Ipsogender

Why cisgender does not fit

The objection the word encodes is that cisgender says nothing about these people. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki puts it as a question of protection: a cis intersex person may take up the term to underline that cisness does not work the same way for them, because they are not empowered by or protected under cissexism in the way the word implies. Both wikis on file use perisex for people who are not intersex. A perisex person's birth assignment records something; an intersex person's frequently decides something.

The Trans Language Primer makes the same point from the other direction, describing ipsogender people as not necessarily cis, having been born intersex and coerced into the gender binary. That phrasing is stronger than the wiki's and the two are not saying quite the same thing. One treats cisness as a description that fits but carries the wrong implications; the other treats it as a description that may not fit at all.

Transgender and cisgender both describe a relation to a birth assignment that was read off a body. The case where the assignment was a decision taken about a body that did not settle the question has no name in that pair, and ipsogender is the proposal to give it one.

How a person arrives at ipsogender

The LGBTQIA+ Wiki names two routes and they are not alike. In the first, the person was coercively assigned a gender at birth, which in Costello's later writing includes surgical assignment. In the second, nobody knew the person was intersex until later in life, so the assignment was made and lived with in good faith on all sides and the fact of being intersex arrived afterwards, on top of a settled identity.

The Trans Language Primer's worked example is of the second kind: a woman it calls Oshin considers herself ipsogender, having always identified as a girl, and came to find out later that she was also intersex. Nothing about her identity changed when the information did. What changed is which vocabulary describes her relation to the assignment accurately.

The term travels with a sex-characteristics counterpart. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki notes that ipsogender people may or may not also identify as ipsosex, and does not define the second word on that page. Neither term obliges the other, and neither obliges anybody to drop cisgender: the Primer states directly that some people who are technically ipsogender choose to identify as cisgender instead.

Where the ipso- prefix comes from

The prefix is Latin and the sources gloss it two different ways. Gary Wood's The Psychology of Gender, published by Routledge in 2018, reports the gloss as in the same place, set against cis meaning on the same side and trans meaning across. The Trans Language Primer gives it instead as to substitute, which is a different claim about what the word is doing. The disagreement is small and unresolved in the material, and no dictionary of record carries the term to settle it.

Wiktionary holds citations without a definition. The citations sit under three separate headwords, ipso gender, ipso-gender and ipsogender, which is what a word looks like before its spelling settles. The hyphenated form carries the earliest quotations and the solid form carries the latest.

How Costello put the term into print

Ipsogender was coined on 30 June 2015 in a post on the blog Trans-Fusion by Cary Gabriel Costello, whom the LGBTQIA+ Wiki describes as an intersex trans male sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who specialises in identity, sexuality, privilege, and marginalisation. The blog post is where the word starts, and the wiki cites it directly.

It went into academic print the following year, in a chapter on intersex and trans communities in Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives, edited by Stefan Horlacher for Springer. The working sentence on page 85 classifies more than it defines: having listed the people he counts as trans, Costello writes that those who are not trans he refers to as cis-gender if born binary-sex-typical, and ipso-gender if born intersex. The word is introduced as the second half of a pair that had only had a first half.

Wood's textbook is the only one of the three not written by the coiner, and it treats the term as settled enough to head a section, which runs transgender, ipso-gender, agender, and genderqueer against cisgender. Costello was still using the word in 2023, in a chapter on the intersection of transgender and intersex experiences, where it appears alongside the observation that ipsogender people often object to the infant genital surgeries performed on them despite identifying with the sex those surgeries assigned. That sentence is the clearest statement of why the term was thought necessary: identifying with an outcome is not the same as endorsing how the outcome was produced.

A flag followed the coinage by a year. The DeviantArt user 1nklash posted one on 9 July 2016, using the inverted colours of the intersex flag and the symbol for the Earth, which the LGBTQIA+ Wiki notes is sometimes used to represent intersex people.

What gender modality means here

Ipsogender is not a gender. It is a gender modality, which the Intersex Wiki's glossary defines as the relationship a person has between their gender identity and the gender they were assigned at birth, and which it illustrates with cisgender, transgender, ipsogender, and ultergender.

That glossary keeps four things apart. Gender roles are what a society expects of people of a given gender. Gender identity is a person's own sense of what their gender is. Gender expression is the outward display, which the glossary separates from identity with the example of drag performance. Gender modality is none of those: it is the relation between the first and the assignment. An ipsogender person's gender identity is female or male, like anybody else's; the word describes how they came to hold it.

Ultergender is listed as the opposite term. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki points to it without defining it, and the Intersex Wiki's glossary names it as a modality alongside the other three, also without a definition on the page held here. What the sources establish is that the pair exists, not what the second half of it says.

Filing the word this way answers the question of why a term for people who are, in the ordinary phrase, cis belongs in a catalogue of gender terms at all: it describes the one relation the standard pair was not built to hold.

Where ipsogender turns up outside definitions

Rarely, and the record thins out fast once the definitional writing is set aside. Every quotation Wiktionary holds is either Costello or a writer citing Costello, so the printed trail is a single author and one textbook that read him.

The one use on file that is not about the word is a Tumblr post in which a fan sets out character notes for a science-fiction web series, and describes one of them as a pansexual ipsogender intersex woman, with a long parenthesis about which intersex variation the writer has in mind. The word sits there as an ordinary adjective in a string of identity labels, unexplained and evidently expected to be understood. For a term coined by a professor in a blog post, that is a specific kind of evidence: it has left the literature that defined it and is being used by people with no interest in defining it.

No dictionary of record carries ipsogender, no survey has counted the people it describes, and the Wiktionary page that holds the citations holds no definition to go with them.