How Cis Went Mainstream

Today, cisgender (or cis for short) typically refers to someone whose gender “aligns with” or “matches” their sex assigned at birth. In this essay, I track and analyze how that dominant sense of cis arose. I identify three primary forces that helped mainstream the term and its current definition: Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, Sam Killerman’s “Cisgender Privilege” checklist, and South Park’s “Cissy” episode. Analyzing these key moments, I argue that cis gets mainstreamed through its depoliticization and rarefaction. That is, it comes to modify a sense of self between the ears rather than serve as a militant term deployed in coalitional politics. I further argue that cis gets mainstreamed through a practice of citational injustice, according to which trans community conversations go largely unengaged and uncited. In closing, I argue that if we are to continue to use cis in trans, queer, feminist, and allied circles, it must be rerooted in the political history of trans community conversations and at the nexus of multiple co-constitutive assemblages of power-knowledge. Cis is best used as a term to diagnose a complex system of institutional legibility and legitimacy, not a private assessment of sex/gender.