The march of the new political correctness

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[/audioplayer]I wonder how many of you know that you’re cis. Not very many, I’m guessing. So let me break this gently. You are almost certainly cis. It is short for ‘cisgendered’, which means that you ‘identify’ with the gender you were assigned at birth. To put it in everyday language, you were born male and are still male, or were born female and are still female.

Roughly 99.7 per cent of human beings — including gays, lesbians and bisexuals — are cisgender. The rest are transgender (‘trans’), which includes transvestites and trans-sexuals. The latter have had a sex-change operation. Incidentally, male-to-female ops greatly outnumber the female-to-male variety. As a distinguished Australian gynaecologist once told me: ‘You can make a hole but you can’t make a pole.’

Fortunately he didn’t say it online or he’d have been sacked the next day. The trans lobby is noisy and thin-skinned even by the standards of Twitter, though its emergence pre-dates social media.

In the 1980s ‘LGB’ replaced ‘gay community’ as the approved term for non-heterosexuals. In the 1990s the T was added and it stuck. Which wasn’t a bad thing. Transsexual people have a hard time and my own attitudes changed after meeting two dazzlingly bright trans women. One was so convincing that my jaw hit the floor when I was told she was born a man. The other, less so. But I think of them both as women and happily refer to them as ‘she’.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, the cause of trans rights has been appropriated by the internet’s language police, who lurk in the slip roads of the digital highway, looking for any excuse to let off their sirens.