Could folks help me out with a terminology question, please?
I was working on a document a while ago and I used the term “trans-gendered”. One of my colleagues said she thought the trans community prefers the term “trans-gender”, but neither one of us was sure.
We want to be respectful and use the appropriate term; is one of these terms preferred, or can either be used?
Thanks for your help.
I don’t believe there is a strong consensus either way.
Transgender. No hyphen.
It’s how Johanna says if you refer to “transgender.”
“Transgender” is an umbrella term which some in the community object to, because it is used to lump together everyone from drag queens to intersex transpeople. Transsexuals such as myself mildly object to excessive grouping under the umbrella, for the reason that our lives, experiences, trials, and barriers are so much more different than the majority under that big umbrella.
As I put it in a lecture I gave recently at a University:
“Transgender” is mostly correct, especially if you are referring to a mixed group, but if you are referring specifically to a group of transsexuals, please refer to us as such. The truth is few will nitpick on it, and some transsexual women prefer the word “transgender” because it’s more common and sounds less related to “sex.” The word “transsexual” sometimes sounds “racy” to the sort of people who titter nervously at the words “titmouse” or “woodcock.”
IMO and that of every intersex person I’ve met, don’t include intersex (and it’s not “intersexed”) persons under either grouping. Intersex people feel very strongly about this. I’m intersex but my condition is mild enough I am happy to be referred to as either, but almost always call myself transsexual.
A friend who is transgender tells me that “transgender” is preferred to “transgendered” because “transgendered” suggests a focus on something that happened to the person, as opposed to an identity. She treats “transgendered” as an incorrect word.
However, I recently read a couple of excellent collections of essays – “Gender Outlaws: the Next Generation” by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, and “Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue” by Leslie Feinberg. Unless I remember wrong, both collections include multiple authors who refer to themselves as “transgendered”. And, certainly, there are pages out there on the web written by people who refer to themselves as “transgendered”. I do get the impression that “transgender” is generally preferred and “transgendered” tends to be a little old fashioned, but there’s variability in the fairly current usages.
Disclaimer: Una Persson has more command of the topic than I do (not that I’m aware we’re disagreeing).
Your recollection is correct, and “transgendered” used to be considered correct. Shoot, I used to use it all the time. But nowadays “transgender” is considered more grammatically correct.
Most of the online places I hang out have stuck with trans*. No idea how one’d pronounce that.
Thanks for the replies everyone - very helpful!
I’ve seen the trans* usage as well - with so much diversity, it’s a helpful short-hand orthography that seeks to be inclusive, while suggesting that there is diversity that shouldn’t just be lumped together.
Yep. ^This.
I don’t call myself transgender. I just call myself woman and that’s that. My personal medical history is no one else’s business.
Within and among the trans community, one to another, they just say “trans.” The full word *transgender *is what the cisgender people are used to hearing from their perspective outside the issue, and generally people who speak for the trans community to the general public will use the longer word. If you follow the emic/etic paradigm, “transgender” is the etic term, while “trans” (or simply “man” or woman") is emic.
Bornstein and Feinberg do not speak for transsexual people at all. They don’t believe anybody should be a man or a woman and are pushing for everybody to be genderqueer. I like Feinberg’s writings in that Feinberg is a serious thinker with a Marxist historical analysis of the phenomenon, though I strongly disagree with Feinberg’s insistence that you should be neither man nor woman. Bornstein, however, is just a clown.
I’d guess “transgender”, since my gender is male. I’m not “gendered” as male.
I see a surprising number of parallel in the cis/trans/genderqueer camps as I do in the racial diversity camps. In both cases you have largely arbitrary classifications of people (though I’d argue gender is perhaps slightly less arbitrary than race), and one camp with privilege. I see the cis-driven* “let’s abolish gender” camp as fundamentally parallel to the white-driven “I don’t see color/I don’t see you as black” camp. It’s well meaning, but it’s ultimately offensive. It’s saying “I don’t want to see you as how you are”. And perhaps more offensive, in many cases it’s saying “I don’t see you how you want to be seen.”
Now, yes the classifications are in large part arbitrary. And maybe we can argue for an ideal endstate in 5000 years where we openly recognize people’s skin color and have gotten rid of race, and happily let people have whatever organs, bodytypes, and mannerisms they choose but have abolished hard gender classification. But we don’t live in that society, we live in a society where, arbitrary or not, these classifications have meaning. And denying people basic things like their gender identity or race is itself a denial of their place in society and in many cases a denial of the issues they face.
I don’t want to go too hard on a lot of these people because they are often well-meaning, but I think it’s a potentially harmful, misguided type of well meaning.
Interesting. I didn’t know this but will proceed accordingly.