Revisiting The Cissy, by a Tranny

It’s been nearly six years since I first saw South Park‘s “The Cissy”, in which the series explores transgender issues in a real way for the first time in years. I had a lot of thoughts on the episode at the time, thoughts which never really manifested into an article in itself. Still, I consider “The Cissy” a landmark in transgender media, and as such it’s worth a revisit.

“The Cissy” premiered in October 2014. It was the same year Katy Steinmetz declared “The Transgender Tipping Point” as trans awareness was becoming increasingly mainstreamed. In the episode, Cartman pretends to be transgender in order to first use the girl’s bathroom and eventually his own separate bathroom. Meanwhile, Stan’s dad Randy is secretly the female pop singer-songwriter Lorde. Gender confusion — and bathroom confusion — ensues.

South Park‘s previous foray into transgender issues was a multi-season-long arc in which school-teacher Mr. Garrison abruptly transitioned from male to female and then abruptly transitioned back again. Starting with season nine’s “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” (2005), the character and their story became a kind of ur-cipher of societal transgender anxieties. Garrison’s bottom surgery is accompanied by Kyle’s attempt to sugically become a tall African-American and Kyle’s dad Gerald’s attempt to surgically become a dolphin, echoing straw man arguments that the existence of transgender people must therefore allow the existence of trans-racial and trans-species people.

The episode ends on another straw man cliché: Garrison’s almost immediate regret over her surgical transition, eventually reversed in season twelve’s “Eek, a Penis!”. In between “Vagina” and “Penis” we see Garrison inspire trans panic (from who else but Richard Dawkins), become a lesbian, and attempt to stop gay marriage from becoming legal. South Park‘s most fluid character is a kind of IT for everything cis people are afraid trans people are.

Fast forward to “The Cissy”, which carries an almost entirely different tone than the Garrison arc. Gone are the devil-may-care straw men and the sense of old-school gender anxiety and fear, replaced by the heightened awareness of the rituals of politically correct terminology and representation. It is indeed hard to imagine even South Park making “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” in the 2014 climate, but rather than going along with any kind of political correctness, in typical South Park fashion Trey and Matt riff on those rituals in a self-reflexive manner.

The most jarring, and perhaps most controversial, aspect of “The Cissy” is that it is a thesis on transgender issues with no transgender characters in it. But the episode is all the stronger for it: by forgoing the sensationalism and self-satisfaction of transgender character inclusion, the show is free to quietly and thoughtfully explore something that most people aren’t: what it means to be cis in an increasingly transgender world. “The Cissy” even dares to wonder if cis and trans are quickly becoming obsolete terms.

The episode begins as Cartman “comes out” as trans in order to gain the supposed privilege of using the girl’s bathroom. Cartman knows the game and how to play it: he spits out the phrase “I live a life of torture and confusion because society sees me as a boy but I’m really a girl” like bullets out of a machine gun, a weapon against the faculty he knows will be too politically correct to see through (or admit they see through) his charade. Not coincidentally it is then Mr. Garrison who explains the term “cisgender” to the other faculty and urges them to avoid controversy by going along with Cartman’s admission.

Later, Stan discovers his dad Randy is the pop sensation Lorde, and that his double life also started with a desire to use the women’s bathroom. Thus for the cis characters in the episode, the bathroom naturally becomes the locus of PC-veiled cisgender anxieties and more importantly of coded transgender desires.

Stan’s girlfriend Wendy presenting herself as Wendell further complicates matters: is s/he really trans or just making a point to Cartman? As Stan begins to wonder about his own identity, the episode makes the case that maybe everyone is always already transgender, and the identity that must be claimed is cis. There are no trans people in the episode, but its central characters explore their gender in multifarious ways that speak to the increasing obsolescence of the term itself as a way of boxing in gender identity.

As the episode ends, it is instead cis that is marked for exclusion and ridicule, given a new linguistic treatment more befitting a slur, and plastered on a separate bathroom. Even so, Stan (at this point labeled a cissy by the other students) enjoys the luxuries of his now-private bathroom, a reminder of the ways that cis still carries privilege over gender variance.

When South Park returned to transgender issues following “The Cissy”, it was to (justifiably) trash Caitlyn Jenner and particularly the response to her transition and appearance in the public eye. With the introduction of a bunch of PC bros who mindlessly rattle of politically correct scripts and call-outs, including the laudatory treatment of Jenner, “Stunning and Brave” beautifully satirizes the way that the rituals of political correctness are weaponized as shields against criticism by, for example, wealthy white trans women.

South Park‘s body of work on trans issues goes further, including season twenty-three’s fantastic episode “Board Girls”, but ultimately the core of that work is “The Cissy”, which effectively addresses the series’ transgender past and prepares the show for its transgender future. It’s one of the strongest pieces of transgender television ever created because it avoids so many of the tropes of trans television (no trans medical issues, no trans killer and/or victim, and no transition narrative) and instead dares to think things through beyond Cartman’s recitation of all the right tropes.