Cis people are anything but normal. No group that contains such a vast number of utter perverts who obsess over what random strangers could have in their pants deserves that designation. Nobody who has seen how unbelievably weird these freaks can get as soon as a trans person happens to merely exist in their vicinity would ever call cis people as a group normal.

It is a question of Boolean logic and linguistic clarity. All cis women are women but not all women are cis. All trans women are women but not all women are trans.

Most of the time the distinction between cis and trans is irrelevant so you dont mention it, other times the general gender category is not precise enough so you mention the more specific trans or cis categories to communicate clearly and precisely.

Insisting on not using the term cis is as nonsensical as insisting not to use the word car because a car is the "normal" motorised vehicle and only "anomalies" like motorcycles and trucks should have their own specific identifiers.

the cynical part of me thinks this person already made up their mind and the best thing you can do is call them a shithead and be on your way. they're fighting ghosts for literally no reason

the framing of "normal" reminded me of this passage

Whiteness is also an imaginary concept and a figment of the racist imagination, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less real, or deadly; whiteness is a thing because people insist that it is, and use force and violence to make it so. Whiteness is a thing because white supremacists needed a name for their violent subjugation of others, and so they gave it one. In this way, whiteness is a uniquely virulent and pathological form of social identity. It cannot survive its loss of supremacy; it cannot abide competition or mixture or “impurity.” Created by racial slavery and given a second wind by European imperialism, whiteness depends on the violent subordination of all others. Celebrate your Irish heritage if you must, or your Pennsylvania Dutch grandparents; that has nothing to do with the whiteness that names me, now, but which (partially) excluded my Irish and German ancestors when they came to this nation. Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch can and will survive incorporation into a multi-ethnic nation, but it is the sine qua non of whiteness that it cannot and will not. Inextricable from racial subordination, whiteness has no other content at all: whiteness is what’s left in the melting pot after everything else has been burned away. Without that xenophobic fire, it has no meaning, no substance, no fundamental.

This is why “white genocide” actually does have a meaning beyond “racial integration.” If you take away a white person’s ability to live as the undisputed master of the universe—to take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence—then you take away his whiteness.

from Buffalo Skulls

The real reason for the argument is that they do not want to give trans people a higher stage of social recognition, which has happened to other minorities before. Maybe pointing out that people said the exact same thing about the term "straight" would work? It is also pretty easy to make fun of them by making them say they are not cis, and then acting like they just came out to you.

"Rhetorical help" Ah yes,

answer in my head:

"how compelling, now please face the wall"

real answer:

sex and gender are different, trying to lump them in together with everything else as straight, yet later in the same post they complain about people using literally when it means figuratively, pick a lane

They always get it all wrong. There are normal people, and then there are cis people.

I’d hit ‘em with one of these:

Cis comes from Latin meaning 'this side of'. Trans comes from Latin meaning 'other side of.'.

Shut the fuck up you special little bigot.

sometimes when I read posts here that say something like "cis people are so fucked up they all do x" I get this reactionary jolt where I'm like "hey that's not fair I don't do that, don't paint us all as--"

Then I blink and realize I'm literally just being extremely uncool and humorless and literally doing exactly what the memer is saying "we" do by reacting that way to the slightest bit of teasing.

Common is a more accurate and meaningful word than normal in this context

Yeah, having read the link, fuck em. Hit em with a "you would have hated the word 'straight' 20 years ago" or give em a PPB. There's nothing else for it, they should be bullied until they shut the fuck up and crawl back into whatever reactionary hole they crawled out of.

Edit: well, ok, they do try to argue they're cool with "straight" but they don't see why "cis" has to exist when "straight" already does. But like, that's so wrongheaded I think it can be dismissed immediately. Maybe with a "so do you think trans people are never straight or what?"

Wow, tankies openly organising harassment and brigading of an innocent person simply for sharing their opinion. Authoritarian much?

if somebody is otherwise solid on trans* issues they might be grumbling about being called cis because they don't strongly identify with their assigned gender

People often use normal when what they are describing is the average, theyre boring, how sad!