Talk:Cisgender

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 11 December 2023
Cisgender is commonly used as a derogatory term these days! 2607:FEA8:2D24:3600:CA34:E4B6:3808:AD0F (talk) 13:20, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 13:23, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Opening sentence
The opening sentence: "Cisgender (often shortened to cis; sometimes cissexual) is a term used to describe a person".

The phrase "term used to describe" seems unnecessarily wordy and, as per WP:REFERS, in opening sentences, we use the term rather than describing it.

I'm not sure the best way to resolve this, perhaps "A cisgender person is a someone whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth." ... similar to the transgender article.

TenToe (talk) 20:11, 20 January 2024 (UTC)


 * I agree, and I like your proposed resolution. There's one extraneous "a". Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 20:31, 20 January 2024 (UTC)


 * This has been discussed before. You can look in the archives of this page if you want to see what was said. At the moment the article is framed as being about the term "cisgender" rather than the actual state of being cisgender. (That is why the title is in italics.) There has been more than one discussion about changing this. The trouble is that almost nobody does research into cisgender people, any more than they do research into right-handed people. This leaves us short of source material for such a change while there is endless material kvetching about the terminology. I'm still sympathetic to changing it though. --DanielRigal (talk) 20:35, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Yeah, this is really the problem. The article really needs a rework as it currently reads like a hit-piece. What would we need to have sufficient grounds to just change the first sentence?
 * The NIH says "A cisgender person is someone whose gender identity aligns with the sex assigned to them at birth".
 * If there are sources that talk about cisgender people, rather than ones focused on the term itself, would this not support the change? TenToe (talk) 23:49, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I think there are enough sources for articles Cisgender and Cisgender (term). The article Cisgnder (term) should describe all controversies about the term, the article Cisgender should describe lives of cisgnder people in cultures in which there is gender binary. Reprarina (talk) 05:18, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

We are going round and round in circles, as Daniel has described. This article has been around for over twenty years, and has always been about the word cisgender because there have always been reliable sources that talked about the word that support an article about it. Twenty years ago, or ten, even five, there was little to nothing in reliable academic sources studying cisgender people, and so you couldn't have an article about it. Afaict, that's still pretty much the case, but to answer 's question, yes: if there are enough sources about cisgender people, then absolutely we can (and should) do something about it. But what you cannot do, is change the lead paragraph to be about cisgender people or the concept of cisgender as studied in academia, with all of the references and the entire body of the article being about a different topic, namely the word: when it was created, what it meant, precursors to it, evolution of the word, objections to the word, controversy about the word, and so on. That would leave the lead paragraph being about one topic and the body being about another, and per WP:AT policy, that is a no-go.

There was previously extensive discussion about this, and in order to support the desire for an article about cisgender people, I created a new draft stub to be about the concept of transgender, inviting people to develop it into an article. However, five months went by, and not one person stepped up. To prevent automatic deletion of the draft (formerly at Draft:Cisgender) at the six-month point, I had to move it to my user space. There was a lot of call for an article about cisgender people, but nobody actually wanted to contribute at that time; perhaps that has changed. If anybody wants to work on the draft, I will move it back to Draft space again. But absent an article or draft which actually talks about the topic of cisgender people, cisgender studies, cisgender whatever, you can't just slap a new lead sentence on this article, and pretend that it is about that, because if you actually read the article, it is clearly about the word.

This keeps coming up, and someone suggested we change the name of this article to Cisgender (word), and I'm starting to think that that is a good idea, because otherwise we will keep having this discussion every few months. If you want an article about cisgender people/studies/etc. I'm all for it; please start by gathering references for it, and I'll restore the Draft if anyone wants it. When it's done, that article can take over the main title, but until we have that, the opening sentence of this article needs to match the title, per article title policy. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:59, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Just noticed a pretty good parallel for this (besides LGBT and Gay which have already been mentioned), namely, our article on Queer. Just like those other articles, as well as this one, Queer is about a word. It even mentions cisgender in the lead sentence, as an example of what it is not, just like this article defines itself by its opposite (with good reason, in both cases, for a general readership). Is anyone interested in developing the Draft? Mathglot (talk) 02:40, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 27 February 2024
Add Social Media news for 2023-2024 Twitter, where cis (often compared to fag) or even cissie (coincidently British spelling of sissy) is being used as slur, which leads it to being a bannable offense in February 2024. Exander77 (talk) 13:09, 27 February 2024 (UTC)


 * WP:Reliable Sources please? DanielRigal (talk) 15:43, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me! 16:08, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 12 April 2024
change "as assigned at birth" to "observed and recorded at birth" Happychatchic (talk) 07:13, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: the current expression is the one used in an overwhelming majority of sources. HansVonStuttgart (talk) 14:19, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Elon 2
This is an extended justification for Special:Diff/1224910480.

, citing Talk:Cisgender/Archive_7 argues that "consensus so far has been against including this". The same reason was given for Special:Diff/1168341849. The issue is that the consensus just doesn't work: you simply cannot use a 2015 article to deal with the July 2023 kerfuffle, it's not how sources work.

To make the content consistent with the source, there are only two possibilities: either you move the back to 2015, or you add a new source justifying the date. Dating it back is silly considering how much waves Musk made. The only logical thing, therefore, is to re-add information relating to the July 2023 Twitter incident.

There's also new development on this front (I realized this after the edit): the platform is apparently finally dishing out the suspensions it promised, just this week. I don't think there is a point in adding this update yet, since we are just saying "anti-woke [in a loose sense, I don't want to actually source this yet!] cisgender people don't like be called cis" here.

I should also bring in the old discussion participants,, , and. My understanding of what was achieved in the discussion seems to be that we all want to have some criticism from the conservative right without amplifying them too much. There's no consensus to ban mentioning what Twitter did, just that we don't want to repeat every thing Elon said verbatim. Neither I nor was doing that.

Artoria2e5 🌉 06:57, 21 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Back in June 2023 in the section you cite, I said, in part "There surely should be some focus on criticism from the conservative right, as you put in your previous comment, and ensure we aren't helping them lob their brickbats." I was referring to DanielRigal's comment that "we are here to cover notable criticism that already exists. I was agreeing with -sche that we were over-covering some minor but notable criticism while under-covering the most pervasive and most notable type, which is that from the conservative right." I think that is a fair comment now. In terms of the two edits you cite, in the first one there is the creation of a new section entitled "Rejection by cisgender people." While the link to The Advocate looks fine, the link to Forbes would have to go. Its already been stated on WP:FORBESCON, which summarizes existing consensus, that content written by contributors or "Senior Contributors" with minimal editorial oversight is "generally unreliable. Editors show consensus for treating Forbes.com contributor articles as self-published sources, unless the article was written by a subject-matter expert." I'm not sure whether Kim Elsesser's Forbes article meets that standard or not (can we say she is a subject-matter expert? Possibly? Not sure. Her bio on Forbes calls her a "gender bias expert"). The section would need more reliable sources in order to justify being a separate section, I would gather.
 * As for the other edit, whether it is used or not depends on whether we are considering the article to be part of the "culture section" or not, because articles outside that have unsure reliability, but articles within that section are "generally reliable", as noted on WP:RSPSS, which summarizes existing consensus on those sources. Since the article itself is within the Tech section, and is a relatively thin article (its only 11 paragraphs long), I'm not convinced it can be used in this sense. As such, I have to agree with Mathglot's edit in that instance. Historyday01 (talk) 13:51, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree that we should cover the essence of conservative voices from the right, perhaps with a representative quote from someone typical of that POV, and preferably from someone with some background or expertise in the topic. That said, I find it aberrant and highly WP:UNDUE to have so much coverage of Musk and his twitter policy or reactions to it. It’s way too much attention to give to a billionaire tech entrepreneur who had nothing of interest to say and no background in gender issues before he bought a social media company. Meanwhile, here are results 490 to 500 (result page 50) for the scholar search for "term cisgender".  We can cover Musk after we cover all of those, in due proportion to his chops on the subject, of course.  There are *plenty* of conservative opinions to tap before his. P.S. Your point in citation age is well taken and we should update them. Mathglot (talk) 07:42, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Cisgender was first coined in 1991
Cisgender was first coined in 1991, well before Dana, by a german Volkmar Sigusch and it should be mentioned more clearly:

"In a 1991 publication, Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick ("Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view"), Sigusch coined the term cissexual (zissexuell in German).[disputed – discuss] As an antonym to transsexual, cissexual refers to a person whose gender identity matches their sex."

source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkmar_Sigusch 86.33.86.16 (talk) 12:58, 11 July 2024 (UTC)