For the record: this essay is intended to clarify misconceptions about, and to encourage more thoughtful usage of, cis terminology. Anyone who references this piece in their attempts to deny or eliminate use of the term "cis" (and its variants) is clearly misinterpreting or misrepresenting my views.
My first book Whipping Girl helped to popularize cis terminology—that is, language that uses the prefix
“cis” to name the unmarked dominant majority (i.e., people who are not trans)
in order to better articulate the ways in which trans people are marginalized
in society. In 2009, I wrote a blog post called Whipping Girl FAQ on cissexual, cisgender, and cis privilege that explained my reasoning in forwarding cis terminology and addressed some of
the more common arguments made against such language. That blog post ended with
a section discussing some of the limitations of cis terminology and the concept
of cis privilege—a topic that I will revisit in this two-part series.
Over the years, I have observed that many people now use cis
terminology in a manner that is somewhat different from how I attempted to use
it in Whipping Girl, thus leading to
potential ambiguity—I will address such matters in this first essay. In the
last section of this essay, I will suggest another possible model for describing
how people are differentially viewed and treated with regards to gender
non-conformity, and which may (in some cases) provide a more effective
framework than a cisgender/transgender dichotomy.