“Cis passing”

The term "cis passing" is a term for transgender and sometimes nonbinary people who pass as cisgender. For binary trans people, it means passing as a person of the gender you feel, for a nonbinary person, it can mean passing as a person of the gender assigned at birth or of the "opposite" gender.

When I started taking oestrogen a few years ago to queer my body, I didn't imagine myself getting cis passing. In fact, my goal was to stop being cis passing in the gender assigned at birth (in my case male). I wrote in an article published in El Topo three years ago:

“Despite this, invisibility continues, and this has led me to consider changing my body, starting hormonal treatment to demasculinize it, always with the idea of transitioning to no specific place, especially not to an opposite gender (opposite of what?). My objective is perhaps a more strange, more queer body; that is, to get out of the normal and thus make it more difficult to be socially read as a man. “

I didn't even imagine myself moving towards a specific gender, nor did I consider having an androgynous appearance. But, it seems that this is not possible in a binary world. People will (almost) always try to read you according to the two binary options: male or female.

And, the reality in this binary world is that sometimes without cis passing life is much more complicated. According to recent research on the reality of nonbinary people in Spain (Spanish), 97% of nonbinary people use cis passing at least sometimes in some areas of their lives. And, if I remember correctly, my answer in the questionnaire was probably a resounding no. But I was wrong. Thinking about it now, I do use cis passing, I just don't do it in my gender assigned at birth. For example:

• When I am in a public space and I need to go to the toilet, I almost always go to the women's toilet (if there is no separate disabled toilet). When I go into the toilet, I almost always get anxious and wonder if any woman who might be in there might read me as a man, and I hope this doesn't happen.
• I have been going to the swimming pool for a few weeks now, and I need to use a changing room to change. I've managed to use the women's changing room, but I have to change in the disabled toilet inside, and I've noticed that I look at myself more since I've been going to the pool. Should I shave so that I don't put my cis passing as a woman at risk? And, the truth is that I shave more frequently since I've been going to the pool, sometimes just before I go. Before, I didn't mind a few days' beard, I even enjoyed breaking my cis passing in this way.

I don't use cis passing a lot. On the contrary, I insist before public administrations on my nonbinary identity (at least in Andalusia, where in theory the trans law gives me this right. The practice is different), and I have a German passport with an 'X' in the sex field. But I have to accept that there are situations in which I have little alternative to using cis passing, whether I like it or not.