The only thing I know for sure about this term "cis" is it's fucking confusing and deeply contentious. It came to my attention in the context of Deep Green Resistance's (DGR) alleged "transphobia" - and before you throw a brick at me, I only say "alleged" because I do not even understand the totality of the controversy, and what I do understand I have mixed feelings about: more on that below.
So as I understand this term, it suggests the connection between your assigned gender at birth - "It's a boy!!" - with your identity: I am a MAN; versus a transgender person - "it's a boy!!" - and your identity: "My name is Chelsea Elizabeth Manning."
Academics don't impress me. I love Gore Vidal's term for them: "scholar squirrels" because they are careerists perpetually gathering their nuts for the next paper to be peer-reviewed by other scholar squirrels. Enough favorable citations means tenure.
So an academic, and a Western one at that (German), inventing a term like "cisgender" means absolutely nothing to me. That it's trickled over into some austere, uber-educated activist circles is as impressive to me as the infamy of Eugenics in a not-to-distant generation.
We've been handed - and do ourselves reinforce - two gender roles by a patriarchal Western capitalist system. Blue for boys; pink for girls. And rather blow this open by taking a page from older, more sustainable, more psychically developed indigenous societies in the Americas and the global South, where - broadly speaking - there were two biological genders but many sexes, our ever-irrelevant academics have decided to create yet another duality - cisgender vs transgender.
Error, Mary Baker Eddy lectured us, cannot expel error. More binaries are not the solution to our current binaries. They may make for tenure-track professorships and publication in journals no one reads, but I already know who they serve so why pay any attention?
Since academics have almost always served the state and its power - if this is news to you I suggest you spend and afternoon reading Noam Chomsky's "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship [1969]" - it makes sense they would not draw from indigenous experiences across - god forbid! - the global South for their dissertations and aspirations for journal publications, endowed professorships, and tenure.
Now, my qualms about DGR's alleged transphobia. I read it stems from not allowing [trans-] women into women-only circles. I'm sure if I've got that wrong one of my sympathetic readers will let me know. This is where I have mixed feelings:
Can a person born white decide because of a cultural affinity or genetic test or whatever that he is actually African (Black) and in turn speak for the experience of Africans in the Americas?
My own suspicion is that he cannot. My own suspicion is that this African-identified person will bring his white privilege into the discussion, when Africans have no experience of this privilege.
Is this chauvinist? Maybe. But I can't help, in as much I understand the DGR debate, that women would not want [trans-] women to be a voice in their private spaces.
And yet, I accept that I'd rather have radical abolitionist John Brown speaking on my behalf than the surly and remote US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but this only opens the question whether to have spaces set aside for the Other is a value at all.
So aside from what continues to make sense to me from indigenous perspectives, I took like a fish to water to the term QUEER when introduced to its usage in the late 80's. I am queer. I know some straight people who are queer and some lesbians and gays who are not. I cringed when for a brief period in the middle 90's academics tried to employ this term but it was happily and epic failure (all those tomes from Routledge must be floating on a landfill in the Pacific now).
Is queer another binary? I hope not. To me it's just a broad canvass onto which anyone can explore the boundaries of themselves without the roles assigned to us by a dominant and domineering culture.
This is all I have to say on this cockeyed subject.
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