Cisgender

Social Justice Usage

Source: Wikipedia, entry “cisgender”

Cisgender (sometimes cissexual, often abbreviated to simply cis) is a term for people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth. For example, someone who identifies as a woman and was assigned female at birth is a cisgender woman. The term cisgender is the opposite of the word transgender.

New Discourses Commentary

“Cisgender” is a gender identity term invented for largely political reasons within gender Theory (see also, gender studies and queer Theory) to designate the opposite state as “transgender.” The term “cisgender” applies when a person’s (biological) sex and gender identity match one another, i.e., a man who identifies as male or a woman who identifies as female. Activists who recognize “cisgender” as a meaningful and important word do not recognize the relevance of “biological sex,” however, and instead insist that “cisgender” means that one’s gender identity and “sex assigned at birth” match. This is, itself, a political claim in an important way within queer Theory and gender studies. The term seems to have arisen first in 1998.

Even this simple definition—sex and gender match—is confusing and complicated under gender Theory, however, as the words “man” and “woman” have therein been divorced from their usual meanings and are also taken to be matters of self-identification under their overarching ideology of social constructivism (see also, man and woman). There, “man” refers to someone who identifies as a man or as male (so, trans men are men), and “woman” refers to someone who identifies as a woman or as a female (so, trans women are women). Here, “man” refers to someone who is born male (when fully healthy, produces sperm and usually has XY chromosomes in humans) and “woman” refers to someone who is born female (when fully healthy, produces ova and usually has XX chromosomes). These views tend to be rejected within gender Theory, even though the notions of “cisgender” and “transgender” intrinsically depend upon them, as threatening sex essentialism (see also, biological essentialism).

As a result, people who recognize that the word “cisgender” is a meaningful and important term to have added to the English language use instead the definition that one’s gender identity and “sex assigned at birth” match. This distinction, to them, is one that is not without difference. The act of assigning one’s sex at birth is, in fact, deemed to be an act of power in categorization, backed by the force of medicine (see also, medicalizing, science, and biopower). Indeed, under some branches of queer and gender Theories, this assignment of sex is not just an act of power but a violence, specifically a “violence of categorization” that has set the infant up for the principle form of oppression of interest to queer Theory: being placed into a category (especially of sex, gender, or sexuality) to which one feels they do not belong. Thus, specifying that sex is being assigned at birth, as opposed to saying “biological sex,” not only allows them to maintain the queer Theoretical position that sex is also socially constructed but also that it is a circumstance imposed upon people not by reality but by people who have access to sociopolitical power (see also, Foucauldian and social constructivism), including doctors, parents, and society at large (see also, socialization).

As the overwhelming proportion of men identify as male and the overwhelming proportion of women identify as female, and this is perfectly normal, there is actually no need for the word “cisgender” outside of gender Theory. It is simple enough to say that there are men, women, trans men, trans women, and (trans or not-trans) gender non-conforming people of other identifications (e.g., non-binary, bigender, trigender, agender, or xenogender). It is only under two assumptions within gender Theory that a term like “cisgender” is needed at all. First, that sex identity is up for grabs in an analogous way to that of gender identity—which itself is a fraught concept, despite the protestations of social constructivists (see also, blank slatism). Second, that there are oppressive and unjust power dynamics rooted in the idea of “normativity,” which plays on a double meaning of the word “normal” to insist that something that is statistically more common is therefore considered morally superior or necessary by society.

“Cisgender,” as a term, is therefore offered by gender Theory to appear to level the playing field. If some women are trans women and trans women have to have a special designation, that sets them apart as not normal women. Therefore, the categorization playing field can be leveled, gender Theory maintains, by requiring all women to present a modifier to their status as women (trans women and cis women) so that “woman” becomes a broader category that can contain within it different types—trans and cis. The objectives in doing this are to disrupt the implied normativity of being “cisgender” as a woman and thus to admit that trans women are women too. (This applies identically, mutatis mutandis, for trans men and men.) Gender Theory maintains that this disrupts “cisnormativity,” the expectation and norm that most people will have a gender identity that matches their biological sex, and thus that transgender identities are somehow outside of that norm (which they are). This is believed to present violences of different types, including that of “literal” erasure, the violence of categorization, and transphobia.

This arrangement, ultimately based upon the falsehood that sex and gender are wholly socially constructed, presents a sort of unintended paradox for gender Theory. Specifically, the existence of the word “cisgender” as a kind of Derridean alternative to “transgender” (see also, phallogocentrism and poststructuralism) subtly implies that the people utilizing gender Theory and queer Theory know that their definitions of “man” and “woman” are a kind of social fiction. Otherwise, the slogan “trans women are women” would imply that trans women who identify as women and who identify or present as female (see also, gender performativity and passing) are “cis trans women,” because their gender and sex identities match even though they are trans. This would designate them as different than, say, trans women who present as male (which is fairly common), who would just be “trans women,” although to most external appearances, these people would look like and pass as men. Though gender Theory would deny it, the insistence that sex is a social construct therefore creates a cis-trans paradox that is predicated on the acceptance that one can choose one’s sex identity. Of course, queer Theory and gender Theory are unrepentantly inconsistent and would probably find this paradox wonderfully queer.

Furthermore, the word “cisgender” is itself a bit of a curiosity. For one thing, the prefix cis- is technically a kind of opposite to the prefix trans- in some contexts, but it is not correctly applied in the case of the word “cisgender” (see also, here). The prefix trans- has a few meanings, but the one that has its opposite in cis- means “on the other side of,” where cis- then means “on this side of.” The trans- in “transgender,” however, refers to having transitioned, which refers to undergoing a change. There is no such thing as a “cisition,” wherein one stays the same, however, nor is there any such thing as a “cis-Atlantic voyage,” where there is no crossing, so this linguistic pairing does not make sense at the level of the relevant roots (see also, language game). Since a full transition from one sex to another is fundamentally impossible, and since transition is a process, the application of the prefix cis- to not having transitioned is unnecessary and inappropriate.

To be fair, gender and queer Theorists, and Trans Rights Activists, reject this analysis of the prefixes trans- and cis-, however, because they insist quite wrongly that transition is a matter of decision—if, and only if, they can determine that it’s veridical and consistent with their politics. Under their ideology, a “cisgender” person is someone on the same side of their decision to transition as how they were born (NB: they would say “as how they were assigned at birth”) while a “transgender” person is someone on a different side of that decision than how they were born. One may note that the decision to transition—which gender Theory holds is identical to the transition itself—therefore becomes the defining feature of cis-trans reality, and so the only people who know their cis-trans gender identity are people who have transitioned. Everyone else remains in a pre-epistemic state regarding that decision and may only identify as cisgender as a result of socialization into some sort of false consciousness, like cisnormativity, transphobia, transhysteria, or, most aptly, internalized transphobia. This construction therefore results in making transgender the normal state and cisgender the abnormal state, in a complete inversion of reality.

Related Terms

Agender; Bigender; Biological essentialism; Biopower; Blank slatism; Cisnormativity; Derridean; Disrupt; Erasure; False consciousness; Foucauldian; Gender; Gender identity; Gender non-conforming; Gender performativity; Gender studies; Injustice; Internalized transphobia; Language game; Man; Medicalizing; Non-binary; Norm; Normal; Normativity; Oppression; Passing; Phallogocentrism; Poststructuralism; Queer; Queer Theory; Reality; Science; Sex; Sex essentialism; Social construct; Social constructivism; Social Justice; Socialization; Trans Rights Activists; Trans women are women; Transhysteria; Transphobia; Trigender; Violence; Violence of categorization; Woman; Xenogender

Revision date: 12/7/20

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James Lindsay