Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Here’s the thing: no one is cisgender. But not for the reasons you might think. This is a tricky thing to say, I know—just ask the internet. There is no shortage of anti-trans agitators complaining about how much it hurts their feelings to be called cis. “Stop misrecognizing me, I don’t identify as cis!” they exclaim. These so-called injured people are being disingenuous. They don’t really care about the word. The whole crux of their gender has always been that they don’t have to be conscious of having one, so they feel their power threatened. Their complaint is strategic, it’s political. And yet, there is no shortage of people calling them out as cis, either. Both can be true. The problem is that the anti-trans side of this confrontation seems to be making better use of the instability of language than the trans-affirmative side.
Ask yourself this: how can you tell if someone is cisgender? Do you look at them? Study their gender presentation? Listen for their pronouns? Wait for them to self-ID as cis? I see this a lot at work. When “diversity” is on the table it usually means that everyone in the meeting has to go around and say their pronouns before we can begin. White ladies have to come out as cisgender. Okay, sometimes that makes me giggle. But it’s also profoundly unhelpful for a lot of other people who are non-binary, who don’t fit the recognizable figure of transness those ladies have seen on TV, or who are being misread by them anyways because of their ideas about race and class presentation. After I came out I began using they/them pronouns at work. My name hadn’t changed. And my hair is very curly, so it barely seemed to be getting longer, even after six months or a year of growth. With my brown skin and dark hair, no amount of shaving and makeup could keep a shadow from forming on my face over the course of a workday. All in all, unless I was wearing a dress, it wasn’t obvious from looking at me what I was asking from people. And so I felt all eyes on me every time I walked into a meeting. I didn’t need the people I work with to name their cisness to deal with that. The really cis thing at that meeting, after all, was the university, not the identities of the people who worked there.