Last month, transfeminine jurist and law professor Florence Ashley co-published an article in Nature that hopes to popularize the term ‘gender modality,’ which is a gender equivalent to the term ‘sexual orientation.’ The article, entitled “Beyond the trans/cis binary: introducing new terms will enrich gender research,” was also authored by Shari Brightly-Brown and G. Nic Rider. The article describes how this concept is not only useful in research, but also in being able to better describe the experiences of people who don’t fall within the traditional trans/cis binary.
Ashley said to Erin In The Morning, “It’s meant to be an umbrella category that returns trans and cis and stuff like that. For instance, we have the word sexual orientation and in trans research, oftentimes you’ll have things like other gender identity or transgender status in the tables, but you wouldn’t have, say, gay status – instead we say like sexual orientation. Part of it is just the fact that we didn’t have a word for that, which was just annoying”
In the article, Ashley and colleagues describe two examples for people that are better included by the term. The first, Alex, is someone who was raised in a completely gender neutral environment and identifies as agender – not fitting easily into either cis or trans as terms. The second person, Luna, had identified as a transgender boy most of her life before detransitioning much later. She describes herself as having more in common with trans women than cis women. Neither trans nor cis completely describe the experiences of these two people, so referring to them by their gender modality can help describe them.
Another important distinction Ashley and colleagues detail is how the term can help in describing how discrimination impacts trans people in comparison to cisgender people. For instance, A transgender woman who is discriminated against for being a trans woman receives specific discrimination on the axis of her modality, and not per se due to being a woman. “Gender identity is not the central thing that’s being targeted there because you have the same gender identity as cis women, and yet they’re not the ones facing discrimination. You’re the one facing discrimination because you’re trans. Gender identity [alone] didn’t seem like it was actually like hitting the right thing in terms of what the basis of discrimination is,” Ashley said.
Gender modality can be just as varied as sexual orientation in what it is describing. It can be useful for intersex people who don’t view themselves as being either cis or trans, as well as nonbinary people who also aren’t fitting in the same binary. It can also describe detransitioners, retransitioners, those who are questioning their gender, and those who have identities specific to their culture. Gender modality is also useful for people who have dissociative identity disorder or otherwise describe themselves as being “more than one person,” with different alters having different gender identities. The scope of the term is intentionally broad to encompass as many identities as possible.
There is also use for the term in the world of research, for which the article gives much focus to specific use cases. Questionnaires are a primary example – right now most research leans on the trans/cis binary, excluding many. Relying on gender modality can better accommodate people excluded by a binary and can make the research done more precise and expansive. By virtue of helping people from different cultures describe themselves more accurately, it can help research move on from a strictly eurocentric view, along with helping participants feel much more respected. The term has been adopted by many prominent organizations and individuals. It’s been used in research seminars, by governmental bodies in Canada, by Planned Parenthood, and by many publications.
“The benefit of gender modality is because modality is not necessarily a term that’s extremely commonly used in everyday language, yet it is not a term that seems too out of place or too clinical,” Ashley said. They also mention how the concept of gender modality can be analogous to what happened with sexual orientation – originally, we relied on a dichotomy between homosexual and heterosexual that was strictly defined, but have since moved on from that.
Gender modality is thus argued to be something that can revolutionize how we understand gender. By using the term, Ashley argues that we can show there’s more to our conception of gender than society gives on, breaking away from artificial dichotomies that restrict us. In essence, they argue that it can change society for the better.
“We open up a discussion around cis and trans as a binary and the fact that we want terms that are bigger than that, much the same way as we’ve broken away from the heterosexuality-homosexuality dichotomy.”
Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering transgender issues, politics, and science. She can be found on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky, @MiraLazine
I heard "gender alignment" on Tumblr many years ago. I like "gender modality" more.
I’ve heard "gender expansive" used casually, clinically, and in scholarly work to describe people whose gender doesn’t fit neatly into the cis/trans binary. So, under the "gender modality" scheme, would "gender expansive" be something like a binary-busting third term? Or?
Non-binary people absolutely fit into the trans/cis binary. We are trans. Anyone who isn’t the gender they are assigned at birth is trans when you’re using the words trans and cis because those words are part of the binary gender system in which there is a binary choice.
Yes, the binary gender system is reductive and awful and we need a term like gender modality because we are moving past the binary gender system but we have to acknowledge that the words cis and trans have meanings within their system and we can’t just pretend they don’t because we know the system doesn’t represent reality.
Trans means across and cis means on the same side. In the binary gender system gender and sex assigned at birth are assumed to be the same or on the same side which is why they say across for people whose gender and sex assigned at birth aren’t the same. For someone like the Alex mentioned in the article who wasn’t raised in the binary gender system they wouldn’t need the words trans or cis because the faulty assumption of the binary gender system wasn’t applied to them in the first place.
We can’t keep the faulty language of a faulty system if we want to move past it, so we need to acknowledge what the words mean and where they do and don’t apply.