Cis Isn’t Normal
By: Riley Black
Tags: LGBTQ, Queer, Transitions, Transgender

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Being cisgender isn’t normal. It’s simply not. No matter how you turn it, feeling hunky dory with the gender you were given at birth and grew up with isn’t the way things necessarily ought to be.

Of course I’m playing with language here. (Got your attention, though, didn’t I?) “Normal” is really only useful for thing like keeping your car’s temperature within specified limits. It’s a pretty damn useless concept for people, especially because my Normal isn’t going to match yours any more than one country’s or one century’s Normal won’t be like any other.

And yet. And yet, as a society, we keep running into this idea that being cisgender is the default, the standard, the measure of everything. And that’s a fundamental flaw that even some of we transgender people sometimes fall for.

When I get my blood drawn and have the results trickle back to the doctor, I’m not being measured against what’s healthy for transgender people. I’m measured against what’s considered standard for cisgender people. Discussions about transgender care often focus on matching cis metrics — from how tall we get to bone density — with less attention paid to how we feel. A chart of my estrogen or testosterone will tell you how much of either I have in my bloodsteam on that day. It won’t tell you whether I’m happy or feel like the person I’ve always ached to be.

Not that I’m complaining about my expanded hips, thicker thighs, prominent boobs, and everything else HRT has done for me. Hormone replacement therapy is life-saving, and it works. And, if anything, we need more data. There’s a dearth of long-term studies on HRT and doctors are often reluctant to prescribe effective medication like progesterone because, they will likely tell you, “There isn’t enough information yet.”

But why don’t we have this information already? Why do trans and nonbinary people have to consistently dig deep for scraps of information that make our care teams sigh in that way medical professionals do when you start any sentence with “Well I was reading about…”?

Demographics almost certainly has something to do it. On the one hand, we regularly remind people that they probably already know someone who isn’t cisgender, whether they know it or not. At the same time, multiple reports state that there are “only” about a million transgender people in the United States, or somewhere around a half a percent of the total population.

Sometimes those numbers are important. We face disproportionate hate, violence, and discrimination for who we are. But there’s a hidden sharp edge here. When we say we make up such a small percentage of the population, and that there are only about a million or so of us in one country, I believe we’re playing into the idea that we’re unusual, rare, and a deviation from the toxic concept of normal. It’s a way we make ourselves small, figures and graphs used against us even by the people who say they want to help.

There are certainly more non-cisgender people in the US, and around the world, than we know. Some people don’t want to come out, and my heart breaks for the people who want to come out and cannot. I hope they someday can. But we already know going in that gender fluidity is far more widespread than any survey is going to reveal, and change is coming as quickly as generations overturn. Gen Z and each that follows — I think, and I do hope — is going to be more playful and more accepting when it comes to variations in gender.

And that’s the key word right there — variation. How can we possibly insist on the importance of variation in biology, in humanity, and not see that we supposed outliers are highlighting something important? Being cisgender isn’t normal any more than being transgender is. That’s because variation is the rule, not the exception.

The history of science has shown this over and over again. Any time we set discrete, seemingly inviolate categories in nature or humanity we end up finding out we’re wrong and have often done terrible harm in the process. Just ask a professional biologist how we define a species, for example, and settle in for a dissertation on why we know species must exist but finding the lines between them is nearly impossible. We can say that an elephant and a redwood tree are readily identifiable as different species, but what about big cats that we can tell apart from their coats but can still produce fertile offspring?

Now imagine if we took variation as the rule. What if we didn’t think of nature, or people!, within binary systems in which you must be one thing or another. Differences don’t require entirely new categories, especially because boxes tend to be divided and subdivided with exceptions scribbled all over them. (To go back to species, can I say I’m just one species when my existence partly rests on symbiotic relationships with the microbiota inside me? I’m more of an ecosystem that walks around and eats too much pizza.) What the existence of transgender and nonbinary people is telling us is that human identity and experience is far more diverse and vibrant than the dusty books we’ve given in our inherited cultural baggage. Gender is a social construct, after all, and the good thing about social constructs can be changed.

Of course this is personal. How could it not be? For the vast majority of my life, I felt small and like I had to please others to survive. What I felt was unique about me — what I was proud of in myself — seemed like it would only attract hate, abandonment, or painful attempts at correction. “Maybe it’s just me,” I’d tell myself. “Maybe something’s wrong with me for not wanting what everyone else does.”

But it isn’t just me, and there’s nothing at all wrong with feeling at home with yourself, in yourself. At some point the numbers of percentages don’t matter. We are here. We are real. We are a reminder that nature thrives on variation. And that’s what I want for all of us. I want us to thrive.