Feminism against Cisness

by Emma Heaney

Rather than a pure binary of men and women, cisness produces myriad racialized and classed categories of people whose communal indifference to the bourgeois mores of sex is deemed aberrant.

Cisness is the biologizing ideology that these social roles of sexual difference adhere to assigned sex based on the appearance of genitals at or (via prenatal imaging technologies) before birth. In other words, cisness is the idea that those identified as girls at birth are naturally inducted into the social expectation that sexual difference sets for the feminine and likewise for boys with the masculine. So, as is clear from these definitions, both sexual difference and cisness are ideological constructs, but of different types.

Cisness, in contrast, has no material basis of its own, only the one it attains via its imbrication in sexual difference. This may sound counterintuitive, because the ideology’s relation to the physical structure of our bodies produces the impression of a real basis in chromosome, flesh, follicle, hormone, muscle, and organ. But consider the following concrete, material example: a vagina is a structure composed of skin, mucous membrane, muscle, and other tissues. Its functions are real, are important, and require attention. Further, the possessor’s relation to this structure is so laden with ideology that she might feel, even on the highly affecting level of sensation and bodily self-awareness, that this structure actually grounds her sex identity. In the negative, she may experience her vagina, for example, as the source of her body’s vulnerability to rape. But we know that vaginas, in themselves, are no more vulnerable to or inviting of sexual assault than other bodily structures that can be penetrated.

heterosexuality is a minoritarian structure of power and not actually a lived social norm for most people.

This kind of history has been crucial. As someone who realized they were trans because of a history of sexuality class, I fully appreciate that the kinds of work I’ve just described push back against the ways trans people have been rendered invisible and against the ways history often masquerades as an authority to be used against us. Clearly, if powerful people are trying to tell us that we were invented too recently for protective laws to have any bearing on our lives, except potentially to protect people from us in bathrooms, then it remains a necessary part of trans history to tell trans stories. It’s also not enough and, on its own, wielded by anti-trans actors, has the capacity to do significant damage.

Instead of responding to accusations of newness with assertions that we’ve always been here, this chapter offers the provocation that if you want to talk about newfangled subject positions, let’s talk about cis people.

A cis/trans binary emerged in trans history by way of Foucauldian disciplinary norms in its parent field, history of sexuality. Thanks in large part to Michel Foucault’s assertion that the “homosexual” did not come to exist in the minds of European doctors or sexual deviants until 1870 at the earliest, historians of sexuality are extremely careful about tightly historicizing sexual categories.

The implication is that people who are not trans fit reasonably well into their assigned gender norms, and if they do cross-dress or work unexpectedly gendered jobs, these are anomalies with little to no bearing on how sex as a system works.

That is to say, there is something about the malleability of childhood itself that requires careful molding of strangely oriented children into normative adult women and men.

What could it mean if there had not always been cis people?

Just imagine if trans historians were as suspicious of the existence of cis people in the past as everyone else seems to be about the existence of trans people in the past.