Cisgenderism

Cisgenderism refers to the ideology that delegitimizes people’s own understanding of their genders and bodies. The term cisgenderism comes from the Latin cis (“on the same side”) and genus (“kind” or “type,” later gender). Cisgenderism can manifest in distinct forms, such as pathologizing (constructing or treating people’s genders, bodies, and experiences associated with their genders and bodies as disordered, e.g., gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and disorders of sex development) and misgendering (misclassifying people’s genders and bodies, e.g., referring to a man who was assigned female at birth as “she” or “female”).

Cisgenderism was initially used interchangeably with the term cisgender to describe people who are “not transgender.” In the cisgenderism framework first proposed by psychologist Y. Gavriel Ansara and first empirically researched by Ansara and ...