Cistransplurid

The term "cistrans" (also known as "tris") refers to someone who is both cisgender and transgender in some way.

Some people see cis and trans as a rigid binary and do not understand how someone can be both at once. Many people say that everyone who is not cisgender is transgender, and that everyone fits neatly into those two categories. Anything that doesn't fit into that neat binary is simplified to "actually transgender" to them, regardless of the actual experiences or identity of the people they are talking about.

Cisgender and transgender are valid concepts, and it is true that anyone who is not strictly cisgender can opt into being transgender, but these words need to be treated like how trans-friendly people usually treat "man" and "woman". That is, they are not opposites but rather two points on a spectrum that includes a lot of other options. While most people are not both at once, some people are, especially if plurality or intersex conditions affect their identity.

Like "man" and "woman", "cis" and "trans" are also, to an extent, words that need to be defined by yourself, for yourself. You should respect how other people identify, even if you feel like they wouldn't "really" be the thing they say they are, but where it comes to determining which of those things YOU are, you need to have a concept in your own mind of what it means to be one over the other, and what "fits" into one over the other in terms of naming your own identity.

If you feel you don't understand the concepts well enough to be either, you don't have to be either. However, you can also be both at once, and this is how my system feels.

While there are several reasons one could be cistrans, not all of them apply to us, so this page will only focus on explaining what it means to us to be cistrans.

For us, this identity has to do with our intersex condition (and by extension our transition, which is how we discovered we were intersex), as well as our plurality. Our identity as cistrans has to do with our relationship to our actual physical body, as well as uncommon experiences we have had thanks to plurality.

Back when we thought we were a perisex trans man, we would say things like, "I don't identify with my body at all. My body does not reflect my gender or my identity. My concept of who I am has nothing to do with my body."

While we still agree with the fundamental concept that our physical body is not the be-all and end-all of our identity, our feelings of connection to our body have changed after discovering we are intersex, and it's not just because of the transition itself. If anything, the transition is the least important part of it, as our condition (Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) means that HRT transition is less effective for us than other people who undergo testosterone HRT.

In particular, due to an unexplained medical history in childhood that our adoptive family refuse to talk about and that they deny happened, we feel that, if we had been allowed to develop naturally, we would have had a body whose natural features we identified with more than how our body was non-consensually modified.

We also consider our intersex condition to be a big part of why we never felt like we fit perfectly into the gender binary or why we never strictly conformed to it. While "being intersex means we are biologically non-binary" would be an oversimplification of how we feel, we do feel that our genderqueer and GNC identity is influenced and reflected by our intersex condition, much like how cis people usually feel like their bodies influence and reflect their gender identities.

Therefore, we no longer relate to the concept of having an identity that is not related to your body at all. While a complete and total disconnect is far from a UNIVERSAL transgender experience, it was OUR experience when we thought we were strictly transgender. Now that we feel less so this way, we feel more connected to concepts of gender that are not represented by only using the word "transgender".

We don't consider just our identity as genderqueer to be cis but also our identity as a man, partly in thanks due to the body we were born with.

Our body has XY chromosomes, and due to our medical history, we were most likely born with testes and with genitals that were more similar to a penis than what we now have. Most men born with XY chromosomes and testes are considered cis men.

It is important to us that we have XY chromosomes, because one of our main hosts (Trevor, who split in our childhood as a perisex cis man) is an android who wants to be human. Androids do not have DNA, but living organisms like humans do. It therefore gives him both gender euphoria and species euphoria to have DNA with XY chromosomes. The DNA that makes him - and our system - genetically human also makes him what many people would describe as "genetically male".

Chromosomes are a part of your body that you can't change, and most trans men do not have and will never have XY chromosomes. However, due to our intersex condition, our body has a trait in common with most cis men's bodies that it has different from most trans men.

Not everyone needs to consider their chromosomes part of their gender, and we would never tell an AMAB transgender person that they were "genetically male" for having XY chromosomes. However, similar to how many cisgender people consider their natural body parts to be congruent with their gender, we consider our genes to be a part of our gender, which is much more similar to how cisgender people see themselves than how transgender people do.

Due to having XY chromosomes, being born with mixed sex characteristics, and having a body that likely would have gone through "both" puberties at once if it hadn't been altered, we consider our "birth sex" to be "androgynous male".

Identifying as androgyne or similar identities is very common throughout the system, even if our collective gender is (demi)male instead. Androgyny as a gender expression separate from a gender identity is also common in our system, including among headmates who consider themselves genderqueer men and do not consider themselves women or feminine at all.

We therefore feel that the way we present and identify as a genderqueer GNC man is consistent with our self-perceived birth sex of androgynous male. While we are perceived as gender non-conforming due to how we present, we consider the body we were born with to be consistent with the way we present, somewhat like how a plural GNC trans man might feel if he presented very feminine and didn't identify as a woman or want to be called "she", but he had plenty of woman alters, and he would use words like "feminine-aligned" or "femme" to refer to his presentation affecting his identity. Not all trans men would feel this identity is influenced by their bodies, but it's reasonable that some could.

Plurality also influences our view of ourselves as cis and trans at the same time, in ways that are not inherently related to being intersex.

While we were being raised as a girl, our system had alters who split as cis men, and possibly even those who split with no real sense of gender, or who felt that they were both binary genders at once.

Thanks to being born in 1994, which is just when the internet became more widespread in people's homes, I got to use the internet from a very early age. I learned that part of internet safety was making sure people didn't know who you were in "real life", and if they think you're someone other than who you really are, that's for the best. Some adults even told us that it's okay to lie about who you are online if it keeps people from figuring out who you really are.

We also liked the movie Mulan as a child, which is about a woman who pretends to be a man to do something she couldn't do as a woman. While the movie doesn't portray it as something she does for identity reasons, a lot of transmasculine individuals relate or related to that movie due to reasons of identity, and it obviously would have given us the idea that we could "pretend" to be a boy if we wanted to, and the only way we would get caught is if people saw our physical body.

Therefore, some parts of the system, in our childhood, made accounts online where they presented themselves as men or boys, without any suggestion that they were assigned anything else at birth. They were, by all recollections, treated the way that cis men would be treated, and unless they self-disclosed their assigned gender at birth, no one ever discovered they were anything other than what they said they were.

This experience is not necessarily unique to plurals, and there are likely other trangender people my age or younger who got to experiment with being treated as another gender thanks to the internet. However, I've also never heard any trans people talk about having an experience like this, so it doesn't register as a common part of being transgender to us.

Furthermore, thanks to amnesia, some of the headmates in question were genuinely unaware that they were in a body that was being raised a certain gender. For example, some of these headmates originally started as roleplay characters, and they mostly or only fronted when we roleplayed online, so they were only aware of an online life where people assumed we were male because we played so many male characters.

While this has less to do with the body's collective identity and more with individual in-system identity, it is notable that, the more we recover alters from our childhood, the more we find headmates who are cis women or cisfeminine to some extent.

This is notable to us, because we had previously felt that we were "genderqueer by default", and there was also corrective abuse in our childhood intendended to make us take on a more feminine identity than what our abusers perceived us to have as a child.

These headmates understand they are now in a male body and are on board with transitioning, but they also don't personally relate to the idea of being a trans man, or even necessarily being genderqueer or GNC. Some of our genderqueer or GNC fem-leaning headmates wouldn't really consider themselves trans, even if they are also aware of and identify with our intersex status.

Some of them - e.g. Tanya, Wendy, Aravis - are important members of the system and are frequent fronters. While we don't consider the person we are to be a cis women, there are usually cis women or cisfem individuals in front at any given time.

Because they relate to being cisgender much more than being transgender, despite not feeling that this relates to the body's actual collective identity, they are taken into consideration when we identify as partly cisgender.

Cisgender and transgender are not the only gender modalities we identify with, where a gender modality is a word that describes your relationship to your body or to transition (e.g. how transgender refers to someone who is or wants to be transitioning their gender in some way, even if it's not physically).

We consider intersex to be a gender modality, as do many other intersex people, and if we had to put only one word in front of "man" to describe what KIND of man we were, we would self-identify as an "intersex man".

We also consider genderqueer to be a gender modality that can be separate from "transgender". We feel that "genderqueer" can include anyone who experiences gender in a queer way, which (if they want to be included) can include binary trans people and (more relevant to our system's innerworld identities) GNC or gay cis people.

We also identify as isogender, which refers to someone who is neither cisgender nor transgender and is outside of that binary. How can we use that word at the same time as using "cistrans"? Well, we see these words as just words, not the ultimate arbiters of the realities the words describe. The words "cisgender" and "transgender" were not created with intersex experiences in mind, and intersex people had to carve out their own language in the wake of the creation of this binary.

Therefore, intersex people are allowed to use whatever language they like to describe their genders, and unless they're doing things like calling other people slurs without their consent or misgendering trans people or anything else that is undeniably harmful and rude to other people, you have no position to complain about it. You can ask respectful questions, but you have to accept that your knowledge and assumptions might be limited, and if you don't challenge your assumptions and you say things that treat intersexist binaristic concepts as absolute truth, you may be regarded as rude at best and bigoted at worst.

Some people would say it's foolish of us to consider ourselves a cis man, because we still need to medically transition like trans men do, and we are not perceived the same as a cis man.

However, this ignores the fact that many intersex cis men would and do transition the exact same way that trans men do. Not all men with gynecomastia want to keep their breasts, and not all men with ovotestes want to keep their uteruses. Some men with an androgen insensitivity or clinically low testosterone levels might seek a prescription for testosterone that comes from outside their bodies.

While we identify with some of the natural features of our body and consider our natural body to reflect our gender more than it would if we were the perisex trans man we used to think we were, we would still likely be transitioning to masculinity in some ways even if we had been assigned male at birth and raised as a boy. Therefore, the concept of being "AMAB transmasc", in the intersex sense, can apply to us, to our headmates, or to an identity we might have had if we had been raised differently and/or our androgen insensitivity had been less severe.

Furthermore, while we still experience discrimination for being transgender, we do not feel that this inherently makes us transgender. Most trans-friendly people agree that trans men, at least pre-transition, experience misogyny. However, I have never heard someone who considers themself to support transgender people to say that trans men are obligated to identify as women due to experiencing misogyny.

Likewise, just like how trans men are benefitted by women's rights and affected by misogyny but they are not women and it is not progressive to say they are required to be women, intersex people like my system are benefitted by trans rights and affected by transphobia, but we are not always transgender and it is not progressive to say we are required to be transgender.

Even if it's true that we still experience transphobia, it's not necessarily true to say that everybody treats us as a trans man. In addition to sometimes being presumed to be cisgender, there are people we know from in person who, when disclosing our intersex status to them, admitted that they did not if we were transgender or cisgender and did not slot us into either of those categories. This is similar to people we know online, who, prior to us discovering and disclosing we were intersex, see us more as a genderqueer man than as a trans or cis man, and who don't always even know what gender we were raised as.

As it is, my system IS partly transgender, but we are also partly cisgender, and we are things outside of cis and trans. While transition, transphobia, and experiences are real, the words used to describe them are made up. They are imperfect and they were not created with all possible real-life experiences in mind.

Therefore, people with experiences that are considered very far outside the norm - such as intersex people - can and will use language that will confuse and upset people who are used to thinking of cisgender and transgender as a rigid binary. However, if you don't think of cis and trans as a strict binary, and if you are willing to listen to people with non-normative experiences without invalidating their identities or experiences, you will understand why we describe ourselves with the words we do.