Quote:
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".[1] Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray characterized the term as "a way of drawing attention to the unmarked norm, against which trans* is identified, in which a person feels that their gender identity matches their body/sex".[2]
Cisgender ( /ˈsɪsdʒɛndər/) (or cisgendered) is an adjective used in the context of gender issues and counselling to refer to a class of gender identities formed by a match between an individual's gender identity and the behavior or role considered appropriate for one's sex.[1]
|
Before we break out the stone tablets and enshrine what Wikipedia offers up as the definitions, let's acknowledge that these are not "official" definitions and may or may not reflect actual usage all that well.
But what I am really interested in is, if possible, stepping back from these words as identities and trying to nail down exactly what work we want this language to accomplish and then seeing how close or far it is from accomplishing that. Because I think this language was essentially rushed out into common and academic usage while it was still in the beta-testing stage and not all of the bugs had been worked out yet. Basically, it's a linguistic Windows Vista.
I realized though that this thread is probably not the place for that, so I'll poke around in the other forums looking for a suitable home.