Earlier I talked about people who don’t neatly fit within a cis/nonbinary/trans paradigm. It’s an expensive, sensitive topic a lot of academics and activists are already talking about. Here’s an inconclusive list of people to whom this may apply:
-Lesbians with no particular affinity to womanhood beyond being lesbians
-Same but for gay men
-Same as the first two points but with a big emphasis on butch lesbians and drag queens
-Cis people who have trauma, even dysphoria, with their AGAB, but can’t find another gender or label they’d like any better
-Cis people of color who are excluded from eurocentric norms of what it means to look, act, and be cisgender
-Immigrants who had different gender norms in their country or origin who no longer fit in
-Neurodivedvent people for whom gender is just another set of confusing social cues
-Nonbinary people who refer to themselves as their AGAB as shorthand in day to day interaction (similar to choosing a “Starbucks name”)
-Nonbinary people who partially identify with their AGAB
-People who view their gender, not as something essential to them, but as imperfect language to refer to a complex range of expressions and experiences
-People who change labels over time but have overlying experiences that transcend these changes
-People who grew up before nonbinary identity really proliferated and still use the nomenclature theyre used to (even if they’re not considered cis by contemporary standards)
-People questioning their identity
-People who don’t relate to western philosophical notions of “the self.”
-People for whom their gender is, well, kind of hard to explain.
Cis is still an important term when denoting power dynamics, especially on a broad sociological level. But on a personal level, this category very often falls apart. Language can only do so much. Anyway, there’s a lot I still don’t know but I just listened to an excellent episode of the Gender Reveal podcast with trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson where they discuss they question what it means to be cis (and how it applies to institutions vs individuals), along with so many other topics that I found fascinating. Give them a listen!
