We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the most basic terms mean. The word cisgender — or just cis — is either standard vocabulary on HR onboarding documents and medical intake forms or, depending on where you live and who holds power at the moment, possibly a slur, possibly banned from government buildings, possibly both at once. The word has been around for thirty years, but its history is largely unknown to the people who argue or legislate against it. What most people are currently fighting about today is a simplified, mainstream version of the concept that traveled a long way from its origins before arriving in the culture war.

What does it actually mean to be cisgender? If the term was coined deliberately by trans people in online communities in the 1990s as a way of naming the unmarked norm so it could be examined, what happened to that political charge when the word got taken up as more of a personal, psychological descriptor? What’s the difference between cis as a description of what you feel and cis as a description of how power treats you? 

In this episode, we sit down with Perry Zurn, Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. Zurn’s new book, Cisgender: Disorienting a Category (Duke University Press, 2026), is the first sustained philosophical and historical account of how the term cis entered the gender lexicon, where it came from, what it was supposed to do, and what it has actually done. Drawing on unplumbed archives, interviews with early trans community figures, and parallel conversations in Argentina and Brazil that predate the American discourse, Zurn argues that cis is more useful as a name for a set of norms and privileges than as a description of any person’s inner life. Moreover, the category, when pressed hard enough, begins to unravel in philosophically generative ways.

Grab a drink and join us as we pull apart a word everyone uses, almost no one can define, and that is more radical, more contested, and far more philosophically interesting than the version currently being banned from Twitter.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc:

• Perry Zurn, Cisgender: Disorienting a Category (Duke University Press, 2026)
• Cisgender (concept and term history)
• Transgender (SEP entry)
• Cisnormativity (concept)
• The cis/trans binary and the cis/trans binary in chemistry — cis–trans isomerism
• Genealogy as philosophical method (in the Foucauldian tradition)
• Michel Foucault
• Gender identity
• Gender performativity and gender as a “project”
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble 
• Audre Lorde and the “mythical norm”
• Charles Mills, epistemologies of ignorance
• Crip theory / disability and gender
• Queer ecology
• Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (University of Chicago Press)
• Alok Vaid-Menon (artist and gender theorist)
• Conchita Wurst (Eurovision winner, 2014)
• Looksmaxxing as a contemporary case study in gender as a making
• The Stepford Wives 
• The banning of “cis” from Twitter/X in 2024
• Perry Zurn, Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)
• Perry Zurn, How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University (Duke University Press, 2025)