What are your opinions on using transgender vs using transexual? Ive been seeing more trans feminine people use transexual to refer to themselves these days and I thought I had it figured out but im confused. Originally, how i saw it was transphobic dolls trying to distance themselves from the rest of the transgender community at large. But the more i read about trans theory and talk to trans women, im finding more and more “cool” trans women calling themselves transexuals. What am I missing?

  • MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Transgender, in its conception, was a coalitional term designed as an umbrella for all sorts of people who transgressed against cisheteronormative gender roles. This included transsexual people, but it also included crossdressers, drag queens/kings, stone butches, fairies, dykes, aggressives, removeds, and a whole slew of other identities (many of which would, in our current terminology, be considered “cis”).

    It was only in the late nineties and into the early aughts that the term transgender started being viewed as synonymous with transsexual. This has led to a lot of interesting (though often inflammatory) shifts in the language used in queer communities. In the anglosphere, the language of institutionalized queer organizing gained prominence, and street-level identifiers fell by the wayside. There were lots of reasons for this: some identities were considered too niche, or too difficult to parse for cishetero audiences. For some, the terms that were symbols of self-realization in some communities were often considered slurs in others (and this is especially true of identifiers used by racialized and otherwise marginalized communities, as able-bodied, educated, wealthy white queer people became a focus for deciding which language was acceptable and which was “offensive”).

    With the prominence of the coalitional term “transgender,” which offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a lot of different marginalized groups under a cohesive banner, transsexual came into a specific sort of cross-fire. On the one hand, you had a new wave of self-identified transgender people making arguments that transsexual as a term was “binary” and “reinforcing gender norms,” which you may recognize as a parallel to arguments that “bisexual” as a term “reinforces the binary.” (This is also a bit of a rehashing of the old lesbian movement’s arguments that androgyny is the “correct” way to do lesbian feminism, and that femininity “reinforces the patriarchy.” Turns out political movements are often doomed to recycle the same tired and divisive rhetoric).

    On the other hand, you had transsexual people who did struggle with accepting or understanding the larger coalitional movement, for a variety of reasons. For instance, there are transsexual people who were resistant to the idea that they could be “lumped in” with crossdressers, or queens, because (especially at the time) many people who were openly transsexual lived “straight” lives, and couldn’t agree with the fact of their manhood or womanhood being conflated with queer sexual practices. There were transsexual people who considered themselves to have a medical issue unrelated to queer activism, or who desired to live lives of stealth. There were transsexual people who saw their very identity as transsexual get villainized by other queer activists as “reinforcing the binary,” as though some identities could be inherently radical/more radical than others. There were transsexual people who were having their very specific transsexual needs sidelined under wider discussions of transgender activism and transgender rights.

    These were all very real and interlaced conflicts of language, the type that will come up in any coalitional organizing, by the way. Coalitions are great for getting people swinging together, but they can easily end up replicating systems of hierarchy and invisibilize the differing needs of the members within that coalition (check out Viviane K. Namaste’s Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People and Julia Serano’s Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive).

    This is all to say that there has been a very deep interplay of competing ideas of what it even means to be transsexual and transgender, that there is no consensus and that there can be no consensus because any consensus would at its heart replicate the very systems of assignment of identity and gender role that transgender activism erupted to combat. There is a very real effort by the bourgeois institutions of queer theory to create a containing and hegemonic ideal of queer identity that can be easily captured and consumed in the commodity market, and this has coloured the way that queer identity is understood and discussed at large. There is no “correct” term for anyone to use, and you simply cannot judge a person based on what words they use to relate to their personal experiences. Language is always in motion, and while often that motion is being directed by the institutions of power, those on the margins will always carve their own linguistic space, and it is incumbent on us to allow people the opportunity to self-describe.

    • MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Just a funny little quirk that is worth commenting on: my very argument that people are often unable to self-identify because the larger mainstream has decided that their personal identifiers are “offensive” has been demonstrated by the website’s slur-filter.

      • TheDoctor [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        The slur filter has always been a blunt instrument. Something something chapomix

        Edit: chapomix

        When Chapo.chat emerged as a site half a year ago, filled with ideas and hopes for their users and their site, the users and mods discovered a very awful thing.

        And it wasn’t about themselves, even though they had to do it to themselves. It was about that reactionary encirclement. They discovered that they needed mods. They discovered that they needed ruthless mods. Because all around them coming in from multiple sites and within their own userbase were acts of sabotage, transphobia, attack, racism, and the like.

        And they understood that if the site was going to survive, they would have to build up instruments of mod power, instruments that were controversial even.

        And these instruments, by the way, can make mistakes, and these instruments can not only make mistakes they can ban innocent users and utilize their mod powers excessively.

        If there had been no invasion, if there had been no espionage, if there had been no attack, if there had been no Stupidpol brigade leaving reactionary comments, there wouldn’t have been a purge of the users. If there hadn’t had been a Cumtown raid, there wouldn’t have been a user purge. And to lose sight of that fact is to lose sight of an essential force in what was going on over those few months.

        trans-heart parenti

    • pooh [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netM
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      2 months ago

      This is a great and very informative comment, and seems to match what I’ve been seeing reading through zines and other stuff on https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/ “Transsexual” definitely seemed like the more common term for most of the 20th century even into the 1990’s, though it also does seem like “transgender” starts to get used more around that time.