No, “cis” is not a slur
To avoid having to type the same things over and over again, I wrote a Twitter thread for those objecting to the word/prefix “cis”, and have turned it into an article here for readability and to add more detail.
I will explain the word for those who are genuinely asking, whilst noting that most of the people objecting are absolutely not acting in good faith.
“cis” and “trans” are Latin prefixes from ancient Rome, meaning “same side as” and “opposite side from”.
So Cisalpine Gaul was the land “on this side of the Alps” (from the perspective of the Romans), as opposed to Transalpine Gaul (“on the far side of the Alps”) during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.
Ever since, cis and trans have been used as antonyms (opposites) for things that can be on the same side or the opposite side.
Many people encounter them in high-school chemistry for cis-trans isomers (molecules that have the same atoms, but arranged differently):
But they are used in many fields of knowledge:
- geography: cismontane, cisalpine, cisatlantic, cisgangetic, cispadane, cismarine, Cisjordan, Cisleithania, etc
- space: cislunar, cis-Neptunian
- chemistry: (e.g.) cis-dichloroethene, cistactic, cisplatin
- biology: e.g. cisGolgi / cis face of the Golgi apparatus
- genetics: cisregulation, cis-acting, cisgenesis
- grammar: cislocative
- physics: cisplanckian
- …and cisgender
Cisgender; of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth
cisgender: used to describe a person whose gender matches the body they were born with
Opposite: transgender
The dictionary definitions are consistently neutral; nothing derogatory to be found at all. Indeed the Merriam Webster dictionary has recently specifically stated that ‘cisgender’ is “overwhelmingly used neutrally”.
Due to their ancient and pairwise origin, ever since the words transvestite, transsexual and transgender were coined it was inevitable that their cis counterparts would follow
- Ancient Rome: cisalpine, etc
- 1785: cisatlantic
- 1800s: cis/trans isomers
- 1867: Cisleithania
- 1877: cislunar
- 1914: Ernst Burchard: cisvestism (cisvestitismus)
- 1948: Cisjordan
- 1991: Volkmar Sigusch: cissexual (zissexuell)
- 1994: Dana Defosse: cisgender
- 2000: Cisgenesis
Which makes it particularly dishonest when people try to discredit and smear some of these words by trying to find bad things about their “inventors”. Who coined them is irrelevant. Coining them this way was inevitable.
Logically if trans people exist (which they plainly do) then “not-trans” people must also exist. And the obvious word for “not-trans” is “cis”.
Some capitalise the prefix to “CIS”, for some reason. It’s not an acronym, so that makes no sense.
Some try to claim that “cis is a slur” or that it is “hateful”. Plainly, that’s false both in its original meaning, and its current dictionary definitions.
And it’s still used as an entirely neutral term throughout the scientific and medical literature:
“Cisgender” is currently also used neutrally by, for example:
- feminist and other academic journals
- World Health Organisation
- United Nations
- International Labour Organization
- Council of Europe
- American Medical Association
- UK National Health Service
- US National Institutes of Health
- British Medical Association
- American Psychological Association
- British Psychological Society
- The Endocrine Society
- Amnesty
- Human Rights Watch
- Courts of Law and statutes in the UK, US, India, Canada and elsewhere
- European Parliament
- European Court of Human Rights
- International Criminal Court
- NATO
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- Oxfam
- Red Cross
- Doctors Without Borders / Médecins sans frontières
- National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
- UK Office for National Statistics
- The World Bank
- Chartered Insurance Institute
- The Church of England, Methodists, Quakers …
- Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth
- Reuters news, BBC
(and no doubt thousands of other organisations — this is just what I found in a few minutes from my somewhat UK-centric perspective, so feel free to create your own enhanced lists!)
And no, LGBTQ+ folks rolling their eyes at “the straights” from time to time does not make “straight” a “slur”, for example. Oppressed minority groups have the moral right to complain about the majority group oppressing them, without the majority pretending to be the victim.
And indeed:
The neutral meaning is that your internal sense of gender is “on the same side” as your sex assigned at birth (cisgender) or “on the opposite side” (transgender).
“Trans” does not mean “someone who has transitioned”, though the words have related etymology. It’s who you are, not what you do.
“Trans” acts as an adjective; some absurdly try to claim that “trans woman” does not mean “woman” because of the qualifier “trans” — yet do not apply that “logic” to “tall woman” or indeed “cis woman”.
Some claim to dislike “cis” because they don’t like the sound, but frankly that’s a really desparate reason to deny the use of a word. On a related note, “cis” is unrelated to “sissy”, it simply sounds similar.
And denial (of vocabulary) is what is happening here. In my opinion, most of the people objecting are cynically and dishonestly trying to de-rail and control the conversation by denying the very words needed to express the situation. Katy Montgomerie makes this point in more detail.
Ironically, some of the same people tend to complain that things are “Orwellian” — whilst themselves borrowing his 1984 tactic of “Newspeak”
“Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual’s ability to think and articulate “subversive” concepts such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will.”
Another dishonest, manipulative tactic is the exploitation and reversal of ‘social justice’ phrasing, claiming that they are oppressed by being “labelled” cis against their will and claiming this is just as bad as oppressed groups being denied their identities.
The wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: “Being offended by equality is not morally equivalent to being offended by inequality”
Also, whilst your identity is your own, you don’t get to deny the categories of trans and cis for everyone in general, or pretend they mean things that they do not, or pretend that terms that accurately describe your status can’t possibly apply to you.
Some claim they are being “misgendered” by being called cis, again borrowing and twisting phrases describing the oppression of trans people. But it is not a gender, nobody is misrepresenting them, and they are engaging in the abusive tactic of DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim & Offender.)
Some claim that the term is sexist or misogynist. Which is false and ridiculous — it applies regardless of sex; there are both cis men and cis women, equally.
Some object to being made “a subset of their own sex”. But we are all in countless subsets of our sex. That’s how subsets work. Being able to subdivide manhood or womanhood doesn’t diminish it.
Some say that “cis” is redundant so should not be used. This is particularly ridiculous — do you go around raging that “tall” shouldn’t be used because we can say “not short”? Have you expunged all your antonyms? Again, people with a tendency to throw around references to Orwell have no business deleting “redundant” words. That would be double-plus-un-good.
If you object to “cis”, then do you also object to “non-trans”? If not, then your objection is spurious; they mean the same thing. If so, the only reason to do this is if you don’t accept that trans people exist (which is transphobic reality-denial) or you refuse to be placed on an equal footing with them (which is transphobic prejudice).
And in fact this is one of the key goals of objecting to “cis”: to establish oneself as “normal”, requiring no qualifier, and the minority group as an “abnormal” out-group, with a qualifier. It is “othering”, dehumanising — a key tactic of fascism and oppression.
As Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube says:
“the anti-gender movement hate it, because it implies that trans people and cis people are both worth listening to. It resists abjectification [a form of dehumanisation] by putting us on an even playing field. Kind of like using the word ‘straight’ or ‘heterosexual’ instead of saying ‘normal’”
These next few say the quiet part out loud: they regard trans people as inferior and invalid, and therefore resent being placed on an even footing with them, even linguistically. It’s just naked prejudice:
![Cis is a slur, first because it just sounds very unappealing, and gross to say, and second because it was a term invented specifically to denigrate “normal” people and putting them on the same level as people who are clearly mentally ill. [some typos in original text corrected].](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*5HadQC-O9SrRuhs0QakXaA.png)
Also, as we’ve seen, it was not in any way invented “specifically to denigrate”, nor is it used in that way. There is no basis for this claim whatsoever.
Another well-known tactic of fascism is pretending to be the victim of this small, oppressed, “othered” group: “The enemy is both strong and weak”. You’ll see people claiming that cis was “invented to marginalise normal people”. But how on earth can 1% of the population “marginalise” 99% of the population? It’s absurd.
There is a long history of this “othering”; exactly the same pattern “I’m not heterosexual, I’m normal” was used by homophobes of previous decades.
Almost everything in the modern anti-trans moral panic is a rehash, often nearly word-for-word, of past homophobic moral panics. Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, etc.
That’s the end of my original explanation — some follow-ups and subsequent events are also included below…
See also:
- “No One Actually Believes That Cis Is A Slur, Here’s Why They Pretend To” https://katymontgomerie.com/blog/no-one-actually-believes-that-cis-is-a-slur-heres-why-they-pretend-to
- “Nobody Thinks Cis is a Slur” https://archive.is/U0Tse
I got some responses to my Twitter thread, pointing out that words can change meaning over time, so a neutral origin does not necessarily prevent a word becoming a slur. This is true — but as far as I know, nobody has yet shown credible evidence of such a change in meaning. Citatio requiritur, perhaps? I have added evidence above confirming that current usage is neutral across a vast range of respectable organisations, and as recorded by dictionaries.
Whilst any word can be used aggressively in an individual interaction…
…that doesn’t make the word itself a slur, so I will not be convinced by the usual handful of cherry-picked anonymous tweet screengrabs.
I also got a number of (IMO) bad-faith responses, which is a bit ironic given the central theme above of bad-faith arguments. One of them (when I checked their Twitter timeline) compared the term “cis” to the terms “TERF” (which has always been negative, though not a slur in the proper sense) and “bastard” (which has arguably been derogatory since the 14th century, so also not a relevant comparison).
The same person also asked me“why is it so important to demonise people who disagree?”. Well, bigoted, dishonest tactics aren’t merely “disagreeing” and calling them out isn’t “demonising”. This person is just using the same tactic of playing victim that I already called out above. They decided the answer to their question was ‘because I said so’. However, one can easily confirm that the vast majority of what I actually said is widely-accepted as fact by the relevant expert organisations.
They also asked me “Aside from the reality that lots of terms don’t come in binary pairings why is it so important to enforce this usage?”. Well, it’s irrelevant that other terms don’t come in pairs, because the term we’re actually discussing does come in a pair. And nobody is “enforcing” anything (this is playing the victim again).
Like many others this person, in all their mentions of the word “cis”, could not, or would not, actually express any reason for objecting to it.
UPDATE (07 Mar 2023)
I’ve also recently seen multiple people making claims like the first tweet here:
As the reply points out, the tweet is self-debunking.
A distinguishing characteristic of hate slurs is that there’s always a more neutral word you can use instead. “Cis” is already the neutral word.
It’s also grotesque to claim that a racial slur linked to hundreds of years of violent oppression is equivalent to a term describing the vast majority (99%+) of people, who are plainly not oppressed by the 1%. Unbelievable levels of delusion and/or dishonesty.
Some time later, some genius left this Medium comment (then promptly deleted it):
Same argument applies. You know the N-word is worse because you wouldn’t spell it out. And you know that the N-word accompanies decades of brutal violent oppression, whereas cisgender accompanies no oppression whatsoever, and has no negative connotations either. That’s why it is objectively not a slur, regardless of what you claim to believe. Also, I am cisgender, so I’m in the same (privileged) group that I’m addressing.
UPDATE (also 07 Mar 2023)
Sigh.
Firstly, this is using a slightly different meaning of the prefix “trans”. Secondly (as already shown) “cis” was already used in many words, and has been for centuries. Finally, “cistern” has nothing to do with “cis” but derives from Ancient Greek κίστη (kístē, “box”). Not liking a word is one thing; confidently throwing out total bullshit about its origin and meaning is another.
UPDATE (09 Mar 2023)
Yesterday, a 2600-page archive of emails from 2019–2021 between dozens of anti-trans ‘expert’ witnesses, US right-wing lawmakers and conservative legal groups was leaked online. There is a lot going on in this archive, but just on the topic of “cis”:
p. 553, Quentin Van Meter advising against saying the word cisgender:
“I agree that adopting use of cis-gender only validates transgender as a healthy variant which it is clearly not.”
Elsewhere, Kelsey Coalition asks SEGM founder Will Malone not to say “cisgender” because it
“indirectly endorses the ideology upon which transgender identities are based”
Attorney Richard Mast of Liberty Counsel then says that SEGM shouldn’t even say “transgender”. Elsewhere, Shupe says:
Another note on cisgender. If I’m not mistaken the word was coined by transgender activist Julia Serano between 10 and 20 years ago. Trans activists don’t get to decide what the rest of us are
and
…I recommend removing transgender and cisgender both.
There’s no scientific evidence that transgender people exist
Shupe was mistaken; Julia Serano states that she was the first to publish the term, but did not coin it. And of course there is copious evidence that trans people exist; over a century of scientific literature and the testimony of millions of trans people.
Elisa Rae Shupe later retransitioned, disavowed this anti-trans team who she felt had exploited her, and leaked this email archive.
The Scooby-Doo gang have removed the mask of “legitimate concerns” to reveal what we suspected all along: naked transphobic prejudice and cynical manipulation of language (and vulnerable people) for anti-trans propaganda.
Update (11 Mar 2023)
- All words are “made up”
- “Cis” features in literature going back thousands of years
- Even “cisgender” goes back 16 years earlier than claimed here
- It’s ignorant to “not understand” a word that can be looked up in a dictionary in a few seconds, and which you are clearly think you are already familiar with (otherwise you wouldn’t be making claims about it being “made up” or post-2010).
Update (24 Mar 2023)
No, it does not refer to any of those meanings.
Pretty sure you made that up.
Lots of sets of letters mean different things in other languages. But not in the language we’re actually using.
Who is “they”? What “research”? [citation needed]
Update (7 May 2023)
Apparently the theoretical risk of accidentally calling someone “sister” is a slur. Truly amazing mental gymnastics there.
Update (21 Jun 2023)
You can “consider” something to be a slur all you like, that won’t make it one.
As Aidan Comerford comments, “At least this is honest. People who say ‘don’t call me cis’ only do so because they don’t believe in the validity of trans people … Being trans is not an ideology, no more than being gay is an ‘agenda’.”
This despite a century of scientific work on the topic, and the recognition of trans people in international human rights law. Rowling believes that she has the right to reject others innate identities, and treat them with disrespect, because her beliefs are more important than the facts. Naturally putting it like that would sound bad, so she has to misrepresent the facts of trans existence as mere ideology, belief, “unprovable essences” etc, and denigrate perfectly sensible, simple terminology as “jargon”.
Also today, the Merriam-Webster dictionary weighed in with an article on the word ‘cisgender’:
Update (16 Dec 2023)
It’s official: “cisgender” has the royal seal of approval! And yet the shortened form using just the prefix, which means the same thing is, somehow, still a slur? Desperate clutching at straws, there.
Update (18 Dec 2023)
Very insightful critique here, really makes you think, right? (eye roll)
As we’ve seen, a word that’s been around since ancient times certainly didn’t just pop up “since COVID”. This kind of violent, unhinged rant perfectly demonstrates the hypocrisy of bigots pretending to be offended by a “slur”, that they don’t even understand, whilst throwing around abuse, violent threats and unambiguous ableist slurs.
(The account was deleted shortly afterwards, but someone of the same name has also been seen sending someone else abusive emails of a similar flavour)
Update (10th April 2024)
Your average reactionary bigot: “I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I hate it”:
I’ll leave you with one final useful resource:
