Hello Ms. Simone! I keep seeing the term cis and cisgender. I don't know what those mean. I've seen them used a lot and I'm kind of confused.

I know what it means but didn’t have the best definition for it, so I looked on wikipedia, and here’s what it says:

In gender studies, cisgender and cissexual are two words used to describe related types of gender identity where an individual’s self-perception of their gender matches their sex.[1] Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook define cisgender as a label for “individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity,” complementing transgender.[2] According to Julia Serano, cissexual is an adjective used in the context of gender issues to describe “people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their mental and physical sexes as being aligned,” while cisgender is a slightly narrower term for those who do not identify as transgender (a larger cultural category than the more clinical transsexual).[3]

There are a number of derivatives of the terms in use, including cis male for a male with a male gender identity, cis female for a female with a female gender identity, and cissexism. In addition, certain scholars have begun to use the term cisnormativity, akin to the queer studies’ heteronormativity.[4][5] A related adjective is gender-normative; Eli R. Green has written that “‘cisgendered’ is used [instead of the more popular ‘gender normative’] to refer to people who do not identify with a gender diverse experience, without enforcing existence of a ‘normative’ gender expression.”[6]