I was recently reading some posts referring to “cis”men and women and it got me thinking why is this even a phrase that is used. Yes before I get flamed in the comments I understand cis is the opposite of trans and when we are talking about genders obviously the terms cis gender and transgender are useful in a sentence. But that is not my question my question is why is there a need for the phrases cis woman and cis man.

Let’s talk about nouns, we have the word woman which is “an adult human female” by definition, and then we have the word trans woman “an adult who was assigned male at birth but whose gender identity is female.” This makes perfect sense. I’m saying cis woman is a direct response to the fact that women do not have to put a prefix before the noun woman and trans women have to be referred to as “trans women” so some refer to women as “cis women” as a direct response to being labelled as trans. I think it’s unnecessary.