Trans-Cistory

Some folks find the term “cisgender” to be insulting, new, and otherwise objectionable, but there’s nothing inherently insulting about it, nor is it especially new, particularly in comparison to the current usage of “transgender”.  But let’s be thorough here. 

Where does “cisgender” come from? 

Excerpt from Usenet post by Dana Leland Defosse to the newsgroup: alt.transgendered on 5/25/1994 containing the first documented usage of the term "cisgendered". 

But before diving into the language, let’s be clear.  The social and psychological phenomena of transness and even the medical aspects of transitioning, precede the vocabulary developed to describe it.  

ben Kalonymus, Kalonymus. Translated by Steve Greenberg, Twitter, 19 Apr. 2018, pbs.twimg.com/media/DbMiyIaW4AAact2?format=jpg&name=900x900.

From a post by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Trans behavior, and even trans surgeries and hormonal treatments are documented back well beyond 2000 years ago, predating the words “transvestite” and “cisvestite” by millenia and likely extending back into prehistory.  Modern medical transitioning through gonadal extracts and transplants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, through surgeries in the 1920s through the 1940s, and through isolated hormone therapies beginning in the late 1920s all predate the words “transsexual”, “transgender”, “cissexual”, and “cisgender”. 

Now for the language:

First of all, both “cis” and “trans” were prepositions used in Latin from more than two thousand years ago.  

“Cis” means “this side of” and “trans” means “across”.  They are opposites and in Roman times you see them used, among other places, to designate different groups of Gauls depending on whether they lived on the near side of the Alps in what is now Northern Italy (Cisalpine Gauls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisalpine_Gaul ) or across the Alps, on the far side of the Alps from Rome in what is now southern France (Transalpine Gauls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallia_Narbonensis )

In English, and other languages “cis-” and “trans-” have become opposite prefixes, essentially retaining their original meanings. 

“Cis-” and “trans-” get a lot of contrasting use in chemical nomenclature.   

They appear in the names distinguishing between different geometric isomers, or molecules that have the same number of atoms of each type as each other, but have the same clusters of atoms that in one form are on the same side (cis-) as other such groups of atoms, but in another form have those clusters on the far side (trans-) of those other groups of atoms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cis%E2%80%93trans_isomerism  

“Travesty” appears in various languages in similar forms in the 16th century and forward meaning “dressed in disguise” or “dressed in a ridiculous way”, but by 1823, “travesty” had in English, come to mean wearing the clothing of the opposite sex (often, but not always for disguise) and in 1832, “travestiment” was recorded meaning "wearing of the dress of the opposite sex". https://www.etymonline.com/word/transvestite#etymonline_v_16904 

In the mid to late 19th century, people assigned male at birth who performed femininity through clothing and behavior were called drag queens, or people in drag - but this could include people who today would be considered transgender, cisgender crossdressers, and cisgender drag queens.  The term “drag” in this context dates back to at least 1870.   It is said to have come from the observation that long dresses and skirts worn by such folks would drag across the floor at social gatherings or in theatrical performances.  The term “drag queen” dates back to at least the 1890s” The term “female impersonator” was also used and persisted as a catch-all term well past the mid 20th century. 

These weren’t kind terms, but rather were descriptive of what were considered medical disorders. In 1886 Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, which introduces the terms sadism and masochism, while describing them, and sexual inversion as paraphilias - mental disorders, which he did for any behavior deemed sexual which would not allow for procreation. 

In 1910, Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld published his book Die Transvestiten. It’s often stated that he coined the word transvestite there, but it may predate him.  This word served as an umbrella term encompassing who we would today call crossdressers, as well as transgender people including those whom we have called transsexuals. 

In 1914, Ernst Burchard apparently coined the term “cisvestitismus” or “cisvestism” in an academic sexology text called  "Lexikon des gesamten Sexuallebens" or "Encyclopedia of the Whole Sex-life", in opposition to “transvestitismus” or “transvestism” and meaning one who conforms to social norms of gendered presentation and expression for their birth designated sex (or does so but in clothing of a different age, profession or ethnicity for sexual relief). The use of the term “cisvestite” in English followed shortly. 

If you don’t like the whole “trans-” “cis-” thing, you wouldn’t be the first.  Havelock Ellis really wanted different terms. And in 1920, having previously proposed “sexo-aesthetic inversion”, then proposed the term eonism after the Chevalier D’Eon to describe people who were trans feminine. Ellis, like Krafft-Ebing before him, saw such things as psychiatric disorders, so you can see why they were less appealing to the trans community itself, such as it was. 

In 1923, Magnus Hirschfeld introduced the term "seelischer Transsexualismus”, that is “psychic or mental transsexualism” in “Die intersexuelle Konstitution from the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen”, but “transsexual” as a category in English would not arrive until David Oliver Cauldwell introduced it in 1949 and it became more widely disseminated by Hirschfeld’s former colleague, Harry Benjamin.  A source for some of the information on Hirschfeld and related work is here. 

In 1949 David Oliver Cauldwell defined “transsexual” in its contemporary meaning as distinct from intersex people and recommended no surgical interventions for non-intersex people.  He published this in an essay titled Psychopathia Transsexualis echoing Krafft-Ebbing’s book title.  Louise Lawrence, a trans woman who worked with sexologist Alfred Kinsey, introduced Harry Benjamin to the term and to Cauldwell’s work after which Benjamin also adopted the term.  Lawrence preferred to use the term “transvestite” to describe herself and never sought any medical interventions.  Benjamin was the most prominent physician associated with medical treatment of trans people in 20th century America and his work The Transsexual Phenomenon, published in 1966, helped popularize the term. 

In 1965, Psychiatrist Dr. John F. Oliven introduced the term “transgender” as a middle ground between “transvestite” and “transsexual” in the second edition of his reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology.  He rejected the term “transsexual”, finding that the “urge for gender change” was a more overriding factor for the individuals described by the term, with any physical changes subsumed by that. 

Still, this was an exonym.  Kate Bornstein describes "tranny" as being a term that was coined in Australia as a shared in-group term for drag queens and trans women in the 1960s and 1970s.  In some places like New York and Atlanta in the 1960s, trans women themselves may have called themselves “gay” or “tranny” and referred to each other as “living in drag”, or as queens or drag queens, but the language didn’t make the meanings as distinct and clear.

At some point in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Virginia Prince began promoting the use of the category "transgenderist" to mean someone who, in today's language, socially transitioned but had not and did not intend to medically transition.  This more specific middle ground usage of transgender(ist) had traction for a while but eventually fell out of broad usage. 

By the early 1980s, “the transgender community” was becoming an umbrella phrase among activists and was inclusive of transsexuals, transvestites, and crossdressers.  One of the greater champions of this usage was Leslie Feinberg, who in In 1992 published the pamphlet “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose TIme Has Come” promoting the use of “transgender” as an umbrella term, including the aforementioned groups as well as drag queens and any other gender non-conforming people.  She was also using it in that context to help forge political alliances among the people under that umbrella Mallory Moore's Twitter thread on Feinberg's Transgender Liberation.  

In 1991, zissexual was apparently coined in German by Volkmar Sigusch, followed shortly by “cissexual” in English, to mean someone whose birth designated sex is the same as their gender. 

In the 1990s “transgendered” was also a commonly seen and used term both within and outside of the trans community, as was the use of “trans” on its own.  (You can see this in the debacle surrounding the creation of Usenet groups in 1992, when the erotica oriented group “alt.sex.trans” was created possibly as a joke by someone outside the trans community and the group alt.transgendered was created in response for conversations within the trans community of a less sexually charged nature.)  The use of “transgendered” has since been deprecated as it implies an action that has been done to alter one’s identity, rather than one that is descriptive of identity, aspects of which were always present.  Even in 1992 “transgender” was preferred and would have been used instead for the newsgroup, had the earlier spelling not propagated so widely before corrections could be made.   Still, the DSM-IV, published in 1994, notes the usage of "transgendered" both as an informal term that is not a label of a diagnosis, but also as a less cumbersome substitution for the diagnosis of "gender identity disorder not otherwise specified."  GIDNOS included but was not limited to: "those who desire only castration or penectomy without a concomitant desire to develop breasts; those with a congenital intersex condition; those with transient stress-related cross-dressing; those with considerable ambivalence about giving up their gender roles." 

The earliest known documented appearance of the term “cisgendered” on the internet was in a Usenet post by Dana Leland Defosse in alt.transgendered on May 24 1994.  The term was used with the expectation that the meaning is understood suggesting it had been previously been in use, but also relying on the earlier usage of terms like cissexual and cisvestite.  However Defosse states that she coined it for that post.  The use of cisgender as an adjective followed shortly. 

Cristian Williams has an extensive essay on the history of the word "transgender" and variations thereof and the false origin stories attributing their coinage to Virginia Prince.

Florence Ashley, Shari-Brightly Brown, & G. Nic Rider look "Beyond the Trans/Cis Binary: Introducing New Terms Will Enrich Gender Research" in this Nature article from June 2024.