Regarding Transgender

Crossdressing definitely doesn't immediately fall under the trans umbrella. If I got up now and went to put on a dress, that doesn't make me transgender - it just means I'm a male wearing a dress. To say that this makes them transgender would also mean that you'd have to classify something like a female mechanic or a male florist as also being transgender because those jobs are stereotyped as belonging to male and females respectively. Permeating gender norms doesn't mean you are transgender, it simply means you are permeating gender norms.

I can see where they are coming from in a purely literary perspective - these things are going across (i.e. trans) stereotypical gender roles, so if we were speaking Latin this would be correctly labelled transgender - however we are speaking English, not Latin, and here transgender is used for a specific application referring to people whose outward gender isn't the same as their birth gender or sex.

I'm not sure on the whole transgender/transexual front, but if I got my way I wouldn't call anyone a transexual. It implies a change in sex, which means you've changed your cell's sex chromosomes, which hasn't happened in humans yet. Your biological sex means jack all anyway because these days it only determines whether you produce egg or sperm cells - everything else falls under gender and gender expression.

 

Hmm... in my experience, crossdressers and drag kings/queens do come under the term transgender. I may have just picked it up somewhere, but that's generally what I've heard. Transsexual is a term to actually mean those who identify with the gender opposite the one assigned at birth and is a sub-category of "transgender".

As for whether the term "transsexual" is fitting or not, most trans* people go about editing their secondary sex characteristics. Whilst it's not complete, it does involve changing many things about your sex, so I think the term is perfectly valid. Plus, it's not like we need another word for when we do have the technology for people to perfectly change sex.

 

I'm no expert on trans issues, but I think you got it mostly right. Just one thing:

Not always. Transgender includes anyone who does not identify as their birth gender. Most of these people identify as the opposite gender, but some identify as some non-binary gender category, such as agender.

 

Oh man the semantics.

I mean don't get me wrong. Sometimes labels just are important to me. If someone is dancing around using certain words around me, it's a pretty strong sign they just are not trying to see me for who I am. Which is cool for 99% of the people out there. Hey I don't want to get to know you guys either. But the people I care about and am close to, some labels can really be just a PA way to get me to drop all this silliness and "go back to being a man" as they see it. So I'm bold enough to correct people some times if I'm in a situation where I'm obviously trying to appear female, which is something I wouldn't do if labels didn't matter at all.

But here things are kinda hard. Two things about language is one, it's fluid. Definitions just plain change over time. Even in dictionaries. And two, at any point in time a word still definitely needs to mean something. That's why we have dictionaries.

So I'm going to pull what I think comes the closest to a dictionary definition, because a lot of people in my position visit a site called Laura's Playground. They aren't the be all and and all, but I think it's where a lot of transgendered and transsexual people will get their definitions from because it's an awesome site, so there's a good shot at them being common use. So here's their definition of transgendered and transsexual.

So in English what that means to me, is that transgender includes all us fruity fruits, and transsexual just includes people that identify as something other than their birth gender.

I don't think there is any common experience where you can say "oh that person is a transsexual". I think any kind of definition that way is going to be wrong, because we all have really different experiences. But I think there are some experiences that people that already know they're born in the wrong body share.

So I'm not trying to define things with this, just give some context. But one thing I've noticed a lot of us people that pursue changing our physical sex have in common is, if we were given a magic lamp, I'm pretty sure I know what one of our wishes would be. A lot of us have prayed at night to wake up members of the opposite sex. Kind of embarrassing for rational scientific minded me, but there was a time when I was a teenager I turned to wiccan magic and other kinds of magic to try to fix the problem. We've all got a little bit of desperation, and I think the reason for that is because the steps we have to go through to change our physical sex the "right" way are just incredibly hard. It's almost more realistic that you'll find a genie.

That said I do have an experience that defines transsexual to me though. I mean other people that aren't transsexuals, some of their experiences are still gonna bleed over and there's going to be common ground. It's like frogs and tadpoles, it's gonna get hard to call it one or the other when it's halfway through and it's got a long tail and little legs and is just taking its first little cracks at leaving the water. But I think that's what defines transsexual for me, when you can look at someone and say "that's definitely a frog, not a tadpole". To me it means there's a feeling there's something really wrong with your body and the way people are interacting with you, and you learn to hide these feelings from the world and be ashamed of yourself, until one day you don't and who you are starts to shine through again.

I think I'm careful that my definition includes people who are simply too poor or don't have the option of transition. It's really painful, but in the third world a lot of those people become sex workers or worse This isn't a first world problem, it's just got a good first world solution. I think that makes my definition a lot different from some other people's though, because many of us define "transsexual" as someone that is actually taking steps toward transition. Which I mean is a valid definition; it is just a word after all. But it's not my definition or what I mean when I use the word.

To me transsexual just means mother nature gave you a blueprint for a castle and then turned around and asked you to build a sports car.

 

I completely agree with this. Thanks hon (*hug*)

 

I hate the term transsexual. So I refer to myself and others exclusively as transgender. As for what they actually mean, transsexual means someone who IDs as something other that their assigned birth sex, and has either transitioned, is transitioning, or intends to. FTM, MTF and neutrois. Transgender refers to all non-cis identities.

 

I'm surprised Transvestites haven't been mentioned: Transvestites are people who crossdress for sexual arousal.

 

So here be politics.

Some people get offended by the word transvestite because it's been in the DSM-IV, and like many conditions in the DSM-IV, it carries a stigma itself and has been used in the past to prevent transsexual women from getting medical help. Now those days are a long time behind us and things are getting better. But even then, because it refers to a sexual fetish, many people who identify as men but enjoy female gender expression (clothes, etc) feel like the term is offensive. The word "transvestite" is used about as often as the word "hermaphrodite". The terms people usually use now are "crossdresser" and "intersex".

Of course a lot of people are comfortable calling themselves transvestites. But I think one of the original goals when the terms transgender and trans* came into use, was to solve problems like this, so that no group felt left out or offended.

 

If we are to assert that society is what defines gender than the notion that there are psychological differences between the sexes hypothesis, then we are to conclude that anyone who breaks gender roles are in fact a transgender themselves in spite of the observation that many of those who falls under transgender don't really identify as the opposite sex. Furthermore, if we are to test the psychological differences between the sexes, then transgenderism is only valid if there is no overlap between the scores of males and females instead of looking at averages as that's not disputed. The test has been done and data presented by Bobbi Carothers & Harry Reis reveals overlap between males and females which can be used as evidence against the psychological gender theory, but there needs to be follow-up studies in order to confirm the fact that there is no psychological studies. Regarding brain studies, it seems like many of the transgenderism studies are flawed due to improper comparisons which can be observed of age differences, different orientations, and lack of consideration for time of treatments' effects. If there was major differences between males and females brains, then there would be major differences of psychological behaviors and even in the education field, but we don't have convincing evidences that suggests males and females have major differences which would provide support for the gender theory.

So what I'm exactly to conclude regarding my observation as a outsider of lgbtq, it is possible that there are differences between the sexes that would support gender theory, but it appears that either sides of the boat has it own sets of conclusion which already have been supported by datas, but neither one of them has a convincing set of data that would support their position. It seems like I cannot conclude anything at all if I cannot see which ones I should support based on datas only instead of feelings. So what exactly can transgenderism be?

 

My child was born male but identifies as female and wishes to complete the transition surgically and with hormone replacement therapy. She uses the term transgender to describe herself, therefore thar is how I refer to her situation. I say if you don't know how someone wishes to be referred to, just ask! These terms seem to be very confusing, sometimes overlapping, and even have evolved into different definitions over the years. The joy of the English language, right? There are so many cruel words which are used to describe people as well. It seems transsexual has become almost a dirty word. We may never get this mess figured out. I don't call my child a transsexual, I call her Marcie. I think society labels us enough, dontcha think?