Transgender


A transgender person has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.
The opposite of transgender is cisgender, which describes persons whose gender identity matches their assigned sex.
Many transgender people desire medical assistance to medically transition from one sex to another; those who do may identify as transsexual. Transgender does not have a universally accepted definition, including among researchers; it can function as an umbrella term. The definition given above includes binary trans men and trans women and may also include people who are non-binary or genderqueer.
Being transgender is distinct from sexual orientation, and transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, or otherwise, or may decline to label their sexual orientation. Accurate statistics on the number of transgender people vary widely, in part due to different definitions of what constitutes being transgender. Some countries collect census data on transgender people. Canada was the first country to introduce collection of census data on its transgender and non-binary population in 2021. Generally, less than 1% of the worldwide population is transgender, with figures ranging from <0.1% to 0.6%.
Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and some seek medical treatments such as hormone replacement therapy, gender-affirming surgery, or psychotherapy. Not all transgender people desire these treatments, and some cannot undergo them for legal, financial, or medical reasons.
The legal status of transgender people varies by jurisdiction. Many transgender people experience transphobia in the workplace, in accessing public accommodations, and in healthcare. In many places, they are not legally protected from discrimination. Several cultural events are held to celebrate the awareness of transgender people, including Transgender Day of Remembrance and International Transgender Day of Visibility, and the transgender flag is a common transgender pride symbol.

Terminology

Before the mid-20th century, various terms were used within and beyond Western medical and psychological sciences to identify persons and identities labeled transsexual, and later transgender from mid-century onward. Imported from the German and ultimately modeled after German Transsexualismus, the English term transsexual has enjoyed international acceptability, though transgender has been increasingly preferred over transsexual. The word transgender acquired its modern umbrella term meaning in the 1990s.
Health-practitioner manuals, professional journalistic style guides, and LGBT advocacy groups advise the adoption by others of the name and pronouns identified by the person in question, including present references to the transgender person's past.

''Transgender''

Although the term transgenderism was once considered acceptable, it has come to be viewed as pejorative, according to GLAAD. Psychiatrist John F. Oliven of Columbia University used the term transgenderism in his 1965 reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, writing that the term which had previously been used, transsexualism, "is misleading; actually, transgenderism is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism". The term transgender was then popularized with varying definitions by transgender, transsexual, and transvestite people, including Christine Jorgensen and Virginia Prince, who used transgenderal in the December 1969 issue of Transvestia, a national magazine for cross-dressers she founded. By the mid-1970s both trans-gender and trans people were in use as umbrella terms, while transgenderist and transgenderal were used to refer to people who wanted to live their lives as cross-gendered individuals without gender-affirming surgery. Transgenderist was sometimes abbreviated as TG in educational and community resources; this abbreviation developed by the 1980s. In 2020, the International Journal of Transgenderism changed its name to the International Journal of Transgender Health "to reflect a change toward more appropriate and acceptable use of language in our field."
By 1984, the concept of a "transgender community" had developed, in which transgender was used as an umbrella term. In 1985, Richard Ekins established the "Trans-Gender Archive" at the University of Ulster. By 1992, the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy defined transgender as an expansive umbrella term including "transsexuals, transgenderists, cross dressers", and anyone transitioning. Leslie Feinberg's pamphlet, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come", circulated in 1992, identified transgender as a term to unify all forms of gender nonconformity; in this way transgender has become synonymous with queer. In 1994, gender theorist Susan Stryker defined transgender as encompassing "all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries", including, but not limited to, "transsexuality, heterosexual transvestism, gay drag, butch lesbianism, and such non-European identities as the Native American berdache or the Indian Hijra".
Transgender can also refer specifically to a person whose gender identity is opposite the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth. In contrast, people whose sense of personal identity corresponds to the sex and gender assigned to them at birth – that is, those who are neither transgender nor non-binary or genderqueer – are called cisgender.

''Transsexual''

Inspired by Magnus Hirschfeld's 1923 term seelischer Transsexualismus, the term transsexual was introduced to English in 1949 by David Oliver Cauldwell and popularized by Harry Benjamin in 1966, around the same time transgender was coined and began to be popularized. Since the 1990s, transsexual has generally been used to refer to the subset of transgender people who desire to transition permanently to the gender with which they identify and who seek medical assistance with this.
Distinctions between the terms transgender and transsexual are commonly based on distinctions between gender and sex. Transsexuality may be said to deal more with physical aspects of one's sex, while transgender considerations deal more with one's psychological gender disposition or predisposition, as well as the related social expectations that may accompany a given gender role. Many transgender people reject the term transsexual. Christine Jorgensen publicly rejected transsexual in 1979 and instead identified herself in newsprint as trans-gender, saying, "gender doesn't have to do with bed partners, it has to do with identity." Some have objected to the term transsexual on the basis that it describes a condition related to gender identity rather than sexuality. Some people who identify as transsexual people object to being included in the transgender umbrella.
In his 2007 book Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, anthropologist David Valentine asserts that transgender was coined and used by activists to include many people who do not necessarily identify with the term and states that people who do not identify with the term transgender should not be included in the transgender spectrum. Leslie Feinberg likewise asserts that transgender is not a self-identifier but a category imposed by observers to understand other people. According to the Transgender Health Program at Fenway Health in Boston, there are no universally-accepted definitions, and confusion is common because terms that were popular at the turn of the 21st century may have since been deemed offensive. The THP recommends that clinicians ask clients what terminology they prefer, and avoid the term transsexual unless they are sure that a client is comfortable with it.
Harry Benjamin invented a classification system for transsexuals and transvestites, called the Sex Orientation Scale, in which he assigned transsexuals and transvestites to one of six categories based on their reasons for cross-dressing and the relative urgency of their need for sex reassignment surgery. Contemporary views on gender identity and classification differ markedly from Harry Benjamin's original opinions. Sexual orientation is no longer regarded as a criterion for diagnosis, or for distinction between transsexuality, transvestism and other forms of gender-variant behavior and expression. Benjamin's scale was designed for use with heterosexual trans women, and trans men's identities do not align with its categories.

Other terms

  • ' refers to a person, binary or non-binary, who was assigned male at birth and has a predominantly feminine gender identity or presentation.
  • ' refers to a person, binary or non-binary, who was assigned female at birth and has a predominantly masculine gender identity or presentation.
  • Transgendered is a common term in older literature. Many within the transgender community deprecate it on the basis that transgender is an adjective, not a verb. Organizations such as GLAAD and The Guardian also state that transgender should never be used as a noun in English. Transgender is also a noun for the broader topic of transgender identity and experience.
  • Assigned Female At Birth, Assigned Male At Birth, Designated Female At Birth, and Designated Male At Birth are terms used to represent a person's sex assigned at birth; they are considered to be more gender-inclusive than the related terms biological male or biological female.
  • The term * emerged in the 1990s as an inclusive term used to encompass a wide range of non-cisgender identities. First used in 1995 on an online Usenet forum, it entered common use in the early 21st century within activist, academic, and online communities. It was originally used to explicitly include both transgender and transsexual, but in modern use it is usually used as a more inclusive version of "trans", explicitly including identities such as genderqueer, agender, and genderfluid. The asterisk represents a wildcard, indicating the inclusion of various identities, beyond just transgender and transsexual, such as gender-fluid or agender, within the transgender umbrella. The use of the asterisk in trans* has been debated; some argue that it adds unnecessary complexity, while others say that it enhances inclusivity by explicitly recognizing non-normative gender identities. The term is incompatible with many common search engines such as Google because the "*" is interpreted as a wildcard character, yielding results with the "trans-" prefix instead of the literal trans*.