Saturday, 25 June 2011

Simon Hoggart: "I Fear Change!"

"Language changes at a dizzying rate. This week the prime minister and home secretary gave public support to a campaign to "kick homophobia and transphobia out of sport". There was a reception at No 10.
""Transphobia", it turns out, is not "fear of change", as you might imagine, but hatred of and violence towards people who have "changed their gender assignations". I don't think that's too much of a problem in professional sport here – I have not heard of any Premier League footballers who were born female – though it may have been in the old East Germany, if for chemical rather than psychological reasons.
"But when you have a term for one group of people, you need a word for the rest, and the one they've come up with is "cisgender". So the huge majority of us are now, "members of the cisgender community".
"I am puzzled about who invents these words and how they become accepted."

Simon Hoggart, in his Guardian column - yes, The Guardian.
Oh do piss off!

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