Marquis Bey states that "proto-cisgender discourse" arose in German in 1914, when
Ernst Burchard introduced the cis/trans distinction to
sexology by contrasting "
cisvestitismus, or a type of inclination to wear gender-conforming clothing, [...] with
transvestitismus, or cross-dressing."
[8][9] German
sexologist Volkmar Sigusch stated in 1998 that he coined the term
cissexual (
zissexuell in German) in his two-part 1991 article "
Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick" ("Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view").
[10]
Coinage
The term
cisgender itself was coined in English in 1994 in a
Usenet newsgroup about transgender topics
[11] as Dana Defosse, then a graduate student, sought a way to refer to non-transgender people that avoided marginalizing transgender people or implying that transgender people were an
other.
[12] Correspondingly, some trans activists argued that using terms such as
man or
woman to mean
cis man or
cis woman reinforced
cisnormativity, and that instead using the prefix
cis similarly to
trans would counteract the cisnormative connotations within language.
Academic use
Medical academics use the term and have recognized its importance in transgender studies since the 1990s.
[13][14][15] After the terms
cisgender and
cissexual were used in a 2006 article in the
Journal of Lesbian Studies[16] and Serano's 2007 book
Whipping Girl,
[17] the former gained further popularity among English-speaking activists and scholars.
[18][19][20] Cisgender was added to the
Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, defined as "designating a person whose sense of personal identity corresponds to the sex and gender assigned to him or her at birth (in contrast with transgender)".
[21] Perspectives on History states that since this inclusion, the term has increasingly become common usage.
[11]
Social media
In February 2014,
Facebook began offering "custom" gender options, allowing users to identify with one or more gender-related terms from a selected list, including
cis,
cisgender, and others.
[22][23]
