Cistem Failure

Marquis Bey explores the strained, opposing relationship between blackness and cisgenderness. The book starts from a question: if decades of feminist theory have undone the belief that sex corresponds to some natural way of being, what can it mean for a gender to match the sex one was assigned? Bey argues that cisgender is too rigid a category to contain the many ways people drift from gender alignment, whether or not they pursue gender-affirming interventions.

The argument moves through a cartoon series, a familiar greeting, and finally Bey's own gender identity. Along the way, Bey shows that cisgender is quietly coded as white, and that blackness challenges this coding. Just as transness names a space outside the cis, blackness implies a non-cis space of its own. Bey contends that blackness offers a way to undermine the dominant power of the gender binary.

From these threads, Bey builds a case for an antiracist project of gender abolition, one that treats cisgender as a regulatory apparatus to be rejected.