ABSTRACT
Coined relatively recently, the terms ‘transgender’ and ‘cisgender’ have rapidly become fixed into a new binary of seemingly immutable and opposing categories. Instead, in this chapter, we argue that the concepts of transgender and cisgender are better used as signposts rather than as markers of fixed identities. The terms, we argue, should point to provisional identities and practices that shift in response to institutional prerogatives and social and personal histories, as well as engagement and activism by those whose very lives the identity categories aim to name and contain. Making use of anecdotal evidence, and with analysis of the larger social, historical, and cultural contexts of these experiences, we aim – as feminists, as gender queers, and as trans allies – to resist the notion that the other side/the opposite of transgender is a group of people for whom gender either easily or completely aligns with the sex/gender they are assigned at birth.
