Understanding the Transgender Community: A Deep Dive

Completely understanding the transgender community can be difficult if one is not part of, or know someone within, the community. Today 's society and mainstream media has very little to no accurate representation of the transgender community for those unaware of its existence. This oversight is mainly due to years of systemic discrimination, erasure, and oppression by both society and its governing bodies. Although there has been a dramatic upswing in support for the transgender community and a call for more education on the matter in recent years, there are still many instances of discrimination people within the community face that prevent them from being completely equal to those outside of the community. But to fully understand the transgender community, what it means to be transgender, and the amount of discrimination they face, one must first learn the terms and definitions associated with, and used by, the community. The most important being the difference between a person 's gender and a person 's sex, since the two are not interchangeable.

A person transitioning, the process of changing their outer appearance to better fit their true innate gender expression, from appearing male-bodied and living male-bodied to appearing and living as female-bodied is MTF. They are transgender women. A person transitioning from appearing and living as female-bodied to male-bodied are FTM and are transgender men. Genderqueer is a person identifying as a gender not traditionally found on the male and female binary. This includes various gender identities such as agender, Two Spirit, pangender, bigender, and genderfluid. The concept of more than two possible gender identities and using gender labels outside of the gender binary is gaining more and more popularity among transgender youth and will rarely be seen or used by older generations of the