The word cisgender (often shortened to cis; sometimes cissexual) describes a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth, i.e., someone who is not transgender.
The term cisgender was coined in 1994 as an antonym to transgender, and entered into dictionaries starting in 2015 as a result of changes in social discourse about gender.
[6][7] 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.
[15][16][17] After the terms cisgender and cissexual were used in a 2006 article in the Journal of Lesbian Studies[18] and Serano's 2007 book Whipping Girl,[19] the former gained further popularity among English-speaking activists and scholars.
[11] 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.
[24][25] Sociologists Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook define cisgender as a label for "individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity".
[19] For Jessica Cadwallader, cissexual is "a way of drawing attention to the unmarked norm, against which trans is identified, in which a person feels that their gender identity matches their body/sex".
[41] In June 2023, Elon Musk, owner of social network Twitter (now X), stated that use of the words "cis" and "cisgender" on the platform as "targeted harassment" would constitute violations of its hateful content policy, as he considered them to be slurs.
[42][43][44] The changes came following an interaction between Musk and a gender-critical commentator, who alleged that pro-trans advocates were using forms of the word (such as "cissy", a variant of the pejorative sissy) to insult him following a post in which he rejected the term.