Am I a man? Oxford students think not I'm not sure any more. It's true that I hold certain qualifying body parts and I like beer - but does that make me a real man, a make-believe man, or, maybe more accurately, someone who is not currently a woman? Among academics, the jury is still out. I recently got into some hot water at Oxford University when I tried to take part in a debate about abortion, and a conspiracy of students closed it down with the threat of disruptive protest. In the course of navigating their argument that free speech should only be practised in so far as it doesn't make anyone feel uncomfortable (because Galileo's greatest crime was rudeness), I learnt a new word. I was told that I was a "cis" who was probably guilty of "cissexism." At first I thought I was being called a "sissy" and considered reviving my gym membership. But then I googled the word "cis" and found that it means a person who identifies with the gender that they were "assigned at birth": someone born a man, who has been raised as a man and who now identifies as a man. In plainer English and fewer words: a man. Apparently, the term "cis" emerged in the Nineties as a way of establishing an opposite for transgendered. For too long, said sociologists, trans people were made to feel abnormal by the fact that there was a word to describe them but not a word to describe everyone else. So the Lefties on campus invented this state of being called "cis," derived from the Latin prefix cis, meaning "on this side of." While doing that, they also cooked up something called cissexism. That's cis people who judge trans people for being trans, of which one giveaway sign is refusing to recognise yourself as cis. Interestingly, I cannot find any equivalent term for trans people judging cis, although I like to think that when they get together, this is exactly what they do: "Who does Tim Stanley think he's fooling by watching a rugby match and pretending that he knows what's going on? There's a woman trapped in a man's body if ever I saw one. Several, by the look of that waistline. Now, I'm more than aware that language can adapt. Teaching American civil rights history, I've seen the word used to describe people of colour evolve from "black Americans" to "African-Americans" to "people of colour." Crucially, however, that change took place in order to satisfy the demand of the subject that they have some control over how they are defined. By contrast, natural-born men and women have - without their knowledge - been arbitrarily reclassified as part of an effort to make them feel less stubbornly normal. Although they may have noticed that when signing up to Facebook, they now have 50 genders at their disposal from "agender" to "transmasculine." This is all part of an attempt to establish in codified language the idea that society is full of oppression and that we can clearly identify and label both oppressors and oppressed - just like the Marxists once invented class categories. This has become de rigueur in universities, and the results can be unintentionally daft. So found Timothy Boatwright, a student at Wellesley College in America who was born a girl but, when he arrived on campus, asked to be thought of as "masculine-of-center genderqueer." The students, rightly, greeted him with tolerance. Until he tried to run for class diversity officer and was told that he wasn't right for the position because he was now a "white man." Timothy is anything that he wants to be. He is welcome to define for himself who he is, and if he changes from being one thing to another successfully, then that is truly a blessing. But he would surely do so as an individual, not part of a group defined by sociologists who want to create "good" and "bad" sides in the struggle for progress. Such efforts to nail down in language our differences and dream up a whole new field of conflict is not an act of liberation, but of erecting walls. Much better simply to see ourselves as individual human beings all struggling to be the best we can in an imperfect world. I am not a "cis," actually. I'm just a very poor excuse for a man.