Cisgender or cis is a relatively new term that was popularized only in the last twenty years. Thus, The mainstream definition of cis-gender is as follows: a cis-gender person is someone whose gender identity matches the sex he or she was assigned at birth; meaning, a person born as a female and who identifies as a woman is cisgender. The term is sometimes replaced by “cis-sexual” which specifically refers to one’s sex identity matching one’s biological “morphology”(1). The term “cis” has a Latin origin meaning “same side as” while “trans” shares the Latin origin and means “opposite side as”. It was first used in a 1991 paper written by the German psychologist Volkmar Sigusch and later popularized in the United States mainstream discourse(2). It was added to the Oxford dictionary only in 2015 (3).

The political power in using cisgender as an identity category for the majority of the population is to reveal the inherent and largely invisible privilege of possessing a normative gender identity and appearance for those who do. Oftentimes positions of privilege remain unnamed and thus become normalized and transparent. Possessing cisgender privileges include for example, navigating services and spaces such as public bathrooms without the threat of questioning or policing, or navigating checkpoints with a lower likelihood of arrest due to non-normative gender appearance or mismatch of the stated sex on one’s identity card and their gendered self-presentation. Navigating daily life in Lebanon for visibly trans* women poses a higher risk than for persons with a normative gender appearance (cisgender), some of this difficulty lies in the fact that these women are more harassed and questioned specifically due to their transgender identities and self-presentation(4). This type of policing and lack of “cisgender privilege” falls into widespread patterns of state policing of non-normative genders and sexualities (see definitions for Gender, Sex, Hymen).

Despite the term’s important political intervention in naming the norm and specifying it, it is critiqued for establishing a falsely coherent binary between trans* and non-trans*. Further, the term has been critiqued for replicating the gender binary, and for reaffirming essentialist positions through building on an assumption that one’s gender identity can be static, stable or coherent (meaning that a person possesses a cisgender position that has not changing since their birth) as opposed to their gender being a result of performative embodied practices that are shaped by class, race, and a range of temporal factors. In this sense, the transgender versus cisgender binary functions similarly to the heterosexual-homosexual binary: while it is politically important to offset the marginalization and the associatedviolence against otherness by making the norm specific, the same impetus risks erasing a plethora of expressions that fall between the two ends of an allegedly coherent binary.

The term remains relatively unused in mainstream Lebanese outlets that are concerned with gender issues, perhaps owing to the fact that trans* issues, communities, and activism are not structured the same way as they are in the United States and Western European countries(5).

Transgender persons – who use the label “trans”, “transsexual”, “shemale” and “ladyboy” when speaking about themselves or others – often use “normal” to describe a non-trans person, and in some cases also using “straight” to communicate the same meaning (as in, a normative gender identity and not only a sexual orientation). Yet, some local uses of the term in activist circles also points to an alteration in the meaning, wherein cisgender is employed as a slur when referring to straight feminine women who display a “normative” gender presentation.