‘Cis by Default’, ‘Cis-genderless’, and ‘Gender Detachment’: Three Terms You’ll Hopefully Be Hearing More Of

This is my submission to the May/June 2024 Gender Exploration Carnival.  The theme this month is “Pride Month”.

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The theme for the May/June Gender Exploration Carnival is “Pride Month”.  Pride Month is an opportunity to draw attention to different experiences of gender and sexuality that aren’t as well understood.  My own experience of gender is one that, for a long time, has been difficult to put into words.  I don’t have a gender identity, meaning that I can’t be thought of as cis-gender or trans-gender.  But I also don’t think of myself as agender or non-binary.  Rather, I avoid the framework of gender entirely by identifying with the labels and pronouns that correspond to my physical sex.

This form of identification doesn’t get talked about a lot.  But over the past decade or so people have been coining words that describe it.  In this post, I’d like to talk about three terms that seem to fit my experience.

Cis by Default

“Cis by default” was coined by Ozymandias in this blog post from 2015.  In it, they propose a theory for why some people don’t seem to understand when trans people talk about their gender identities: since the people don’t themselves have gender identities, they are unable to understand the experiences of those who do.

“I think that some people don’t have that subjective internal sense of themselves as being a particular gender. There’s no part of their brain that says ‘I’m a guy!’, they just look around and people are calling them ‘he’ and they go with the flow.”

That pretty accurately summarises how I experience – or, rather, don’t experience – gender.  I’ve never had an internal sense of myself as a girl, woman, or female; I simply grew up being told that those labels applied to people with bodies like mine.  Likely because of this, when I hear people (cis or trans) talk about having a gender identity, I don’t really get what they mean.

Ozymandias suggests that this lack of gender identity might be a cause of some transphobia.  Since cis-by-default people don’t understand gender identity, they may assume that people who claim gender identities (including trans people) are making things up.  Ozymandias proposes a strategy for combatting this kind of transphobia:

“We simply have to explain to cis-by-default people what a gender identity is and that they don’t have one but other people do”

I don’t know how big the intersection between transphobia and being cis by default really is.  However, if the goal is to increase empathy and understanding among people with different experiences, this seems like an excellent approach – that, sadly, I have yet to see anyone actually take.

The weakness of this post is that it only goes in one direction.  Ozymandias suggests ways that cis-by-default people could become more accepting of trans people, but not how cisgendered, trans, and non-binary people could become more accepting towards cis-by-default people.  Still, articulating an experience is the first step towards normalising it, and that makes this post very important.

Cis-genderless

The term “cis-genderless” was proposed by R_1 in this AVEN thread.  In it, they distinguish between “Cis-Cis” people (who might also be called “cisgender” people) and “cis-genderless” people.  Both groups identify with the labels associated with their “bio-sex”, but cis-cis people also identify with those labels based on “gender roles and psychological feelings”, while cis-genderless people do not.

I was introduced to the term by this blog post by Isaac.  I related to it so easily that I ended up writing my own blog post, “On (Not) Being a Woman” in response.  In that post, I wrote:

“What I like … about this term … is the way it brings together two seemingly contradictory ideas. One is the idea of being ‘cis’. I’m sure I appear ‘cis’ to many people, and I enjoy cis privilege by virtue of not being trans. The other is the idea of being genderless. Without any sense of gender identity, that’s what I am: gender-less.”

I do question whether the “cis-“ part of “cis-genderless” is really necessary.  For me, at least, the important thing is that I don’t have a gender; using labels that correspond to my “bio-sex” is simply the logical consequence of that absence.  As a result, I do sometimes simply say “genderless” instead of “cis-genderless”.  However, the word “genderless” is more ambiguous, since it is sometimes used interchangeably with “agender”.  So for clarity I tend to use “cis-genderless”.  I describe myself as a “cis-genderless” person, and I have tagged several of my posts with the “cis-genderless” tag.

Cis-genderless people even have their own pride flag!  You can see it at the top of this post.  It was created by ixi in this AVEN thread.  The white stripe at the top represents genderlessness, the pink stripe represents females, the blue stripe represents males, and the purple stripe represents intersex people.

I haven’t always taken to the pride flags I’ve seen for different aspects of my experience, but I really like this one!  For one thing, it’s easy to understand: white is commonly associated with absence; pink and blue are stereotypical “girl” and “boy” colours; and purple makes sense for intersex people, both as the colour between pink and blue and as the colour of the circle on the intersex pride flag.  Moreover, the flag is just pretty!  I don’t always find pride flags aesthetically appealing, but the combination of white with the pastel forms of three analogous colours creates a very harmonious look.  In fact, I like it so much that I’m now using it as the header image for all my “cis-genderless” posts!

Gender Detachment

“Gender detachment” was coined by Canton Winer in a paper called “‘My Gender Is Like an Empty Lot:’ Gender Detachment and Ungendering Among Asexual Individuals”.  Winer defines gender detachment as, “individually-held notions that gender presentation and/or identity is irrelevant, unimportant, pointless, and/or overall not a topic of personal concern”.  That definition seems to fit me quite well, and I was amazed by how many parts of the paper spoke to me.

For example, many respondents expressed detachment, not just from traditional gender categories, but also from nonbinary or agender identities.  One even points out that words like “agender” and “non-binary”, despite deviating from gender norms, are still working within a “gendered framework”.  That expresses quite well my own reasons for not identifying as agender or nonbinary: I don’t wish to place myself within that framework.  “Gender detachment” seems to offer an alternative, outside of the framework.  As Winer writes, “Although agender and nonbinary identities represent a departure from the gender binary, gender detachment presents a different gender challenge, questioning the utility and relevance of gender identities altogether.”

On a related note, some respondents criticised societal pressure to “choose” a gender identity.  As Winer writes:

“My findings complicate the (often unstated) assumption that everyone ‘has’ a gender identity.  By disrupting this assumption, these findings reveal gender as a compulsory system of categorization. … Moreover, my findings suggest that the ways we measure and ask questions about gender may erase the possibility of gender detachment by operating under the assumption of compulsory gender.”

This assumption that everyone has a gender is one I find quite alienating.  And yet, as I pointed out in “The Missing Gender Question”, it seems to pervade even the asexual community.  Seeing someone else name and critique this phenomenon was encouraging for me.  It made me feel seen and validated.

I even resonated with the illustration in the article that links to the paper: an image of two hands breaking free from a pair of manacles shaped like the symbols for male and female.  Since I’ve only ever seen gender as a prison or fetter, this “breaking of chains” image represents exactly what I want from gender!

One limitation of Winer’s study is that all his respondents are on the asexual spectrum and most were “assigned female at birth”.  We can only hope that future work will study gender detachment among allosexuals and men.  It is also not exactly clear what the relationship is between “gender detachment” and the other labels I mentioned above.  Winer never mentions “cis by default” or “cis-genderless”, so it’s hard to know if they see them as the same or different.  My best guess is that “gender detachment” might be a super-category that comprises the other two terms and also other experiences.  This is another issue that I hope will be explored in the future.

How many of the people quoted in Winer’s paper actually experience (or don’t experience) gender in the same way I do?  It’s impossible to say.  However, the fact that so many of their statements resonate with my own experience suggests that I, too, am one of the “gender detached”.  As a result, I have also added “gender detachment” as a tag to many of my posts.

Conclusion

In 2004, Anthony Bogaert published “Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National Probability Sample”.  Though far from a perfect or comprehensive explanation of asexuality, this paper helped to legitimise asexuality as an orientation and provided a foundation for other writers to build on.  Twenty years later, asexuality is a widely recognised orientation.  People are able to claim the asexual label, even in adolescence.  There are books about asexuality.  There are novels with asexual protagonists.  There are asexual characters in T.V. shows.  There are networks around the world of openly ace people, and there are communities that support them.  Yes, there’s still pushback, erasure, and ignorance.  Yes, we have a long way still to go.  But things are a lot better now than they were.

Not having a gender identity is in much the same place as asexuality was twenty years ago.  It’s a theoretical possibility people occasionally mention, but few people acknowledge it as a real experience, and the discourse around gender still treats gender identification as universal.  But the terms I’ve mentioned – and Winer’s paper in particular – give me hope.  They provide a language to talk about this experience, and Winer’s paper provides a springboard for future research.  With luck, people will continue to build on this foundation, and twenty years from now not having a gender will be as widely accepted as asexuality is today.

So, yeah: “cis by default”, “cis-genderless”, “gender detachment”.  Keep an eye out for those terms.  Hopefully, you’ll be hearing more of them.