The word cisgender borrows the same Latin prefix Romans used for Gaul
Romans called northern Italy Cisalpine Gaul, meaning Gaul on their side of the Alps. That same Latin prefix, cis, now sits in chemistry, cell biology and the word cisgender, first used in English in a 1994 online newsgroup and added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015.
Cisgender describes someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth; in other words, a person who is not transgender. The logic is spatial. Cis means on this side of, while trans means across or on the far side, which is why Rome distinguished Cisalpine from Transalpine Gaul, roughly northern Italy versus modern France. Later pairings followed the same pattern: Cisjordan and Transjordan, cis and trans arrangements of molecules in chemistry, and the two faces of the Golgi apparatus inside cells.
The distinction reached sexology long before the English word. In 1914 Ernst Burchard contrasted a preference for clothing matching one's gender with cross-dressing, using German terms built on cis and trans. The sexologist Volkmar Sigusch used zissexuell in a two-part article in 1991 and later said he had invented it there.
In English, Dana Defosse, then a graduate student, coined cisgender in 1994 on a Usenet group about transgender topics, looking for a way to name non-transgender people without treating transgender people as the odd ones out. John Hollister used it the same year, and Carl Buijs seems to have arrived at it on his own in 1995. Later that decade Laura Blake used it constantly in Usenet debates, and a 2006 journal article and Julia Serano's 2007 book Whipping Girl spread it further among activists and academics.
Serano draws a fine line between cissexual, for people whose mental and physical sex have always felt aligned, and cisgender, the narrower label for those who do not identify as transgender. Related coinages include cisnormativity, the assumption that being cisgender is the default, and cissexism, bias in favour of cisgender people. Facebook added cis and cisgender to its custom gender options in February 2014, and since the dictionary entry the word has moved steadily into everyday use.
Source: Cisgender
