Don't Call Me Trans
We are fighting our fight all wrong. We have accepted the terms of battle, of our very existence, from those who seek to demean us, reduce us to insignificance, to erase us from society. It’s time to stop and it starts with the way we define ourselves.
To begin with: Why do we continue to call ourselves “transgender?” By definition, the prefix “trans” connotes a change from one form to another. That is patently untrue of anybody in our community. By putting the prefix of “trans” before my gender, a transformation is implied. And in truth, none has.
I AM a woman and have been as long as I can remember. I have been one since birth, despite the anatomical indicators otherwise. Nothing about me changed. And I wasn’t any less a woman when I didn’t present so outwardly than now when I do. Taking hormonal supplements or having surgery or the wearing of traditionally female clothing, doesn’t make anybody MORE of their true gender. Doing so simply makes a person more comfortable in their skin.
Historically, the prefix of “trans” was first employed in a speech by the noted German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in 1923. The actual term he created was "transsexualismus," and in a translation of his own words, he used it to describe: “the preliminary stages of hermaphroditism.”
While Hirschfeld was a pioneer in “transgender” research and healthcare (Lili Elbe, one of the first recipients of gender-affirming surgery, was treated by Hirschfeld), the term “transsexual” evolved, but was never clearly defined until Dr. Harry Benjamin did so in the 1950s.
Americans were still trying to wrap their heads around the story of Christine Jorgensen, the young GI, who after WWII went to Denmark and had gender-affirming surgery. Upon her return to the United States in December 1952, Jorgensen became headline news. Not long after, Benjamin—who eventually became Jorgensen’s doctor—started using “transsexual” in various scientific papers he had written. Officially, it wasn’t until his groundbreaking book, The Transsexual Phenomenon*, came out in 1966 that the term was fully adopted into the popular lexicon.*
Around the same time, Dr. John F. Oliven wrote Sexual Hygiene and Pathology (1965), which argued that “transsexual” was a medically incorrect. He postulated that “the concept of sexuality could not account for the ‘all consuming belief that [transsexuals] are women who by some incredible error were given the bodies of men’”
It was only a few years later that Virginia Prince, a crossdresser, wrote: “I, at least, know the difference between sex and gender, and have simply elected to change the latter and not the former. If a word is necessary, I should be termed a 'transgenderal." But her concept of a “transgenderism” was “a middle ground between the episodic cross-dressing of the transvestite and the permanent genital transformation of the transsexual.”
By the 1990s, “transgender” took precedence and generally replace “transsexual” in common usage.
But realistically, why do we need special defining? Cisgender men and women don’t usually preface their gender with the “cis” prefix. In fact, many cisgender people bristle whenever someone refers to them in that way.
In a sense, it’s a numbers game. Just because most people describe themselves as “someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth,” as Merriam-Webster would have it, why should I acquiesce to their numerical dominance and declare myself as someone whose internal sense of gender does NOT correspond to my assigned sex at birth?
Of course, I get it. Early sexologists, psychiatrists, and other medical professionals, were trying to understand body dysphoria and they searched for a way of putting that into words. We have moved far beyond their misunderstanding, though. And now, medicine generally accepts that some people are born with this inherent incongruity between their inner and outer selves.
If we could get all of society to accept this concept, it would not only change the conversation about our community, but it would eliminate most transphobic arguments.
Instead of fretting about “biological men” participating in women’s sports as “transgender women,” they would be seen as women, period. Same with using restrooms or any other space our presence invites unrealistic fears.
It all starts with us. We have to train ourselves to drop the prefix of “trans” from our description. If we wish to define ourselves, let’s adopt the term “gender-affirmed,” or “true-genderdc,” or a similar, proper descriptive.
The same should go for the term, “deadname.” That word has always bothered me since it carries a negative connotation. While I consider my past life living as a perceived cisgender man as separate from my current gender-affirmed life, it’s wrong to think of it as “dead.” I have too many good memories linked to those years to think of them in such nihilistic terms. I prefer to use “chosen name.” It’s philosophically neutral and demonstrably true.
I know this is all a big ask. The word and concept of being “transgender” is so fixed that usurping it and dropping it completely will be a long road. Doing so, however, comes with so many benefits, not the least of which is our taking back our self-description from old school medical terms and current transphobes who seek to accentuate our otherness.
I am a woman and I have been one since birth. No qualifier needed. I may not have always had the opportunity to express it, and how I express it may differ from you, but it is my birthright. And nobody has the right to take that away from me.
--- 𝓐𝓷𝓷𝓲 🏳️⚧️