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Wyoming Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman, in a Tuesday House meeting last week, admitted she believes “cisgender” is a “made-up word” that seeks to “destroy civil order.”
“Cisgender is a made-up word that means nothing,” Hageman said, according to PinkNews, not realizing that all words are literally made up by people to describe the world around them. “Do not call me cisgender. I am a woman,” the cisgender legislator added.
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She said the word “epitomizes the left’s ongoing effort to rewrite the English language in order to change the debate and destroy civil order.”
In reality, the term was popularized in the 1990s by internet users discussing trans issues. The Oxford English Dictionary added cisgender to its list of words in 2015, defining the term as “designating a person whose sense of personal identity corresponds to the sex and gender assigned to him or her at birth (in contrast with transgender).”
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Transphobes, like Hageman and billionaire white supremacist Elon Musk, have increasingly insisted that cisgender is a “slur” meant to attack non-trans people. It is not.
Hageman made her comment while discussing the “Protection of Women in Olympic and Amateur Sports Act” in the House Judiciary Committee, a bill that would ban trans women from sports leagues and competition of all sorts.
During the hearing, Hageman claimed that gold medalist cisgender boxer Imane Khelif is a transgender woman who “beat the hell” out of women during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Khelif, like Rep. Hageman, is a cisgender woman.