Are You Cisgender? Or are you Assuredgender?

The process of living deliberately.

My nephew did something that I found terrifying. He’s only a teenager and he goddamned did the thing I wish I’d done when I was his age. He came out. No longer was he going to live as a girl. He wanted to transition.

I told him I was proud of him, of course. What self-respecting trans person wouldn’t be over the moon at the prospect of there being another trans person IN THEIR OWN FAMILY!? Because those of us already on the journey know how important these first moments are, I told him I’d be there every step of the way. I didn’t give him the well-meaning but misplaced platitude; “it doesn’t matter what gender you are I still love you”, because to him, HIS GENDER ABSOLUTELY MATTERS TO HIM and anything short of saying “it matters to me as well” is a disservice. I know what it’s like to start your journey into discovering your queerness and it just be a non-issue for everyone around you. Something to tiptoe around. Something to pretend doesn’t exist.

It should matter to everyone if it matters to him. 

So, I told him I love him for doing this. I told him that the vast majority of people in the world will never do the thing he’s doing. It is notable. It is special. And I told him that most people don’t have the strength of character to turn their critical eye inwards and answer the most confronting question a person can ask themselves: “Who Am I?”

The world is full to the brim of people who’ve never considered it. 

There are whole swathes of men whose lives orbit around a constructed image of masculinity that was at best handed to them, and at worst forced upon them. You can see the insistence of this conformity writ large in the world. The promise of being sexually desirable, of getting that promotion, of finding “success”, of “fitting in”. The promise of being a man that other men admire as long as you perform masculinity in precisely the right way. It’s the same for women. The same false promises of a reward. Promises that you will be desired, that you will have worth and value and you will be cherished in the world just so long as you perform the assigned femininity that is the obligation of your gender.

People don’t examine themselves in this way though. I’m not suggesting that everyone is secretly trans. Though the disparity of statistics around the prevalence of trans people suggests there are a huge number of people who are hidden. Part of that is to do with a hostile world but part of it is because considering one’s identity at such a fundamental level is scary as fuck. The most that any average person can manage in self-examination, in push-back against these strict gender norms is thinking “why am I expected to wear makeup every day?” or “if I wear a pink shirt are guys going to think I’m gay?”

So, I told my nephew that I believe him when he says that the body he was born into doesn’t feel like it is his, but I would also believe him if he changed his mind or if his understanding of his feelings evolved. I told him that if during this process he decided it wasn’t for him and if he wanted to go back to living as a girl then I would love him just the same. Or if he wanted to live in an in-between space, or if he wanted to separate from gender all together. All of these are valid choices and all of them would make me love him more because he would be living authentically. 

With every step he takes to be his true self; man or woman or both or neither, my love for him will only grow.

As such, I set my busy mind to thinking of how I’d help him if any of those outcomes (other than being a trans man) were things he was interested in. I ain’t got no problem talking to him about the trans experience, but it’s my responsibility to give genuine thought and consideration to how I’d help him navigate a realisation, no matter how unlikely, that he was in fact cisgendered.

And then I realised there was a hole in my thinking. 

I realised that the term “cisgendered” couldn’t and shouldn’t really apply. The OED’s definition that it is “relating to a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex registered for them at birth; not transgender” misses out on so much nuance about what that would mean. It falls woefully short of the lived experience. The act of being transgender requires an enormous self-examination that is not necessarily true of being cisgender. A person decides to transition. No one decides to be cisgendered. Cisgender is the default from which decisions about gender and gender expression then stem. Should my nephew decide to be my niece it won’t be a reversion to what they were… it will be something entirely new. Because their gender isn’t the one that was assigned, it is the one they chose after careful deliberation.

There’s a whole bit in a play I did last year about something like this. About the idea that if you had two people sitting in front of you and both said they hated broccoli but one of them had tried it and one of them hadn’t, who would have the more valid opinion? And how the fact that we all see the person who has tried broccoli and hated it as being more valid. Much to the amusement (and hopefully discomfort) of the audience of the play I went on to explain that I think the same way about sexuality… That a man who has sucked a dick once and didn’t enjoy it is more straight than a guy who has never sucked a dick at all.

There are people out there who use the term “realgender” because in their opinion being called cis is a slur. That would have been a great term… shame it’s being used by the clamouring brigades of dickheads who claim they’re a “real woman” or a “real man”. So I guess that one is out?

We have terms like “assigned gender” and “assumed gender” … why not also have “assured gender”?

“Assuredgendered” This is not the same as being cisgendered. This is not the same as being assigned a gender at birth because a doctor held up your tiny squalling body in the sudden cold air, peering at your genitals to make their declaration. It is not the same as falling into line in your youth, of only liking the correct colours, the correct toys, the correct cut of clothes. It is not the same as seeking sexual and romantic partners of the variety that everyone expects of you. By the very nature of the world, queerness, both in sexuality and in gender, is an exercise in self-examination. Anyone who casts the eye inward and has attempted to live outside of the default. Men who will fuck around with eyeliner and nail polish. Women who will flat out refuse to wear skirts or dresses. Men who cry and hug their friends and lounge in the arms of their boys because they can tell them they love them. Women who will actively seek to live the experiences that have been shut off from them for centuries because of arcane understandings of strength. These men and women who have fucked around and found out that they are still men and they are still women… but to me are assuredgendered, because cisgendered refers to the men and women who have never even considered their gender. These men and women are living deliberately in their gender. They are expressing gender through choice because they reached for it instead of it being handed to them. As such, in my opinion, they deserve to be categorised differently.

Assuredgender: “relating to a person whose gender identity has been explored and revealed to correspond with the sex registered for them at birth; not cisgender”

They have been assured of their gender. They have done the labour, put in in the effort, they have done the goddamned work and they should be proud of their manhood or womanhood.

–S