Becoming cisgender

The metaphysics of sex and gender is of significant philosophical, social, and cultural interest at present. Terms like transgender and cisgender have come into wider circulation in the fight for gender justice. While many are familiar with ‘transgender’, fewer know ‘cisgender’, the term that captures AFAB-women (assigned ‘female’ at birth-women) and AMAB-men. But ‘cisgender’ is controversial to some, which I find surprising. In this article, I reflect on my process of recognising my self as cisgender. During, I highlight the ethico-political consequences of refusing the onto-epistemic category ‘cisgender’. I shall argue that uptake of ‘cisgender’ and apprenticeship to trans texts uncovers how we maintain, and might purposefully disturb, queer/cis-hetero, man/woman/other hierarchies of social identity power. I argue this self-recognition is a crucial tool for challenging ‘cisgender commonsense’ and may be a means toward dislodging ciscentrism in my (western, Anglophone) milieu.