Centering Gender Identity and Transgender Lives in Instructional Communication Research

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Notes

1. While not without its problems, the term cisgender generally refers to people whose gender identities match the cultural expectations for persons of their sex assignment at birth. For example, a person designated female at birth who grows up and identifies as a woman is cisgender (regardless of her sexual orientation). As Spencer (2015) argued, recognizing and naming cisgender identity matters:

Just as men have gender, white people have race, and U.S. Americans have nationality, so cisgender persons have gender identity. By actively naming cisgender privilege and social structures of cisnormativity, we resist defining transgender people as Other and everyone else as normal. (p. xix)

For more on these terms and others, see Adams (2015) and Spencer (2015).