Becoming cisgender

Abstract

Abstract The metaphysics of sex and gender is of significant philosophical, social, and cultural interest at present. Terms liketransgenderandcisgenderhave come into wider circulation in the fight for gender justice. While many are familiar with ‘transgender’, fewer know ‘cisgender’, the term that captures AFAB‐women (assigned ‘female’ at birth‐women) and AMAB‐men. But ‘cisgender’ is controversial to some, which I find surprising. In this article, I reflect on my process of recognising myselfas cisgender. During, I highlight the ethico‐political consequences of refusing the onto‐epistemic category ‘cisgender’. I shall argue thatuptakeof ‘cisgender’ andapprenticeshipto trans texts uncovers how we maintain, and might purposefully disturb, queer/cis‐hetero, man/woman/other hierarchies of social identity power. I argue this self‐recognition is a crucial tool for challenging ‘cisgender commonsense’ and may be a means toward dislodging ciscentrism in my (western, Anglophone) milieu.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.