I think I’m more informed on this than 99% of people, but I’m not even sure what TERF means.
I think there is a sort of private elevated club thing going on here.
Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. The kind of person who calls herself a feminist, but only supports the rights of women born with vaginas.
Again, only in the minds of the lunatic fringes of the trans and anti-trans communities. 99.9999% of usage is a completely neutral descriptor.
Or perhaps they see that the trans issues tend to actually be about fixatation on extremely strict gender roles, or hewing to a strict gender binary…I’m just waiting to be told that telling a trans person, that you CAN have those feelings and be male/female or whatever gender is transphobic…Kate Bornstien had SRS…thought s/he wanted to be a female…Guess what? Gender is a LOT more complex and complciated…yet trans people want to make it all black and white
Two serious questions.
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What is the difference between “Trans” and “Trans *” (and the similar designations with and without an asterisk)? I assume this must be common enough knowledge that it wasn’t explained, but I couldn’t search on that, with the asterisk being a wild-card character and all.
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Is “two-spirit” really considered a gender? I have met a couple of people who defined themselves as two-spirit–including a former girlfriend–but they didn’t use the term to define their gender, only their…state of mind, consciousness, what you might want to call it. So my ex referred to herself as a “pansexual two-spirited woman”, and most of the two-spirit literature she loaned me referred to “female two-spirit” and “male two-spirit” persons. I realize that the term is a bit obscure–when I looked it up on the internet I found it was mainly used by Native Canadian nations and by a certain subset of LGBT New Age types–but its inclusion in the list made me wonder.
While you’re entitled to feel proud about your broadmindedness on this issue, you should also recognize that this sort of lofty indifference is much easier for us cisgender heterosexuals than for many other groups, due to society being biased in favor of our preferences.
We can afford to sneer at gender-identity politics precisely because our gender identities are automatically assumed in our culture to be “normal” and “natural”, and we don’t have to confront visceral social disapproval about them. If you’d spent much of your adolescent years getting beat up and mocked specifically because you identified as a male attracted to pretty redheaded women, I think you’d realize that “building your politics around” such an identity isn’t so absurd after all.
You and I don’t bother “building our politics” around our gender identity or sexual orientation because, as cisgender heterosexuals, we get the advantages of a pre-built political framework that already approves those categories.
I may not be the best the answer this, but my understanding is that “Trans” is a singular identifier for a person who is not current the gender they were born as (Usage: “Jane is Trans”, thus implying that while she is female she was born as male).
“Trans*” is an umbrella term to encompass people whose gender identity is not what they were born as (Usage: “We’re starting a support group for Trans* persons”, thus implying the group is for transmen, transwomen, and a variety of other groups).
As long as we’re at it “Cis” is a prefix used to indicate you were born as the gender you currently present as (Usage: “Barry is a cisman”, thus implying that Barry was born male and still identifies as such).
WTF?
If you’re asking what “MTF” stands for, it’s “Male to Female”. I’m not sure there’s a difference between MTF and transwoman other than terminology.
56 different types of sexual beings is really no big deal, considering there are over 7 billion of us. Now how about we be allowed to be more than 16 types of human beings (actually two main types: introvert and extrovert)
MTF, probably male to female transsexual?
I’m not sure that’s it; the Google list includes pairs such as Trans Woman and Trans* Woman, and Trans Man and Trans* Man, suggesting there is a specific difference between Trans and Trans* and that Trans* isn’t simply an umbrella term.
I did say I may not be the best person to ask 
It also lists MTF and FTM, which as far as I can tell are synonymous with transwoman and transman. I think trans*woman is just another synonym. Why there are so many I do not know.
Nope , sorry. I think it’s a perjoritve, even.
Sorry, mate. But the definition of a pejorative isn’t ‘word DrDeth doesn’t like for some reason’, it’s based on actual usage of the word, and in actual usage of the word, it’s no more a slur than ‘man’, ‘American’, ‘woman’ and so forth are.
Yes, you can find actual uses of ALL of those words used as actual insults…but, in all of those cases, the general usage is entirely neutral, and the use as an insult is an outlier created by an insane fringe.
For what it’s worth, I completely disagree, and on boards far more concerned with PC-ness than this one, “cis” is a preferred term, so the idea that it’s a pejorative is completely bonkers to me.
To paraphrase Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be white, male, straight, middle-age, and middle-class.”
But 56 terms? With 25 variations on “trans?” I wasn’t joking when I called it a Southern-Baptist degree of splintering.
Fine for self-identity, but a political negative if taken to extremes. I’m a lumper, not a splitter, because I watched, and participated in, some of the largest political movements of the past 50 years, and saw that movements were more effective the more unified they were. The civil rights movement became more effective when it unified, mostly, behind Dr King. The anti-Vietnam War “movement” was only a bunch of isolated groups that constantly bickered with each other, and only took off when some political leaders started talking about some of the same things.
OTOH, my inner (and outer) Grumpy Old Wobbly is coming around about Pride Parades because they are accompanied by a general shift in attitudes among the young and very young. It seems like more people, including the people on the news, are laughing with the participants rather than at them, but some things still make me cringe because I see them as playing to, not just with, some people’s prejudices. Including, I assume, mine.
And thank you, faithfool. That meaning for “Q” makes a lot more (inoffensive) sense because it’s, to me as the arbiter of all that is simple and sensible, a logical splinter. A good design reduces the parts count to a bare minimum, but you still need some parts. Which, now that I think about it, may be one reason 56 different classifications “offends” me so. As an engineer I am offended by bloat–why use three different screw sizes if, when you do it right, you can make it work with one?
I would hazard a guess that there are so many terms because each person comes to accept their orientation and gender identity in their own way and in their own time - which is no mean feat, given the challenges they face - and so they each end up at a preferred ‘label’ to place themselves under. Even if some of them are synonyms, some people may view the alternatives as pejoratives because of the abuse they’ve endured. Or they may want to ‘reclaim’ the offensive ones.
We’re getting way out of GQ territory here, but I think you seem to be mixing up diversity of nomenclature with political fragmentation. I’m not up on current gender-ID-minority-group politics, and I’m sure that there may well be subgroups pointlessly bickering with each other about how to define their identities. However, that has jack-diddly to do with how people should be able to identify themselves as individuals on Facebook.
To follow up on your religious-sect analogy, while it may indeed sometimes be politically counterproductive for small sects to squabble over endless schismatic changes in nomenclature, it’s nobody else’s right to “reduce their parts count to a bare minimum” when it comes to how they choose to describe themselves. It might gratify your lumping engineer’s soul to have the possible options in a “religious denomination” category reduced to, say, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Other; but it would not be appropriate to impose that “bare-minimum” framework on other people’s self-identification.
If you’re going to give people a list of possible choices to describe themselves, that list should reflect how different people actually do describe themselves, not some minimalist taxonomy of how you think they ought to describe themselves.