barnes January 18, 2013 at 17:35

I’m with him:

‘It’s now very common to hear people say, “I’m rather offended by that”, as
if that gives them certain rights. It’s no more than a whine. It has no
meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. “I’m
offended by that.” Well, so fucking what?’ —Stephen Fry

Jonathan Mason
January 18, 2013 at 22:30

People get offended over everything these days. I remember the fuss over
Ricky Gervais using the word “mong” to describe people who are idiots.
Immediately people were protesting on behalf of people with Down Syndrome
which used to be known as Mongolism. But because they suffer from brain
disabilities and very few can read, people who actually have Down Syndrome
are unlikely to know that it used to be called Mongolism or where Mongolia
is or what the people there look like, or why the term was replaced in
polite usage. So the only people who were claiming to be offended were
proxies.

Up to this point I had, quite frankly, never heard of the word “mong”
meaning a complete idiot and don’t know when it came into use or whether it
derives from “Mongol” or from “mongrel”. It is not a word I am likely to
use. But by people who claimed to be offended raising such a hoo-ha, I
suspect the use of the word “mong” will have been propagated via the Daily
Mail and other Web sites to many young people who might never have heard of
it or used it.

John
Galt January 18, 2013 at 22:55

One remark at the last election that wound up the Labour luvvies at the
Grauniad was George Galloway’s use of the term “Window Lickers” to refer
to disabled people, although I vaguely recollect that it was a Labour
politburu type that first got caught out using the phrase, can’t remember
which one though.

This is why I don’t believe in censorship and political correctness,
give these people the rope to hang themselves is my view. Let them speak
their minds freely without recourse to the law and the British public will
soon find out whether these people are worthy of political office.
Personally, I wouldn’t leave them in charge of a street-light.

Anna
Raccoon January 19, 2013 at
13:48

Jonathon,

You might be interested in this very old post of mine –

https://www.annaraccoon.com/annas-personal-stuff/a-requiem-for-popsy/

See Popsy was the proud owner of a sweat shirt printed with the words
‘Britain’s Oldest Mongol’.

It was a present from what is now the Down’s Syndrome Society in the
years before they succumbed to political correctness.

He was too. At the time. Advances in medicine have meant that his final
age of 64 is not as unusual today as it was then.

Jonathan Mason
January 18, 2013 at 17:23

I agree. Apparently the press commission is now going to investigate
Burchill’s column, because “the press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative
reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender, sexual
orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability”.

As far as I know, Burchill did not mention any transsexual individual in
her column, and in any case I would have thought the above would refer to news
items, not to opinion pieces, otherwise it would be impossible to describe the
performance of the English football team.

Ho Hum January 18, 2013 at 18:33

Straight from the Editors’ Code of Conduct that is, but as the Chair of
the Code of Conduct Committee is the editor of the Daily Mail, I doubt if
anyone should be unduly worried about its being too strictly applied in
practice (think Stephen Gately), especially with the 50 tanks wide ‘public
interest’ exceptions tucked away at the end

Jonathan
Mason January 18, 2013 at 22:57

It probably only applies to living persons.

Peter Raite
January 21, 2013 at 14:09

No, Burchill was not stupid enough to name any individual, she simply
applied a very broad brush of hate and vitriol at pretty much every
male-to-female transexual. The fact that she had not a word to say about
female-to-male transexuals was a rather glaring omission. She also, of
course, did it from the hype-feminist viewpoint that men are always men,
even when they are prepared to turn their entire lives upside down to be
otherwise.

At the last count (I had to really think about it, as I don’t quote my
friends or acquantaince), I know five people who have transitions (3/2 in
either “direction”), and to the best of my knowledge none of them have the
sort of tattoo alluded to, nor would I image they would want one. Another
broad brush…?

Ladle January 18, 2013 at 16:13

The fact that people can now change themselves from human to victim worries
me most of all, though thanks to modern progressive surgery and support groups
like the TransGuardian and the Twittersphere (never so aptly named), the
transition is apparently almost painless. The pain however does come later
when the newly-minted victimist must ceaselessly strive to maintain a state of
trembling angst and live with the nagging fear that maybe, just maybe, no one
actually gives a shit about them.

Moggsy January 22, 2013 at 09:22

I don’t think that wouldn’t give a s- about _them_ is quitet right. Like
their life or existence or something wouldn’t mean anything. I guess most
people would.

But maybe most people woun’t give a s- about if they choose this life
style or that lifestyle or dwell on it, and for some people that can make
them feel ignored like they wasted a lot of effort. ^_^

Wigner’s Friend
January 18, 2013 at 15:48

But I cannot help but relish the thought of the sister being on the
receiving end of victimhood.

Saul January 18, 2013 at 15:38

A shameless excuse to post one of my favourite jokes….

A Tortoise was walking down an alley when he was mugged by a gang of
snails. A police detective came to investigate and asked the tortoise if he
could explain what happened.

The tortoise looked at the detective with a confused look on his face and
replied, “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

GildasTheMonk
January 18, 2013 at 20:54

Oh no!

Engineer January 19, 2013 at 11:27

I think government should hold an inquiry into that joke, on the grounds
of the offence given to snails. Though if there is no more than a shell of a
committee, things might spiral out of control. We need to know if a trail of
slime is being covered up.

Saul January 19, 2013 at 16:35

Sonds like a job for Shellike Homes…

Gloria
Smudd January 19, 2013 at 19:32

Shellymentary, my dear Watson

Ted Treen
January 20, 2013 at 00:49

And I suppose a slug is a snail whose wife’s divorced him…

GildasTheMonk
January 18, 2013 at 15:28

“Tortoise Sunshine” were a cult soft prog rock group from the 1970′s I
believe. Their concept album, Gorgeous George Galloway and the Spiders from
Bradford, sold 4 copies.

John Galt
January 18, 2013 at 14:34

“Is any Government Minister going to step in and demand that tattoo
be removed because it is offending my right to consider myself in a different
league from the person sporting it? I doubt it.”

Despite complaints from the readers of the Grauniad, there is not yet a
“Right not to be offended”, but I wouldn’t hold your breath as it wouldn’t
surprise me if the numpties in Parliament came up with one.

People tattoo themselves with all sorts of rubbish nowadays, especially in
Chinese for some unknown reason, which causes my Chinese wife no end of
hilarity. We were passing some twenty-something in the supermarket one day
with a series of Chinese characters which she thinks was meant to mean “Carpe
Diem”, but had been translated phonetically and meant the equivalent of
“tortoise sunshine”. My wife was in bloody tears.

Anna
Raccoon January 18, 2013 at 14:39

Brilliant!

Steve Brown
January 18, 2013 at 19:04

Came to the UK on leave from Hong Kong with some Chinese friends in the
mid-nineties. They couldn’t believe some of the Chinese character tattoos
meant! Big, burly skin-head type had “Stupid Boy” on his left arm. A
chavette had “Baat jaam gai” (white cut chicken), a Cantonese colloquialism
for depilated lady-parts, tattooed on her right arm. Unfortunately the two
were not together.

JuliaM January
19, 2013 at 07:45

Given long enough, they probably will be…

Moor
Larkin January 18, 2013 at 14:16

I used to work in a garden centre, and customers often asked where they
could find Cystitis.
http://www.findmeplants.co.uk/cytisus-genus.aspx

Mudplugger
January 18, 2013 at 15:09

I have similar problems finding her clematis.

Moor Larkin January 18, 2013 at 15:14

I can see Savile getting dragged into this……
http://the-tap.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/savile-little-boys-cover-up-continues.html
Ooh…
I just have…..

Brian January
18, 2013 at 22:23

One afternoon in double geography I learnt that around tors were small
pieces of eroded granite called clitters. Why didn’t anybody else find
that funny?