How we ended up ‘cisgender’

‘That’s not how you spell “system”,’ said my husband triumphantly, pointing with his whisky glass at a placard inveighing against the ‘Cistem’, held up by a transgender protester on television. ‘No, darling,’ I said, not even assuming a patient tone. ‘It’s a play on words.’

Among people who like using the word gender outside its grammatical homeland, cis- as a prefix is tacked on, to make cisgender: ‘someone whose sense of personal identity corresponds to the sex and gender assigned to him or her at birth’, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it carefully. Note that it is not held to be a question of being the same sex as you were born, but the sex and gender assigned to you.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

I confess to having fallen in with my late parents’ blinkered decision to assign the female gender to me, a decision perhaps reinforced by my daughter Veronica’s habit of calling me Mummy.