Cisgender
Having the gender you were assigned at birth.
Cisgender describes someone whose gender is the one they were assigned at birth. A woman who was assigned female and is a woman is cisgender. That is the whole of it.
The word exists so that there is something to call the other side. Without it, trans is a category and everyone else is just people, which quietly makes trans the deviation and cis the default. Naming both is how you get a comparison instead of a norm and an exception.
The prefix comes from Latin, where cis means on this side and trans means across. It is the same pairing chemists have used for a century and geographers before them; it was applied to gender in academic writing in the 1990s and moved outward from there.
It is not a slur, and it is not an insult, though it is regularly received as one. The reaction is usually less about the word than about being labelled at all, which is an experience most cis people have not had regarding their gender and most trans people have never stopped having.
Cis is the ordinary short form. Cisgender is an adjective like transgender: a cisgender man, a cis woman. Not a noun.
Cisgender is a description, not a judgement
The objection usually raised is that nobody asked to be labelled. That is fair as a feeling and beside the point as an argument: the alternative is not no label, it is the unmarked default, where trans people are the ones with a word and everyone else is simply people.
It also makes plain sentences possible. Cis women and trans women is a sentence with two subjects. Women and trans women is a sentence that has already decided something, and that is precisely the work the word was invented to stop.
Saying it well
Say this
- She is cisgender.
- I am cis.
- A cis man and a trans man are both men.
- The study compared cis and trans participants.
Not this
- Normal people
- Real women
- Biological male / biological female
- Cis is a slur
Questions people actually ask
What does cisgender mean?
Having the gender you were assigned at birth. It is the counterpart to transgender.
Is cisgender a slur?
No. It is a descriptive term from Latin, where cis means on this side, and it exists so that both sides of the comparison have a name.
Where does the word cisgender come from?
From the Latin prefix cis, the opposite of trans. It entered academic writing on gender in the 1990s.
What is the opposite of cisgender?
Transgender, meaning someone whose gender differs from the one assigned at birth.
Can you be neither cisgender nor transgender?
Most people who question the framing end up describing themselves as some kind of nonbinary or questioning, both of which sit under the trans umbrella for most purposes. Some decline all of it, which is allowed.