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This week’s Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Gender. Here is the definition we will be using so everyone can use the same terminology.
Here are some questions that should help kickstart things:
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Why do you feel it started entering public consciousness in regards to humans about 15 years ago?
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Was it needed?
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Did it do what it was intended to do?
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Are things better or worse now in that specific area?
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Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about the idea of gender?
I am a cis dude, but I had asked a friend who is trans about why the term moved away from “transsexual”. She said that not everyone is able, or wants, to do the surgeries to change the sex organs, so “Transgendered” would apply to people that “Transsexual” didn’t.
There was a point in her life when she was male (both in gender role and physical sex) and now she fits into the gender role of being a woman. To the best of my knowledge, she hadn’t done bottom surgery, so she technically hadn’t changed her physical sex.
You then run into groups who say that people need to go through all the medical procedures before they are “really” trans, which opens up a lot of in-fighting. “Transmedicalist” is the non-derogatory term for this group. This hits a linguistical place where “trans” isn’t really meaning the pre-fix “across”, but is being used to describe people in the trans community.
(Please don’t read my comments as aggressive, because I’m not meaning them that way; I appreciate this discussion.)
Yeah, so it expanded the group it applied to while making the term less functional.
I get why they’d want the term (because then you’d fit in with a pre-established group), but I disagree that it should apply that broadly. I suppose that “transgender” would apply to that case you listed above for lack of a better term, because it still enforces some kind of binary on the behaviour, and I don’t really see there being a functional binary except in media.
Words are wonderful and descriptive when you know how to use them and I’ve always felt that there is no perfect synonym for most. Broadly applying specific terms has always felt like a dumbing-down to me and I feel it only hurts discussion and understanding. I wish we created more terminology for edge cases instead of breaking specificity to apply to everything.
Most people I know who are not cis use “trans” or “trans/non-binary” as an umbrella term for “not cis”, and they generally don’t use either “transgender” or “transsexual”. This continues the “Trans meaning the group of people, and not specifically the pre-fix” school of thought, which I think is interesting.
I think that English stopped being wonderful and perfectly self-descriptive once contronyms came into being. But it’s still fun to look up how/when/why words change over time. It can be a better look into culture than a lot of history books.