cisgender

I had to look up the word "cisgender" today when I saw it used in an article: "No cisgendered male can express opinions about that topic."

Cisgender (which is sometimes abbreviated to "cis") is a term to describe people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth.

The Latin-derived prefix cis-, means "on this side of" and can be considered the opposite of trans-, which means "on the other side of."

For example, you can say transatlantic to mean on the other side of that ocean, as in a "transatlantic ship crossing," or say "cisatlantic" to mean on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Despite my ignorance of the word, it has been around for awhile. German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch used the neologism cissexual (zissexuell in German) in his 1991 article "Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick" ("Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view") as the origin of the term.

Cisgender is a word that applies to the vast majority of people who are not transgender. Is there a need for such a word? The best parallel in our language would be homosexual and heterosexual.

You can go deeper into the sociology of this in gender studies and I suspect the word will be in wider usage in the future. There are already derivatives of the terms cisgender and cissexual include "cis male" for "male assigned male at birth", "cis female" for "female assigned female at birth" (analogously cis man and cis woman) and also cissexism and cissexual. A related adjective is "gender-normative" because "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 *."

I also didn't realize that back in 2014 Facebook began offering "custom" gender options, allowing users to identify with one or more gender-related terms from a selected list, including cis, cisgender, and others.