Wait, what does transgender even mean? Let’s break it down.
In the simplest terms, transgender is a label referencing any individual who identifies as a gender identity that is different from the one assigned to them at birth. This is in contrast to the label cisgender, which is given to individuals who identify as the same gender identity as the one they were born with.
“Transgender (adjective): of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth. Especially of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity is opposite to the sex the person was identified as having at birth.”
– The Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Key Takeaways
- Definitions Matter. Transgender describes anyone whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth, while cisgender refers to people whose gender identity aligns with their assigned sex.
- Transgender People Have Always Existed. Historical evidence shows gender diversity across cultures long before modern Western terminology.
- Evolution of Language. Use of the term transvestite began in 1910, but use of transgender wouldn’t be widespread until the 1990s.
Author’s Note: Transgender vs. Nonbinary
In the current age, transgender is the umbrella term that encompasses all identities for individuals who identify as something other than the gender assigned to them at birth. Nonbinary is a specific gender identity that is neither man nor woman.
Actually, nonbinary is also an umbrella term – but to keep things simple, it is a third gender that some people identify with rather than traditional gender identities like male and female.
Transgender and nonbinary are not the same thing; many nonbinary people (but not all) are transgender, but the majority of transgender people are not nonbinary.
Remember the definition for both terms. A nonbinary person CAN be transgender if they are assigned a gender identity like male or female at birth. On the other hand, a nonbinary person can also be cisgender if they are assigned and raised nonbinary. If that nonbinary person identifies as the gender identity they were assigned, they are cisgender.
A growing number of children are being raised without strict gender roles, which means they could end up as nonbinary and cisgender. In other parts of the world, this has happened for centuries, where third-gender identities have been allowed to flourish.
Before We Were Trans: Transgender Labels in the Pre-Modern Age
Transgender people have always existed, even though our terminology and understanding of gender identity are new.
Gender roles and expectations have existed for millennia, and some humans have always found ways to express themselves beyond their rigid boundaries.
Third-gender identities have been identified as early as 1800 BCE. Thailand and India have embodied kathoey and hijra identities for thousands of years. Khanith and mukhannathun have filled Arabia’s third-gender role since at least 600 CE. Africa and the Americas were home to thousands of third-gender identities, such as the nádleehi and lhamana.
With no other language available, we were pansies and dykes when we failed to conform in Christian-based societies that dominated Europe and global colonization. In society’s eyes, there was no reason to care about the nuanced differences between cisgender gay men and lesbians versus transgender people.
Despite this, there are still instances of those select occurrences when society did distinguish us. In the case of Thomas(ine) Hall, a genderfluid English colonist that would be described as intersex today, Governor John Pott determined Hall had a sex and gender of “dual nature.” Other figures, like Chevalière d’Éon, were simply referred to without any labels separating them based on their sex assigned at birth.
Cercle Hermaphroditos was formed in 1895, becoming the first known advocacy organization centered on trans-related identities. Its members described themselves as “instinctive female impersonators,” as well as androgynes, queens, fairies, and Uranians. All of these terms were commonplace in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but did not distinguish members of Cercle Hermaphroditos as different from effeminate but cisgender men.
The Golden Years of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld
Magnus Hirschfeld was an outspoken scholar during the Weimar Republic, Germany’s brief golden years that brought immense social freedoms to a repressed public. He was one of the most influential sexologists to ever exist, and his advocacy of LGBTQIA+ rights earned him the ire of the Nazi Party, which would exile Hirschfeld to France.
After founding the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (WhK or Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) to argue for the abolition of Paragraph 175, Hirschfeld found himself drawn to the study of “Zwischenstufenlehre,” or “sexual intermediaries” as early as 1899.
Despite the time, Hirschfeld believed humans possessed a spectrum of traits associated with masculinity and femininity. Instead, he argued that a small number of remarkable people were “sexual intermediaries” who transcended the binary identities assigned to them at birth. He considered Socrates, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare fell under this label, who are all figures understood now to be LGBTQIA+.
Continuing this work, Hirschfeld published a nearly 1,000-page study titled “Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb” in 1910. This is the first use of the term “transvestite,” and his book is still considered the most comprehensive treatise regarding transvestism. Based on the flawed understanding of sexology then, Magnus Hirschfeld grouped gender-nonconforming individuals we would describe as transgender today as the same as those who cross-dress due to erotic arousal.
Transvestite comes from the Latin roots “trans” and “vestire.” It literally means “to dress across” to reference cross-dressing. Today, transvestite overwhelmingly refers to individuals who cross-dress for sexual pleasure.
In 1919, Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), which was the world’s first sexology research center. The Institute focused on transgender healthcare and research, which performed the first instances of gender-affirming care via hormone replacement therapy and surgery. It also housed the world’s largest LGBTQIA+ library and contained research backing the Institute’s understanding of gender identity.
Hirschfeld gave a lecture on March 16, 1923, at the University of Berlin to discuss his understanding of sexual intermediates. Now transcribed as “Die Intersexuelle Konstitution,” Hirschfeld coined the term transsexualismus from the Latin roots of trans (across or beyond) and sexus (biological sex). In the same lecture, Hirschfeld also coined the distinction between transsexuality and intersexuality.
Transsexualismus would not be introduced into English until 1949, translated as the term transsexual. The linguistic change from previous terms like transvestite to this new one was an important one; it signified that individuals who truly identified as another gender identity were different from individuals who cross-dressed for sexual pleasure.
This separated understanding molded the trajectory of research related to gender identity, leading scholars to eventually deduce that transsexual identity was not a sex-based mental illness like pedophilia.
“If we follow intersexuality from homosexuality via gynandromorphic physicality and psychic transsexualism in both directions, we arrive in an incomplete constitutional series on the one hand at the preliminary stages of hermaphroditism, and on the other at the metatropic emotional attitude towards the opposite sex, aggression inversion.”
– Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, 1923. “Die Intersexuelle Konstitution”
Confused about the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation? Read this article for an introduction.
An Interesting Icon: Christine Jorgensen & Popularization of the Term Transsexual
David Oliver Cauldwell introduced the term transsexual into English in 1949 in his essay “Psychopathia Transexualis,” describing folks who experienced a “psychological sex” different from their “biological sex” assigned at birth. Harry Benjamin, another German sexologist and colleague of Magnus Hirschfeld, is alleged to be the first to publicly use the term in English during a 1957 lecture.
Together, Cauldwell and Benjamin popularized the term transsexual amongst the medical community. Until 2018, transsexual was the established term used to diagnose gender incongruence through the ICD-10.
For the most part, transsexual individuals were unknown by greater society. Similar to the status of transmasculine people today, the general lack of visibility had both positive and negative consequences. This changed when former WWII veteran Christine Jorgensen returned to the United States after recovering from sex reassignment surgery in Denmark.
Jorgensen is considered the first person widely known in the US for undergoing the operation. Her story became front-page news, making Christine an instant celebrity and novelty to the American public. At the time, she identified with the most available language of the period and described herself to numerous audiences as transsexual – although she would later prefer the term transgender upon its eventual popularization.
Following Jorgensen, a number of other transgender women received media attention, such as Delisa Newton, Charlotte Frances McLeod, Tamara Rees, and Marta Olmos Ramiro. However, none of these women were given positive spotlights since Christine was the “good transsexual” most appealing to American audiences.
A Post-Transsexual World
In “Sexual Hygiene and Pathology,” Dr. John Oliven proposed that the term transgender replace the use of transsexual in 1965. To Oliven, transsexuality led too many people to believe the identity related to sexuality under the then-modern understanding that sexuality had no bearing on one’s gender identity.
Despite the acceptance of major sexologists like Kinsey, Hirschfeld, and Benjamin, the medical community believed that transgender people ought to be heterosexual. To be transsexual was to be so gay that you wanted to be another gender. This belief is warped, although it still has some supporters amongst those who advocate that individuals “become transgender” to avoid being gay.
There are still people who believe transgender identity is a disorder and a sex-based kink. Although Oliven’s proposal would take decades to become popular, his argument helped push his colleagues away from the assumption that transgender people are sexual deviants.
Harry Benjamin, in his own right, was just as important to the trajectory of transgender rights. In 1966, Benjamin published “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” establishing the scale that would be later referred to as the Benjamin Scale and lead to the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care (now known as WPATH).
The Benjamin scale placed gender-nonconforming people into one of the following categories:
- Pseudo Transvestite
- Fetishistic Transvestite
- True Transvestite
- Nonsurgical Low-Intensity Transsexual
- Moderate-Intensity True Transsexual
- High-Intensity True Transsexual
What does it take to be a queen?
The 1960s brought a large number of terms to identify gender-nonconformativity – but these terms weren’t necessarily common. Terms like transsexual were considered medical and were not common labels that everyday individuals self-described as.
There is still contention on whether major figures in LGBTQIA+ history like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera would be classified as transgender. Unlike earlier predecessors, Johnson and Rivera technically existed during a time period when terms like transsexual existed during the Stonewall Riots and the creation of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
Even though it is widely known that Marsha used “she/her” pronouns and a feminine name in daily life, she did not identify as transsexual – she identified as a transvestite and drag queen.
In reality, few gender-conforming people identified with terms like transsexual or transgender until the 1990s and instead preferred to identify as drag performers or transvestites.
Even though it was a dangerous time to cross-dress, it was infinitely safer and more acceptable to be considered a cross-dressing transvestite or drag performer than to be authentically trans due to the legislative and societal landscape.
Most often, it was white individuals of the middle and upper classes who could identify as transsexual. People like Christine Jorgensen were able to afford the backlash that the medical and legal transition would cost.
For the rest of the transgender community, outward identity came at the cost of family and job opportunities. For working individuals, aligning with drag was the most feasible route to financial survival alongside sex work.
To be Transgenderal
For approximately half of her life, Virginia Prince identified as a heterosexual cross-dresser. This includes nearly the entire timeline of when Prince published “Transvestia,” a magazine aimed at trans-related individuals like Prince from 1960 to 1980.
In 1969, Prince described herself to readers as “transgenderal,” although she later changed this to “transgenderist” by 1978. Through her magazine, Prince helped popularize the term transgender amongst LGBTQIA+ and cross-dressing subcultures.
Like Oliven, Prince believed transgender identity had nothing to do with one’s sexual orientation. However, unlike Oliven, Prince asserted a different definition much more similar to ours today. According to Virginia, transgenderists were individuals who lived full-time as a chosen gender identity different from the one they were assigned at birth, but did not undergo genital surgery.
Ari Kane, another notable figure in the cross-dressing community, began identifying herself as transgenderist in 1976. It was through Kane’s close relationships with transvestites that she came to found Fantasia Fair, although the event was originally aimed towards heterosexual cross-dressers before its audience shifted towards transgender individuals. Like Prince, Kane helped popularize the term transgender amongst the subcultures she frequented.
By 1974, there was enough support to establish the TV.TS Conference in the United Kingdom. The conference followed the previous International Symposium on Gender Identity in 1969, but was the predecessor to other important conferences like Southern Comfort.
The general mission of TV.TS was to establish awareness amongst community members regarding legal and medical rights. By the end of the conference, TV.TS was most known for cementing the fundamental differences between transgender, transsexual, and transvestite communities. As the transvestite community drifted away from LGBTQIA+ identities and towards kink circles, transgender and transsexual identities became more uniform over the next decade.
Trans: A New Umbrella
By the 1990s, transgender began to become the dominant identity label as the distinction between transgender and transsexual faded. Transgender also functioned as an umbrella term, covering many small identities like transmasculine, transfeminine, nonbinary, genderqueer, demigender, bigender, and others.
There are still individuals who identify as transsexual today. All transsexual people are transgender, but not all transgender people are transsexual.
- Transsexual individuals seek medical interventions as part of their transition or gender affirmation journey. This can include any range of procedures, such as hormone replacement therapy or surgeries.
- Transgender individuals refer to anyone who identifies as a gender different than the one assigned to them at birth. Compared to transsexual people, transgender individuals do not inherently want medical transition.
Since the 1990s, the transgender label hasn’t significantly changed. Regardless, language is fluid and constantly evolving – so remember that today’s definitions are not inherently tomorrow’s answers.