Down with Cis Bus
Based on a true story that definitely actually happened
I would be remiss to pass a Pride month without doing a bit of a deep dive on a tumblr meme. Tumblr was the hub for memes for LGBTQ teens in the early 2010s. A lot of people came to find community and learn fundamental things about their gender, sexuality, and personhood; and then make memes about those discoveries. I thought I would go semi deep into the vault and talk about something I’ve never talked about before: A Fake tumblr story. Now, the fake tumblr story is a genre all its own and deserves maybe it’s own month but during Pride I need to talk about a very special fake tumblr story and it’s subsequent memes: The Down With Cis Bus.
Here is the original post that birthed the Down with Cis Bus:
Now a fake tumblr story always has the tone of someone who wants to be a great writer but seemingly has never stepped foot in the real world. They are very verbose when it comes to descriptions that do not matter but sparing and weird when it comes to basic things like character, setting, and realism. The stories themselves combine these elements with unbelievable highs and depressing lows. The story mixes a blase tone for exposition and fallout but suddenly becomes very intense and visceral when we reach the meat of the story. What were they doing before? Who cares. What happened after? Not important. What matters is that a real bus pulled up to two people walking down the street, and real people piled out of the bus in matching shirts that said “Down with Cis” and beat the shit out of one random person. Presumably for being cis, but they never provide an explanation for their attack.
Almost every part of this interaction opens up more questions than it answers. What kind of bus? What location did this take place in? Was it a city? Were there other witnesses? How long was the friend in the hospital? Is there any evidence of this incident anywhere else? Have you heard of this happening to anyone else? Why would a group of people only beat up one person and not two? Ultimately none of those questions matter because every single part of this story is fake. It’s all made up. The only reason to ask questions about it is to get more ammo to poke fun at the original post.
Now, to place this meme in context, this was after the fake tumblr stories boom of 2012. We were well versed in people lying on tumblr for notes by pretending that they were reporting back to us about things that actually happened in real life. The in house writing style had gotten a little bit more refined and the authors a little better at lying. It’s the internet so people were still lying all the time but now they were weaving tangled webs that would take months or years to untangle (like the Hamilton AIDS fanfiction) No one came right out and said it anymore. This post is almost vintage for the time. People weren’t really lying like this anymore, and many would have said Down with Cis was from the same time as Oppa Homeless Style. But there are tells that reveal how late in the game it was. For being a totally ridiculous improbable story, it does have a pretty measured delivery. A matter of fact Here's-what-happened approach. One paragraph with very few in-jokes or, besides the central lie, exaggerations.
This post obviously is sniffed out to be fake from the moment it’s posted. No one gives a moment of let’s talk about this or discuss it earnestly. Everyone at the same time went “that’s stupid and fake” and immediately started to make fun of it. Trans people claimed it immediately as their own inside joke. No one saw any need to engage with this idiot in good faith. Everyone immediately thought “yeah that’s funny” and let their imaginations run away with them. The tag on tumblr is filled drawings of various characters wearing their own versions of the down with cis shirt. There’s products on Zazzle, Redbubble, and Society6 so one can actually buy and wear their own Down with Cis shirt. There’s multiple posts with designs of the bus and nominations for who should drive the bus.
The Original Poster (OP) never gave us the term “Down with Cis Bus”. That was coined by the people making memes about the bus. It’s an obvious moniker but shows the work of the collective. People really latched onto the bus aspect of the post and I think it’s because it’s the funniest mode of transportation one could use, especially if they were in a roving street gang whose only goal was to beat up cis people. Not motorcycles, or a bunch of cars, or walking the streets, or really anything typically associated with a gang but a bus, which if nothing else, is the most economical and eco friendly option. The line about the bus was sparse and lacked detail but that empty space allowed everyone to infer their own ideas about the bus itself.
It’s one of my favorite ways to make fun of people. To take them at their word and pretend their malevolent lies are true. A “yes, and” for bullying’s sake. Ok, let’s say the Down with Cis bus is real. So not only is it real but I rode on it. The fare was free and it’s government funded. They’ll give a Down with Cis shirt to anyone who rides it, not just the gang members. The down with cis bus is always right on time and never breaks down. I fucked your mom in the bathroom of the Down with Cis bus. We can all play in the sandbox of making shit up. We’re going to make the Down with Cis the most important vehicle to ever exist in the collective imagination, since we’re all just saying things.
The “Down with Cis” slogan itself, is also a little tame for a group whose only goal is violence. “Down with Cis” is one of the milder things I’ve seen on a shirt related to LGBT related discrimination. Protests and parades of the past were adorned with buttons and shirts that were clever, vulgar, verbose, and, most of all, funny. One of the best parts of any LGBT archive is looking at the buttons, t-shirts, and posters from the past and laughing at how funny the community has always been. “Down with Cis” is a run of the mill shirt you could see at pride, even before the meme.
“Down with Cis” was probably the most popular trans-centric meme on tumblr, and one of the more popular memes in general. Ever since the great purge of 2018, tumblr has been nominating and discussing what we call world heritage posts. Post that shaped the website that either had a stranglehold on their time or were kind of timeless. There are multiple blogs dedicated to deciding which ones meet that criteria and one can look through it and find a multitude of posts that helped dictate the sense of humor and lore of tumblr. This is part of an ongoing trend of Tumblr memorializing itself. We were always interested in writing our own history as it was happening. Keeping track so we could properly represent ourselves when we had to explain it to the people who weren’t there. By adding “Down with Cis” to the list of world heritage posts, we finally have one piece of evidence that trans people had any modicum of power on tumblr.
On the surface tumblr was also was seen as pro-queer and pro-trans but in the weeds of the website, this was not always the case. TERFs were rampant and recruited many people into their ideology through tumblr. A lot of self proclaimed progressives would claim to be pro-trans while setting parameters for “acceptable” trans people. Their opinions on how a trans person should act would become more and more obsessive and conscriptive as time went on. As if their opinions and their allowances abided by any kind of reasonable logic, rather than their own uneducated gut feelings on gender.
Including this joke as part of the world heritage collection, takes a specific pro-trans stance but not because of posturing or argument. Because trans people were so funny about it that everyone agrees that it’s one of the most iconic posts on the website. It’s mostly symbolic and not necessarily doing anything important for anyone anymore but trans people were funnier than their oppressors, and anyone who didn’t admit that, had to admit that they would rather side with the idiot who tried to pass off one of the fakest stories we’d ever heard. You can usually tell who’s on the right side of history by who’s funnier. The Down with Cis op is self serious and not funny, even if they walked it back a year later to say they were joking and it was satire, and the trans people making fun of the Down with Cis bus were giving us banger post after banger post. They canonized the Down with Cis bus into tumblr lore and made op look like an idiot.
This is actually one of our most useful tools for dealing with discourse and fighting with people, on the internet and even outside of it. Valuing our time and properly judging the intelligence of our opponents. I do not need to spell out the problematic points of this to the OP. We do not need to treat them like a serious person that needs to be met with the intention of healing or understanding. Conserving one’s energy by going “that’s stupid and you’re lying” and making jokes that were funnier and more popular than the original post, is great for the movement. In making fun of the original post many people were able to share their art and sense of humor with other trans people. This post that was meant to deride and put down the trans community was actually a chance for many people to come together.
Down with Cis is still popular on tumblr to this day with new posts appearing in the #downwithcis and #downwithcisbus tags every so often. It’s particularly popular right now during pride. Overall the meme tends to run dorky, but it’s a very popular meme from tumblr, of course it does. It’s by no means a revolutionary meme or a salve for the trans community. It was a chance to be fun and funny and win an argument, which on the internet, is almost all we can ask for.