I think often the pressure for people to as cis doesn’t make any sense, either.

I’m not sure how helpful it is to think of cisgender as something that people need to own up to, for example, in a pronoun circle (when people introduce themselves by name and by the pronouns they prefer). That being said, it’s not a totally kind of innocent or uncomplicated term. Cisgendered came to mean that your gender identity matches what was assigned at birth. At some point on the internet, people started using that word they were looking for a word to distinguish between people who are trans and people who are not. So is the word “trans.” Trans as a prefix means across – it’s the spatial metaphor moving across something. It’s a prefix that you can put in front of words. Jules Gill-Peterson: This is actually a term from chemistry. What does “cis” mean and where does it come from? Listening and believing your child about their identity is key to supporting them, Jules Gill-Peterson said.

that is just kind of a powerful message and one that I certainly subscribe to as an adult too, but I can imagine it’s especially important for young people. But I think it can be profoundly reassuring, in a moment of not just political backlash but the general isolation that trans people face in a cis-normative society, to be able to that you’re not the first person to ever go through this.

It’s not like you look back in time and you see yourself reflected, by any means. I think history can be a really powerful grounding force to give young people a sense of lineage. One of the most remarkable things about trans youth is that they’re able to stand up in this world that we’ve created, that gives them no reason to know who they are, and say, “Hey, actually, I know something about myself that none of the adults in my life know.” One of the challenges that anyone who’s trans faces is coming to an understanding of yourself in a culture that fundamentally doesn’t recognize that you exist. But that doesn’t mean people themselves haven’t existed before. The visibility that we’re dealing with today is pretty unprecedented. Jules Gill-Peterson: A lot of the rhetoric around kids frames them as totally new – most people are getting to know that there are trans youth for the first time. How does transgender history inform us about where society is at in the United States? Transgender and gender diverse youth have become more visible than ever.

Binder trans