Sociologists Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook define cisgender as a label for 'individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity'. In February 2014, Facebook began offering 'custom' gender options, allowing users to identify with one or more gender-related terms from a selected list, including cis, cisgender, and others. Perspectives on History states that since this inclusion, the term has increasingly become common usage. Cisgender was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, defined as 'designating a person whose sense of personal identity corresponds to the sex and gender assigned to him or her at birth (in contrast with transgender)'. After the terms cisgender and cissexual were used in a 2006 article in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and Serano's 2007 book Whipping Girl, the former gained further popularity among English-speaking activists and scholars. Medical academics use the term and have recognized its importance in transgender studies since the 1990s. Correspondingly, some trans activists argued that using terms such as man or woman to mean cis man or cis woman reinforced cisnormativity, and that instead using the prefix cis similarly to trans would counteract the cisnormative connotations within language. The term cisgender itself was coined in English in 1994 in a Usenet newsgroup about transgender topics as Dana Defosse, then a graduate student, sought a way to refer to non-transgender people that avoided marginalizing transgender people or implying that transgender people were an other.

Marquis Bey states that 'proto-cisgender discourse' arose in German in 1914, when Ernst Burchard introduced the cis/trans distinction to sexology by contrasting ' cisvestitismus, or a type of inclination to wear gender-conforming clothing, with transvestitismus, or cross-dressing.' German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch stated in 1998 that he coined the term cissexual ( zissexuell in German) in his two-part 1991 article ' Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick' ('Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view').

In cisgender, cis- describes the alignment of gender identity with assigned sex. ' Gaul on this side of the Alps'), and Cisjordan (as distinguished from Transjordan). This usage can be seen in the cis– trans distinction in chemistry, the cis and trans sides of the Golgi apparatus in cellular biology, the ancient Roman term Cisalpine Gaul (i.e. The term cisgender has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis-, meaning 'on this side of', which is the opposite of trans-, meaning 'across from' or 'on the other side of'. Related concepts are cisnormativity (the presumption that cisgender identity is preferred or normal) and cissexism (bias or prejudice favoring cisgender people). The term has been and continues to be controversial and subject to critique. The term cisgender was coined in 1994 as an antonym to transgender, and entered into dictionaries starting in 2015 as a result of changes in social discourse about gender. The prefix cis- is Latin and means on this side of. A cisgender person (often shortened to cis sometimes cissexual) is someone whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth, i.e., someone who is not transgender.

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