‘We’re just normal, why do you call us cis?’
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Cisgender (shortened to ‘cis’) simply means ‘not transgender’ (shortened to ‘trans’).
The original question [subsequently deleted; my original answer is here] was:
‘Why do the LGBT people refer to normal women as cis women?’
There are three parts to fully answer the question asked.
Firstly: because trans and intersex women (and men and enby) are normal.
Gender and sex do not exist as absolutes or as binary (either/or). As with other human traits (like height and shoe size) they exist on a curve, where the fat part of the curve covers the majority and the curve thins over the minority.
By the way, this shape is called a normal distribution:
There is no absolute male/female binary to either gender identity or physical sex; what there is, is most people being mostly-male or mostly-female and a few people being in-between or swopped.
Cis and trans exist on a continuum; no one is ‘perfectly’ cis or trans, just as no one is perfectly male or perfectly female, whether we’re aware of it or not. We use male/female, cis/trans, as if the situation were binary, for convenience or out of ignorance, but in ‘natural fact’ it is not. (And kindly bear in mind that, as for all things human, my description of all this is grossly oversimplified.)
Here are two other normal distributions:
(Note that you can overlay these graphs perpendicular to each other and get a three-dimensional map of gender vs physical sex, where any point might represent a human individual. For example, my own point would fall, in three-space, toward the female extreme of gender and the male extreme of physical sex [pre-transition].)
So, being cis is normal. So is being trans.
Secondly: cis and trans are not LGBTI+ terms, they are English words, defined in the English dictionary. OK, technically they are prefixes, originally from Latin, used in compound words like cisgender, and increasingly used as adjectives, as with trans woman. Cis and trans are increasingly being used as short for cisgender and transgender. And by the way, they are not active verbs: transgendered is not a thing, and neither is cisgendered. You wouldn’t say someone was ‘blacked’, would you?
Cis and trans merely describe gender-states which are either congruent with birth-assigned sex (cis) or incongruent to some significant degree (trans). The use of cis with respect to gender and sex dates back to at least 1914. Language evolves, and new words are every bit as ‘real’ as old ones. Most people do not object to the word ‘internet’, which has existed since the 1970s, or about 2/5 as long as the word ‘cisgender’.
Cis is no more strange than trans; the terms simply form a pair which, together, describe a range of states, like tall/short, straight/gay, happy/sad…if you have trans, you must also have cis. That many cis people were unaware of this until recently makes no difference.
Whether one is cis or trans depends on how one’s physical sex happens to have been assigned at birth; whether that assigned sex is congruent with one’s gender (cis) or not so much (trans). Intersex people may identify as either cis or trans depending on the luck of the draw at their sex-assignment at birth. It is most correct not to say that one’s sex ‘is female’ or ‘is male’, but rather that one was ‘assigned female’ or ‘assigned male’. (And there is a movement within intersex and trans communities to move away from this at-birth binary assignment.)
Just as cis means not-trans, there is also the word dyadic meaning not-intersex. Dyadic has come into use for the same reasons as has cis — in an attempt to destigmatise a minority—and so, as with cis, some ‘normal’ people object to the existence of the word (as you can see in the comments at the link).
Lastly, we press the issue because many (probably still most) cis and dyadic people consider themselves to be the ‘normal’ human beings and position trans and intersex people as ‘abnormal’ others, freaks, ‘wrong people’, ‘its’, and not-really-human, and then mistreat us accordingly.
That we push back against such categorisation and abuse should be unsurprising. It’s only normal.
Click here for notes and citations supporting the claims made.
To learn more about transgender-related language see Review: Trans Talk.
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