On Why I’ve Been Avoiding Cis

You might have noticed by now that I don’t use the terms cis and cisgender much, and usually hedge them in phrases like “the standard credentials for cisgender.” Now that I’ve laid some groundwork, I want to explain why. If you’re about to turn the page—oh no, PC unpleasantness—please stay! I’m not out to police language but to share with you how thinking through some problems with cis has really helped me connect some dots about how we can get stuck in racialized gender binarism.

I want to say first, though, that I haven’t totally abandoned cis, which spread exponentially from its trans-activist beginnings in the 1990s to become a useful shorthand for identifying with the gender assigned to you at birth. A measure of its reach came in 2015, when the Oxford English Dictionary added the longer form cisgender, along with other new entries that help to convey the level of buzz required for admission by popularity, such as twerk, Twitterati, Masshole, and hot mess (Brydum 2015).

Cis also generally carries an implicit acknowledgment that privileges come to people whose gender assignments and identities match up. As Finn Enke writes, “It is hard to overstate how dramatically . . . legibility . . . and consistency within a binary gender system buy a privileged pass to social existence, particularly when accompanied by the appearance of normative race, class, ability, and nationality” (2012, 64). Most basically within skating, this includes my opportunity to compete without misgendering myself. While US Figure Skating has allowed people to choose the (unideal) gender category “unspecified,” USFS follows the International Skating Union in restricting solo and partnered competition to people recorded as female or male.

But when I take advantage of cis’s legibility, I sidestep a bunch of problems, beginning with the gender assignment that cis is measured against. Think about the notions lurking in the fanfare of declaring “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl”:

• That assignment to a binary gender category is the foundational part of being recognized as human—of moving from it to boy or girl (Stryker 1994, 250).
• That medical, legal, familial, and other interested bystanders are authorized to name your gender.
• That it’s reasonable to guess gender by genitals, shallow even as a canvass of physical components that might contribute to gender assignment or identity (Strangio 2016).
• That initial deviation from decreed boy or girl criteria is a problem to be solved (Malatino 2019, 19).
• That assigning someone, or being assigned, to boy or girl is the best thing ever, making nonconsensual gendering, these days, the occasion for a party. Pink confetti! Blue frosting! Smoke bombs dropped from an airplane!
• That binary gender assignment is a universal, natural, and obvious act, when it has long been anything but. For example, as Che Gossett states, “Terms like ‘cisgender’ can’t really account for how the gender binary was forcibly imposed on black and native people through slavery and settler colonialism” (Ferraz 2014). By taking “male” or “female” as a starting point, “cisgender” invisibilizes the racial violence involved in making those the two acceptable possibilities.

Forcibly imposed but with membership often denied, which is one of many issues on the identity side of cisness. As I’ve discussed earlier, even if you think you’re female or male, masculine or feminine, your perceived legitimacy in those categories depends on all sorts of gatekeeping, racial gatekeeping primary among them. In Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, Marquis Bey writes that “gender is always a racial arrangement” (2022, 22), describing in detail how antiblackness and the elevation of whiteness figure in the criteria for cisness. Bey also emphasizes that no one simply slips into compliance with assigned categories. People are trained, sometimes forced into them (40). Besides, Bey asks, what’s so great anyway about the idea of staying where you start? What else might we do, become, imagine, or try out?

Cistem Failure pushed me to recognize what I had conveniently compartmentalized. In one location, what I knew to be cis’s many problems, which I had taught and written about for over a decade. In another, my identity as cis. That didn’t make me think I am trans. It did, however, make me question my attachment to being “the cis one” in my skating partnership and what my own racial privilege had enabled me to avoid thinking about.

Writing this book has been humbling, disturbing, and exciting as I repeatedly came up against my own entrenchments and, conversely, found myself rerouted or opened up to directions I hadn’t expected. Over time, I came to think of grappling with racialized gender binarism as, in a way, like skating. I couldn’t get where I wanted to go by merely amassing ideas. I needed more mobility, repetition, muscle memory, exercises, experimentation, and practice time. I offer the next pieces in the spirit of warm-up and lubrication for unsticking—for thinking and acting beyond where we start.