Transgender

Transgender

Introduction

A significant development in conceptualizations about transexuality has been the development during the 1990s of the term ' transgender. ' The phrase, adopted from a usage coined by Virginia Prince, originally signified a person who chose to live full time in a nonassigned gender without surgical or, in some cases, without hormonal interventions. While ' transgender ' is still often opposed to 'transexual' in this sense, it has become more frequently used as a collective term to describe a range of disparate groups which had previously been seen as distinct: transexuals, transvestites or crossdressers, drag queens, and even intersex people. Other terms, such as Richard Ekins's male-femaling' or Judith Halberstam's 'female masculinity,' have been proposed in the social science literature as a way of analyzing this range of people who cross or transgress gendered boundaries. However,' transgender ' has increasingly become the accepted generic term.

The category ' transgender ' arose primarily in the northeastern and western United States (New York and California) in the early 1990s as a way of achieving a diverse set of political, social, and cultural goals: the depathologization of gender difference in psychiatric and popular discourses, the recognition of gender variant people as a political constituency and a social group, and the achievement of social justice around such issues as exposure to violence and discrimination. In the brief years since then, ' transgender ' has become ubiquitous in progressive community-based organizations, identity-based political movements, popular media accounts, international human rights discourses, academic debates, cross-cultural descriptions of gender difference, and is even finding its way into medical discourses, the very discourses that ' transgender ' has been opposed to. Like transgender, 'transexual' with a one 's' spelling (the usage we adopt here), was coined by activists in opposition to medical categories, as in the New York-based direct action group 'Transexual Menace.' Other linguistic innovations abound, including formulations like 'transmen' or 'transwomen,' 'transcommunities' or 'person of transgender/ transexual experience,' all of which attempt to describe phenomena without being constrained by standard medical terms(Henry Tischler 2006)

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The collectivity of ' transgender ' also takes into account complexities of lived identities and experiences in a way that medical categories such as 'transsexual' or 'transvestite' do not. While DSM diagnostic criteria, for example, insist that transvestism is particular to heterosexual men, in fact self-identified heterosexual women, lesbians, and gay men also engage in erotic cross-dressing. Likewise, the line between cross-dressers and transexuals is not clearly drawn, nor is the line between butch lesbians and transmen. A cross-dresser or transvestite, who in psychiatric diagnostic criteria is a heterosexual man who cross-dresses for erotic pleasure, may also take hormones, and in some cases, transition to live full-time as a woman. ' Transgender ' is useful, therefore, in bringing together a range of individuals who share an experience of gender variance.

Discussion

However, ' transgender ' as a category is not without its complexities either. While some activists use it in the collective sense described above which includes postoperative transexuals, others insist on the narrower ...