Smash the Cis-tem!

“What’s this country coming to?” Was almost the last tweet I saw last night, in reply to exactly what I didn’t bother to find out. It could have been the second instalment of Benefits Street, or possibly the news that the muslim Brotherhood have set up shop above a disused kebab shop in Cricklewood. Or maybe it was a response to @IDS_MP’s latest effortless and always entertaining trolling for untermenschen off Twitters rocky shores. Social media is like a wrecker’s beacon luring to their doom the earnest, the agenda-driven and those bowed down by the weight of heavy causes. It’s like the ultimate shit magnet, collecting faecal matter in a never-ending storm of ordure.

And always quick to heed the siren call are those whose brief twitter biographies are nevertheless revealing of deep anguish and unnecessary pain. Yes, I’m talking about the passionate ones. I worry about passion; after all it’s another way of saying “I probably care about this particular subject more than I should really be telling you.” You should never have to tell us you’re passionate about your family – it would be odd if you weren’t. But to describe yourself as passionate about, say, cream teas or a political party borders on the uneasily obsessive.

‘Enthusiastic about’ or ‘supporter of’ or even ‘backing’ are all reasonable descriptors of your interests, although I remain to be convinced whether such declarations are necessarily the best introduction to potential followers. Imagine greeting a new acquaintance with “Hi, I’m Danny and I am a fearless and unapologetic defender of our religious freedoms!” And a string of vaguely related hashtags is another giveaway that your life and thoughts are dominated by preoccupations that may make you incapable of always playing nicely with others.

Once you acquire a passion, of course, the next essential lifestyle accessory is a label. Labels, labels labels… it’s that lefty obsession with over-complication again. While ‘the right’ tend to shrug and accept things, getting on with the world as it is and overcoming adversity during the week, leaving the weekends free for a spot of downtime, there really does seem to be a passion for lefties to immerse themselves, 24-7, in a good fight or two. And it isn’t enough for ‘a left’ to believe in something, passionately or otherwise. No, once they have had their meetings the task is to bend everybody to their will.

Thus it was that yesterday I was informed that, as a ‘normal’ I am no longer allowed to use the word ‘normal’ in the normally accepted sense. Some of you were there and saw the ridiculousness of the stance while others were there and helping along the ridicule. Yes, it was that troublesome word, ‘cis’ a microscopic wordlet, too small to survive alone in the wild and chosen, no doubt, for its oddness, to describe those who hitherto needed no such label.  A tiny, tiny… tiny minority of people are unhappy with the physical gender they were born with. It’s complicated for them and they deserve support and compassion but browbeating the rest of us is no way to gain sympathy.

What? You don’t know what ‘cis’ means? Well it describes a gender identity where your self-perception of your gender matches the sex you were ‘assigned’ at birth. Just read that again; if your birth certificate says you were born a girl and you grew up happy to be a girl then you’re no longer just a girl, you’re now a cis-female, whether you like it or not. In other words, you’re normal… except that word is now verboten, you nasty oppressor. How dare you.

'Duane' Abbott - gender uncertain

Being me, I tend to shrug off such things, because they make absolutely no difference to my life, but it seems that’s just not allowed any more. For those who are ‘passionate’ (or ‘deranged’ as evidenced by their tenacity) about such things it is not enough that we just get on with our own lives. We must bend, once again, to the will of the minority. And if we don’t comply, no doubt another term will be coined to label us as the hateful humans we are. Take the rat out of racist and what have you got? It’s not normal, I tell you.