Cisgender ( /ˈsɪsdʒɛndər/) (or cisgendered) is an adjective used in the context of gender issues and counselling to refer to a class of gender identities formed by a match between an individual's gender identity and the behavior or role considered appropriate for one's sex.[1]
Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook defined "cisgender" as a label for "individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity", complementing "transgender".[2] A similar adjective is "gender-normative"; Eli R. Green wrote, "The term 'cisgendered' is used [instead of the more popular 'gender normative'] to refer to people who do not identify with a gender diverse experience, without enforcing existence of a 'normative' gender expression."[3] There are many derivatives of the term in use including cis male, cis female, and cissexual.
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The word has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning "to/this the near side," which is antonymous with the Latin-derived prefix "trans." This usage can be seen in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry, or in the ancient Roman term "Cisalpine Gaul", i.e., "Gaul on this side of the Alps". In the case of gender, however, "cis" refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned gender.
The word cisgender has been used on the internet since at least 1994, when it appeared in the alt.transgendered Usenet group in a post by Dana Leland Defosse.[4] Defosse does not define the term and seems to assume that readers are already familiar with it. This may also have been independently coined a year later: Donna Lynn Matthews, the charter maintainer of the alt.support.crossdressing usenet group, attributed the word to Carl Buijs, a transsexual man from the Netherlands, claiming that Buijs coined the word in 1995.[5] In April 1996, Buijs said in a Usenet posting, "As for the origin, I just made it up. I just kept running into the problem of what to call non-trans people in various discussions, and one day it just hit me: non-trans equals cis. Therefore, cisgendered."[6]
While sexologist Volkmar Sigusch used the term "cissexual" (or "zissexuelle" in German) in a 1991 article,[7] "cisgender" may have been coined independently.
The term has more recently been used in publications, such as a 2006 article in the Journal of Lesbian Studies[8] and Julia Serano's 2007 book Whipping Girl.[9] Serano also uses the related terms cissexual, which she defines as "people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes as being aligned" (p. 12), and cissexism, "which is the belief that transsexuals' identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals."[10] While having been used by trans activists for some time,[11][12] the term cisgender privilege has recently appeared in the academic literature and is defined there as the "set of unearned advantages that individuals who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth accrue solely due to having a cisgender identity" (p. 83).[13]
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