Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. In his new book, Cisgender: Disorienting a Category, Zurn traces the story of how cis entered contemporary gender lexicons. Utilizing unplumbed archives and fresh interviews, Cisgender offers a critical history of the term from the 1990s to the present, deftly defamiliarizing and reimagining cis at the same time.

In this book, you set out to “disorient” the category of cisgender. What does disorientation mean for you? What are the stakes of disorienting contemporary discussions of sex and gender?

Today, use of the term cisgender has fallen largely into two camps. On the one hand, people like Elon Musk, JK Rowling, and the rising right assert that cis is a slur and should be prohibited. You are a man or you are a woman. Period. And trans people are just confused. Musk even banned the term from Twitter/X in 2023. On the other hand, trans people, allies, and leftist liberals generally assert that cis is a neutral descriptor of non-trans people. Non-trans men and women are not simply men and women but cis men and cis women, on an equal footing with trans men and trans women. In our moment, cis has become a lightning rod for political fights.

I started writing this book because I got curious about the word. Where did cis even come from? When did it enter contemporary gender lexicons? Why does it feel impossible now to talk trans politics without it? Has it always meant a person whose gender “matches” their sex at birth? What other possibilities lie buried in its history? What are solid reasons for its endorsement or critique? I had become frustrated by how quickly the term cisgender seemed to stop thought in its tracks. At a juncture in which cisness—and critical discourses about it—have become ever more solidified and more crystalline, my book invites us to return to the muck and reimagine what this term could do.

This book offers an expansive history of the term cisgender. How does that expansive history help us reimagine gender justice today?

Cisgender: Disorienting a Category is a critical history. The conceit of this book is that our pasts not only explain where we have come from, they also offer overlooked possibilities for where we might go. This book offers the first definitive history of cis. It tracks that story geographically, from its Latin roots in the Mediterranean, through queer and trans subcultures in the US and Europe, to transfeminist conversations in Argentina and Brazil. It also tracks the term virtually, moving across platforms such as Usenet, Livejournal, Tumblr, and blogs to Twitter and Reddit. Along the way, a joyous mound of ideas gets piled up on the conceptual table.

Did you know that cis is a Latin prefix? For millennia, it has meant “on this side,” while trans meant “on the far side.” So, cis-Alpine, for example, means the side of the Alps that you are on, whereas trans-Alpine means the other side, which you are not on. In chemistry, cis isomers have a specific atom on one side of a molecule, while that atom jumps to the other side for trans isomers. Early trans endorsers knew these Latin and chemical uses and extrapolated from there: cis means staying on the birth side of your sexgender, while trans means moving to the other side.  

But cis has other Latin senses, too. It can refer, for example, to temporal proximity. If we carried that meaning forward, we might ask what our temporally nearest gender (or genders) are (e.g., this week), in comparison to those farther away (e.g., from our youth or childhood). Cis can also mean “within certain confines.” So, for example, cis-bedpost means in bed (or within the confines of the bedposts!). What might our at home gender(s), our in-bed gender(s), or our sick gender(s) be? These questions—which forefront issues of capitalism, sexuality, and disability—are precisely the kinds of questions that open up when we take cis as a question rather than already an answer.

The term cisgender arose within trans communities well before it began to circulate in the mainstream. What did its coiners and early users mean by it? And has that meaning changed in its now mainstream use?  

Cisvestite and cissexual actually arose in German sexology (in the 1910s and 1990s, respectively). But yes, cisgender first appeared (at least in print) in trans communities using early internet forums. In those first moments, cisgender meant a range of things. Before delineating some of them, I want to underscore this: cisgender was a trans innovation and intervention. As such, it is not just a neutral term that describes a naturally occurring kind. The term itself is a militant act. This is one reason I argue for an appropriate citational politics, one that acknowledges the trans people who built the term, rather than participates in a cisnormative erasure of their contributions to knowledge.

Two competing senses of cis were there from the beginning. I call them the psychological account (i.e., cis is a sense of one’s gender matching one’s sex assigned at birth) and the political account (i.e., cis is a gender position that is sanctified by the state and other social institutions). The psychological account reduces cis to a sense of self between the ears, prompting confessions of cis identity. By contrast, the political account turns us outward to assess the material and discursive institutions that enforce cisnormativity. One of the things I argue, in the book, is that while the psychological account won out, the political account is more compelling and has greater liberatory promise.  

In one of the final chapters, you note that the term cis is “sticky.” What do you mean by this? How does the term’s stickiness relate to the work it does for trans people?

Cis helps us talk about the histories, the discourses, and the political institutions that make trans life—and a lot of other gender nonconforming life—so difficult. The term helps us call out an otherwise unnamed universal—much like the terms whiteness or ablebodymindedness. It helps us name the privilege of moving in a world that expects your sexgender configuration. And it helps us identify the system of norms that discipline everyone’s sexgender experiences. It is because of all these critical uses that cis is so sticky and has stuck with us so implacably.

One of the real joys of this research was stumbling into a vibrant conversation around cis in Argentina and Brazil in the 2010’s. People like Mauro Cabral, Hailey Kaas, Beatrice Bagagli, Viviane Vergueiro Simakawa, and Blas Radi did a lot, inside and outside the academy, to mobilize the uptake of cis as a term and a framework. In that South American context, however, cisness was almost immediately reinterpreted not as some psychological state, or even a political institution, but as a colonial project. Cis is a way to name a longstanding Euro-American investment in Man and Woman—categories to which even the Global North conception of “trans” is still tied. In critiquing the colonial imposition of “cis” and “trans,” some of these writings press us to grapple with local sexgender configurations and bodily projects beyond (and before) that binary.

Despite this stickiness, you also show that cis doesn’t work in certain ways and for certain ends. How does cis fail? And why does that matter for gender liberation today?

Cis fails to help us talk about non-trans people’s genders—which are myriad and weird, often culturally distinct and temporally discrete, and complicated. In the book, I argue that there is no such thing as a cis gender. There are only genders (more than two) that pass, sometimes better than other times, as instantiating a cis norm.

I demonstrate this failure in a number of ways. First, if cisness is constructed in and through whiteness (especially via histories of colonialism and slavery), then colonized peoples, enslaved peoples, and people of color will, in some ways, fail to be cis without ever having to be trans. Second, if cisness is constructed in and through endosexism, then intersex people will, in some ways, fail to be cis without ever having to be trans. Third, if cisness is constructed in and through heteronormativity, queer people will fall short of cis, too, without ever having to be trans. And fourth, if cisness is constructed in and through compulsory ablebodymindedness, then disabled, mad, neurodivergent people will, in important ways, fall short of cis without having to be trans. Cis fails to accurately name all non-trans gender experiences. It also fails to provide room for the complex relationships trans and non-trans people have to fulfilling and failing gender norms.

Given these Black, Global South, intersex, queer, and crip critiques of the term, one thing seems clear to me. If trans and nontrans people are going to keep using the term cis to diagnose and resist epistemic and material inequalities, we need to be equally attentive to the ways our uptake of that term reinscribes epistemic and material inequalities.

Cisgender, as a term, is young, barely 30 years old. What do you hope for its future?

In Cisgender, I tell the story—or, rather, many stories—of how cis became possible and what possibilities its present solidification as a concept occludes. But the book also aims to move beyond history. To tell half stories, shattered stories, shifty and unsteady glimmers of stories that allow the crevices of cis—its buried worlds and upending appendages—to come to light. My goal is not to simply uncover the truth of cis (as if that were possible), but rather to open up what might become thinkable in its wake. 

I want to invite playfulness back into our gender lexicons. I was able to interview early users (even “coiners”) of the term cis, and they underscored that it started as an inside joke or a pun. A sort of ludic sparing. “Well, if we’re trans, they are cis.” But I was also able to include a glossary of 50+ cis terms (e.g., cistem, cisteria, cistory) from the last several decades. You can’t miss the (often humorous) conceptual ingenuity of trans people running through it. While cis has largely become serious and brittle today, I want to submerge it back in that sea of imaginative possibility.          

One of the places I hope we go is this. In Latin, cis can mean “right here” instead of “over there.” I would love us to think more about our genders as right here. Genders as grounded. Genders as local. Genders as crafted in specific relationships (to very different bodies, to our unique histories, and to our singular loved ones). Genders as built in relation to the land on which we live (and its own stories). Too many fights still happen in the realm of universals (e.g., “men,” “women,” “trans,” “cis”). Too many “over there.” I would love to see us ask: What kind of gendered beings do we want to be—right here, right here with our people, right here on this land, right here in this moment?   

Read a sample from Cisgender for free and save 30% with coupon E26CGNDR.