It’s time to bring clarity to the confusion surrounding the word “transgender”. Leslie Feinburg’s original intention behind it was honourable: it was to unite all people oppressed by cis-heteronormative gender constructs, people who do not neatly fit into the social constructs of what a “man” or a “woman” is supposed to be, under a single umbrella term. It was meant to bring us together, to unite everyone constrained or punished because they didn’t neatly fit the social constraints of how to be men or women. The goal was solidarity: to recognise that we are all, in different ways and with different core experiences, targeted by the same mechanisms of exclusion and control.
Over time this meaning has been completely lost. It has left us with division, a lack of curiosity about each other and our personal experiences. It has become the antithesis of community, and anchor for division, with many people rejecting it, refusing to be “defined” by it, and closing us all off from connection, from understanding, from compassion, and from curiosity.
“Transgender” in and of itself is fundamentally a description of all gender apostates. Those for whom “traditional” gender roles and constructs do not neatly fit. I use the word “apostate” in its literal sense, someone who steps outside an orthodoxy, not a heretic to be condemned. It includes butch lesbians, fem-boys, transsexuals, gender-performers, not by “who they are”, not by their intimate and personal experiences, not by sexuality, not by the painful experience of gender dysphoria, not by the joyous experience of gender euphoria. None of that. It describes the way all of the above are oppressed. It is a description of a shared experience of oppression.
That shift, from shared resistance to personal identity, created the modern definition you’ll now find in a search engine. Somewhere across time, “transgender” came to also mean:
“Transgender is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth”.
This is, fundamentally, how and why tensions exist among gender apostates, and now it is more important than ever to understand that “transgenderism” is actually equivalent to the term “oppressionism”. Transgender was never intended to be a shared description of a personal journey. It was never meant to be about hormones or surgery, or being a trans man, a trans woman, or non-binary. All of those things are unique; they are all deeply personal, steeped in pain, exclusion, ostracism, erasure and systematic violence. To say “I am transgender” is not to say “I want to change my body with hormones and surgery” it is nothing to do with “identifying differently with the sex assigned at birth” because a butch lesbian may well identify as their sex at birth and yet still be oppressed by the same constructs, the same pressure to conform to what a “woman” should be. A feminine heterosexual man or masculine heterosexual woman equally so.
It does not describe the pain of physical dysphoria. It is not a definition of people who change their bodies with hormones and surgery. It is not the “trans” as in transsexual. It is simply a description of all of us who are affected, all of us who are punished for gender nonconformity.
I am deeply pained by the way in which this has been lost, how a word so intentionally meant to be inclusive has been forgotten, how oppression became an identity, and how its antonym, “gender ideology” has been weaponised to persecute the minority of people who change their bodies with hormones and surgery.
The fractures between people, made by the change in meaning of the term, are wounds that will take time to heal. Endless friction isolated people meant to share understanding about the roots of our oppression. Arguments about “tucute”, “trans-trender”, “tru-trans” and “trans medicalism” are mindlessly harmful. “True-transsexual” (or “true-trans”) draws from the medicalised model of transition, framing “transsexualism” as a clinical condition marked by dysphoria and a desire for medical transition. “Tucute” originated as a slang label used pejoratively by people who felt that some newer trans and non-binary identities were trivialising or erasing dysphoria and transsexual experience. Misunderstanding and animosity grew exponentially over those terms, and divided people experiencing a great deal of distress and pain, all of whom deserving to be heard, and to be held.
What is lost within this friction and animosity is the shared understanding of the way that we are oppressed. Transgender is far from being a description of our unique, personal, and often painful but sometimes joyful experiences. That, you can only find by holding each other with tenderness, with a deep understanding of a shared experience of oppression.
So where do we go from here? Well, maybe by inserting a colon. “Trans:gender”. Trans describing those who physically transition, gender describing everyone who has experienced oppression for not performing femininity or masculinity “properly”, all who have been punished and excluded by it.
I’m deeply saddened that a word once meant to connect us now divides us. For everyone hurt by misunderstanding, may we find again the curiosity, compassion, tenderness, and love that make connection possible.
