Transsexual

A transsexual person is someone who experiences a gender identity that is inconsistent with their assigned sex or gender, and desires to permanently transition to the sex or gender with which they identify, usually seeking medical assistance to help them align their body with their identified sex or gender.
The term transsexual is a subset of transgender, but some transsexual people reject the label of transgender. A medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria can be made if a person experiences marked and persistent incongruence between their gender identity and their assigned sex.
Understanding of transsexual people has rapidly evolved in the 21st century; many 20th century medical beliefs and practices around transsexual people are now considered outdated. Transsexual people were once classified as mentally ill and subject to extensive gatekeeping by the medical establishment, and remain so in many parts of the world.

Terminology

Transsexual has had different meanings throughout time. In modern usage, it refers to "a person who desires to or who has modified their body to transition from one gender or sex to another through the use of medical technologies such as hormones or surgeries". Within the transgender community, the term is a subject of debate, and it is sometimes considered an antiquated or pejorative term. The more widely preferred terms are transgender or the abbreviated form trans. However, due to its historical usage, continued usage in the medical community, and continued self-identification with the term by some people, transsexual remains in the modern vernacular.
In understanding the subject, it is noted that there is a difference between gender and sex. Gender is defined as a "set of social, cultural, and linguistic norms that can be attributed to someone's identity, expression, or role as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or nonbinary". Sex is defined as being "assigned at birth by medical professionals based on the appearance of genitalia, and related assumptions about chromosomal makeup, gender identity, expressions, and roles emerge over the life span, sometimes changing over time".

Origins

reported that in 1921 Dora Richter of Germany began a surgical transition, under the care of Magnus Hirschfeld, which ended in 1930 with a successful genital reassignment surgery. In 1930, Hirschfeld supervised the second genital reassignment surgery to be reported in detail in a peer-reviewed journal, that of Lili Elbe of Denmark. In 1923, Hirschfeld introduced the term "Transsexualismus", after which David Oliver Cauldwell introduced "transsexualism" and "transsexual" to English in 1949 and 1950.
Cauldwell appears to be the first to use the term to refer to those who desired a change of physiological sex. In 1969, Harry Benjamin claimed to have been the first to use the term "transsexual" in a public lecture, which he gave in December 1953. Benjamin went on to popularize the term in his 1966 book, The Transsexual Phenomenon, in which he described transsexual people on a scale of three levels of intensity: "Transsexual ", "Transsexual ", and "Transsexual ".

Relationship to ''transgender''

The term transgender was coined by John Oliven in 1965. By the 1990s, transsexual had come to be considered a subset of the umbrella term transgender. The term transgender is now more common, and many transgender people prefer the designation transgender and reject transsexual. Some people who pursue medical assistance to change their sexual characteristics to match their gender identity prefer the designation transsexual and reject transgender. One perspective offered by transsexual people who reject a transgender label for that of transsexed is that, for people who have gone through sexual reassignment surgery, their anatomical sex has been altered, whilst their gender remains constant.
Historically, one reason some people preferred transsexual to transgender is that the medical community in the 1950s through the 1980s encouraged a distinction between the terms that would only allow the former access to medical treatment. Other self-identified transsexual people state that those who do not seek gender affirming surgery are fundamentally different from those who do, and that the two have different concerns, but this view is controversial. Others argue that medical procedures do not have such far-reaching consequences as to put those who have had them and those who have not into such distinctive categories. Some have objected to the term transsexual on the basis that it describes a condition related to gender identity rather than sexuality. For example, Christine Jorgensen, the first person widely known in the United States for having had gender affirming surgery, rejected transsexual and instead identified herself in newsprint as trans-gender, on this basis.
A common argument in opposition to the term transsexual is that it over-medicalizes the trans experience, focuses too much on diagnosis, or both. The term transgender emerged in part in an attempt to break the "medical monopoly" on transitioning that transsexual implied.
GLAAD's media reference guide offers the following distinction on the use of transsexual:

An older term that originated in the medical and psychological communities. As the gay and lesbian community rejected homosexual and replaced it with gay and lesbian, the transgender community rejected transsexual and replaced it with transgender. Some people within the trans community may still call themselves transsexual. Do not use transsexual to describe a person unless it is a word they use to describe themself. If the subject of your news article uses the word transsexual to describe themself, use it as an adjective: transsexual woman or transsexual man.

Terminological variance

The word transsexual is most often used as an adjective rather than a noun – a "transsexual person" rather than simply "a transsexual"., use of the noun form was often deprecated by those in the transsexual community. Like other trans people, transsexual people prefer to be referred to by the gender pronouns and terms associated with their gender identity. For example, a trans man is a person who was assigned the female sex at birth on the basis of his genitals, but despite that assignment, identifies as a man and is transitioning or has transitioned to a male gender role; in the case of a transsexual man, he furthermore has or will have a masculine body. Transsexual people are sometimes referred to with directional terms, such as "female-to-male" for a transsexual man, abbreviated to "F2M", "FTM", and "F to M", or "male-to-female" for a transsexual woman, abbreviated "M2F", "MTF" and "M to F".
Individuals who have undergone and completed gender affirming surgery are sometimes referred to as transsexed individuals; however, the term transsexed is not to be confused with the term transsexual, which can also refer to individuals who have not undergone SRS, and whose anatomical sex does not match their psychological sense of personal gender identity.
A rarer, alternate spelling for transsexual has been transexual, with a single S. This variation is British in origin. This spelling was used by The Transexual Menace, an activist group, for example. This spelling has been used by some activists in an attempt to remove "pathologizing implications" from their use of the word. Another rare variation, a synonym for transsexual, is .
The terms gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder were not used until the 1970s, when Laub and Fisk published several works on transsexualism using these terms. "Transsexualism" was replaced in the DSM-IV by "gender identity disorder in adolescents and adults".
Male-to-female transsexualism has sometimes been called "Harry Benjamin's syndrome" after the endocrinologist who pioneered the study of dysphoria. As the present-day medical study of gender variance is much broader than Benjamin's early description, there is greater understanding of its aspects, and use of the term Harry Benjamin's syndrome has been criticized for delegitimizing gender-variant people with different experiences.

Sexual orientation

Since the middle of the 20th century, homosexual transsexual and related terms were used to label individuals' sexual orientation based on their birth sex. Many sources criticize this choice of wording as confusing, "heterosexist", "archaic", and demeaning because it labels people by sex assigned at birth instead of their gender identity. Sexologist John Bancroft also recently expressed regret for having used this terminology, which was standard when he used it, to refer to transsexual women. He says that he now tries to choose his words more sensitively. Sexologist Charles Allen Moser is likewise critical of the terminology. Sociomedical scientist Rebecca Jordan-Young challenges researchers like Simon LeVay, J. Michael Bailey, and Martin Lalumiere, who she says "have completely failed to appreciate the implications of alternative ways of framing sexual orientation".
The terms androphilia and gynephilia to describe a person's sexual orientation without reference to their gender identity were proposed and popularized by psychologist Ron Langevin in the 1980s. The similar specifiers attracted to men, attracted to women, attracted to both or attracted to neither were used in the DSM-IV.
Many transsexual people choose the language of how they refer to their sexual orientation based on their gender identity, not their birth assigned sex.

Surgical status

Several terms are in common use, especially within the community itself relating to the surgical or operative status of someone who is transsexual, depending on whether they have already had gender affirming surgery, have not had but still intend to, or do not intend to have surgery. A pre-operative transsexual person is someone who intends to have SRS at some point, but has not yet had it. A post-operative transsexual person is someone who has had SRS.
A non-operative transsexual person is someone who has not had SRS, and does not intend to have it in the future. There can be various reasons for this, from personal to financial. Having SRS is not a requirement of being transsexual. Evolutionary biologist and trans woman Julia Serano criticizes the societal preoccupation with SRS as phallocentric, objectifying of transsexuals, and an invasion of privacy.