“Don’t Call Me CIS!” Cis People Problems

07/12/2023

[Partially stolen from Wikipedia.]

The term cisgender has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis-, meaning ‘on this side of’ or ‘on the same side’, which is the opposite of trans-, meaning ‘across from’ or ‘on the other side of’.

In ancient Roman, someone might have said cisalpine Gaul, (i.e., Gaul on this side of the Alps), or transalpine Gaul (i.e., Gaul on the other side of the Alps).

We have the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade because parts of the trade occurred on the other side of the Atlantic from the perspective of Europeans.

This usage can be seen in the cis*–trans distinction in chemistry, i.e., the same elements on the same side of a molecule are cis while the same elements on the opposite side of a molecule are trans.

We have the cis and trans sides of the Golgi apparatus in cellular biology.

In relation to sex & gender, the usage goes back to 1914 in Germany by sexologist and gay rights activist Ernst Blochard. He used it to contrast between cisvestismus, a person who wears gender conforming clothes to transvestismus, referring here to cross dressers.

The term cis can be applied to biological sex. A Cissexual is someone born male, female, or intersex and has no desire to medically transition away from their birth sex. So, a cissex male is someone born with predominately male sex characteristics and doesn’t want to get rid of any of them. A transsexual or transsex male is someone born with predominately female sex characteristics, but wants to medically transition away from their birth sex by removing female sex traits and adding male sex traits.

Cisgender means your birth sex and your gender embodiment (or your body’s relationship to gender roles & gender expressions) predominately match or are the same, while transgender means your birth sex and your gender embodiment predominately don’t match or are in opposition. All transsexuals are transgender, but not all transgender people are transsexuals. Therefore, it’s typically more useful to use cisgender & transgender, than cissexual & transsexual.

If you’re cis dude like me, you were born a dude, have no problem being a dude, and like being a dude. Rough estimates: 99% of people are cisgender; less than 1% of people are transgender, though this number changes depending on who you include in the category of trans but it doesn’t seem to be greater than 2% of the world population. So, being cisgender is in fact the normative form of gender embodiment in the world.

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