Transgender

Lore & Background

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 (coined in 1923), 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 LGBTQ 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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

Reader's Guide

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 (for example, sex reassignment surgery) 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 (for some people) but a category imposed by observers to understand other people. According to the Transgender Health Program (THP) 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.