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.
Funding
Australian Research Council
History
Publication title
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour
Volume
52
Pagination
609-622
ISSN
0021-8308
Department/School
School of Humanities
Publisher
Blackwell Publ Ltd
Place of publication
108 Cowley Rd, Oxford, England, Oxon, Ox4 1Jf
Rights statement
Copyright (2022) The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.