Merriam-Webster announced this week that it’s adding 2,000 new words to its unabridged version including “waggle dance,” “wacky tobacky,” (don’t ask) and “ICYMI.”
It also added “genderqueer” and “cisgender.”
“As the term transgender has become increasingly prominent in the lexicon, a contrasting term has also settled into the language.
Cisgender (also styled as cisgendered and often shortened to cis) describes someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth,” reads the definition.
Wait. Isn’t that… most people?
Most people can be described as cisgender. If the pronouncement your mom heard at your birth—It’s a girl! or It’s a boy!—still feels like it was accurate, then you’re cisgender.
Ok, phew.
I’ve never personally used the term, but I get it. Language evolves and new words generate antonyms —much like “heterosexual” arose in response to the word “homosexual.” The prefix “cis” is Latin means “on this side of,” while “trans” means “on the other side of.”
I checked to see how widely it is used in print and online (one of Merriam-Webster’s criteria for adding words to the dictionary), searching for “cisgender” and “transgender” on Google Ngram to see how frequently those words came up in sources printed between 1500 and 2008.
And well….
Google Books couldn’t find it.
Google Trends? Not much better.
Turns out that “cisgender” is actually a fairly old word but one mostly used in a very different context than it is today. It was coined by biologist Dana Leland Defosse in 1994, and trotted out by biologists and other scientists until around 2010, when it began to appear so frequently online that the Oxford English Dictionary considered adding it.
Today, of course, it’s become derogatory invective, used by trans-activists and “social justice warriors” on social media. Here are a few samples from Tumblr and Reddit:
To be fair, Tumblr is certainly not representative of the best of humanity, but the term has stuck. The word became so charged that Urban Dictionary—a catalog of the Internet’s linguistic underbelly—recognized it, notably, as subject of, well, debate.
