Transgender And Transgender

For many decades the terms Transsexuals and Transgender were used interchangeably for each other in regards to labeling and describing people that did not identify as one of the two genders, as male or female. The term transsexual first came into usage as a result of the work of Harry Benjamin in the early 1950 's to describe people who wanted to change their bodies to match their representation of self through gender. He wrote The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966, in which he explored the various views of transgender and transsexual folks in the medical world. “The challenge lies in the novelty of these observations and in the attempt to describe clinical pictures and events without preconceived notions, with no axes to grind, and with

“Given our cultural rules for identifying gender (i.e, there are only two and that masculinity is assumed in the absence of evidence to the contrary)” (Lucal, 1999). The binary being defined as the heterosexual normative and cis-gender categories of societal norms in which the pre-assumption and narrative is that your gender, male or female, defines your attraction to the opposite gender. Through this social construct we learn to “read people’s gender by learning rules that enables us to classify individuals with a wide range of gender presentations into two and only two gender categories” (Kessler and McKenna, 1978). Furthermore, the pre-assumption of the binary, relegates the categories of sexual preference and gender to be defined by each other, although it is understood for the most part in academia that “sex and gender are something distinct, and that gender is something that we do” (Lucal, 1999). This distinction is important to acknowledge because the idea that sex and gender are intrinsically intertwined is outdated, but still often believed to be true throughout mainstream audiences. “The assumption affects not only our perception, but individuals’ senses of their own gendered self.” (Lucal, 1999). This then creates problematic ideologies surrounding sexual politics and the self, the self being that of the gender or non-gender that you

Transgender is a western concept that describes individuals that do not identify with the assigned gender at birth. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Identity that does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these.” This definition became mainstream and is the preferred definition by many, however it is still problematic for some. There is a common misconception that every person that identifies as transgender wants to transition, because of this misguided ideology transgender folks end up having their bodies medicalized and abnormalized without valid