What are cis and trans alternate types of? I don’t think it’s “gender identity” because wouldn’t that just be man, woman or nonbinary regardless of whether they’re cis or trans? Cis/trans just being a qualifier?
If the answer is “I am cis” or “I am trans”, what is the question?
Edit: Someone came up with the term “gender congruity” and (after looking up the definition of “congruity”) I think this describes what I’m talking about perfectly.
It’s possible I didn’t make it clear enough what I was asking.
“I’m making a website. Drop-down 1 has options like [male, female, nonbinary] and goes into a column called “gender” in the database. Drop-down 2 has [cisgender, transgender, prefer not to say]. What is the name of the column for drop-down 2?”
You made it perfectly clear. What happened was people who don’t understand that cis and trans are real words with real meanings that weren’t just made up to describe ones relationship to ones gender at birth decided that they would weigh in on the subject.
All word are just made up. And we can make up new ones if there is a hole in our vocabulary that needs to be filled.
I think a lot of people feel like they just learned what those words meant* and therefore everyone must also either have just learned it or don’t know already and therefore dumb down the question to asking for a definition since that’s the only metaphorical hammer they have. Probably would have been better to ask in a trans (or maybe a linguistics?) community since it’s an issue that comes up. Unfortunately, there’s not an asktransgender equivalent on the fediverse yet and a lot of the queer reddit communities who have migrated went to raddle instead.
*in basic definition terms, without really having considered the broader topics, such as the one the OP brings up.
This comment would be relevant if it didn’t ignore the second half of the sentence it references.
I thought it was pretty obvious what you meant. Even the title alone was enough IMO. But I guess this is something most people don’t even consider. And even if they had put some thought into it. And a lot of transphobes don’t think women are women or men are men.
I’m a firm believer in having a wide enough vocabulary available to discuss issues.
Btw, if you want more opinions on the topic, threads talking about demographic survey design in trans communities have discussed this issue. Not sure how easy it would be to find threads that focus on it, but r/asktransgender has almost certainly had this topic come up occasionally.