Not fully defanged yet. Queer can still be used as a pejorative just like if someone said “That’s so gay!” in the 90’s schoolyard usage to synonym for dumb, uncool or bad… We did however make it kind of harder to pull off as a lot of the time unless you make your tone or context explicitly negative it just comes across as using it in a neutral way.

Yeah a lot of cis people really reject the term. Some don’t like the way it sounds and wants to self identify with a word that they like more… A certain number stick to their guns in wanting to make sure that there is no word that is used for people who are not trans.

Sometimes they opt for wanting to be called “normal” without realizing that there is a value judgement implicit in that word. If you have a “normal man” and a “trans man” you are saying that transness is abnormal, pathologizing gender. You reach the same effect by omission of a word. If there is a man and a trans man then one of these things is assumed standard and the other the deviation.

Of course they don’t see a problem with this because under that model they personally don’t take on the psychological burden of constantly having to referring to oneself by terminology reserved for either the deviant or somehow inferior. To those unused to questioning their centrally held power the idea of just having a word to describe them in relation to others is seen as an oppression.

If enough people disliked the term cis they could band together and just come up with another value neutral word…That’s basically how we arrived at the less science centric terms for other sexuallities like “gay” as an example. “Homosexual” being a relatively new classification wasn’t exactly loved by the people to whom it was applied to beyond their consent as it sounded clinical. Other euphemisms had always existed but gay was purposely adopted as a synonym by the queer community.

I don’t think there would be objection from the trans community long as the term synonymous for cis was essentially was not trying to imply that it is somehow the default state of being.

Think of the potential slang we are missing out on!

Also the thing is just steeped in trans metaphor. Consider the agents deadnaming Neo throughout as “Mister Anderson” Ander being intended as the same word part as Androgens, Androgyny or Misandry… Mister Ander Son. The system keeps reinforcing his identity as Man man man.

Go listen back through Morpheus’s speech just before he offers a red and blue pill (back in the 90’s horomone treatments for trans women came in the form of little red pills)… It’s a sci-fi parable for gender roles and dysphoria. Of being forced into a system where oppression isn’t seen or heard or touched because almost nobody recognizes it. Only some nebulous but insistant feeling causes you to want to break free, to explore yourself.

And once you break free you no longer have the protection from the system. The system sees you as a threat. You must accept less resources and support outside of whatever small found family and resistance you gather.

Like all scifi parables some of it’s metaphor plays second fiddle to making the technical premise work from a narrative perspective…but whenever they start talking about the Matrix consider they are actually saying “The Bioessentialist construct of gender” and you can see a lot of the different facets behind deliberate creative choices.