Ponderment

[space_kat]

Consider the old adage:

"Sex is between your legs, Gender is between your ears"

So if TransGENDER is an umbrella term for people with gender issues, where does that place TransSEXual people? I've wondered for a while if it places them distinctly outside what we might consider to be transgender.

[Fer]

It does place us dinstintly.  The tern transsexual is to define persons that are profoundly gender dysphoric & need to alter their physical appearance (sex included) by mones or surgery to match their psychological gender a.k.a. sex.

[tinkerbell]

"The Old Adage" makes sense (to me, at least!)

why?

I'd rather use the word transsexual instead of transgender.  Although I am aware that transsexuality has nothing to do with sex, to me TRANSSEXUAL implies that I am TRANScending from one sex to the other (anatomically speaking), and this is, in fact, true.  I have never changed my gender, for my gender has always been female, what I am changing is my physical sex to be congruent with my female gender.

tink

[ChildOfTheLight]

Consider the old adage:

"Sex is between your legs, Gender is between your ears"

So if TransGENDER is an umbrella term for people with gender issues, where does that place TransSEXual people? I've wondered for a while if it places them distinctly outside what we might consider to be transgender.

People who don't like what's between their legs?  Seems to work.

[Jeannette]

Consider the old adage:

"Sex is between your legs, Gender is between your ears"

So if TransGENDER is an umbrella term for people with gender issues,

Cross-dressers, ->-bleeped-<-s, drag queens dont have gender issues but they fall into the category of transgender because it is an umbrella term.



What is transsexualism?

What Transsexualism Is
Transsexualism is the most pronounced form of Gender Dysphoria. A typical medical definition of transsexualism would be along these lines:

A transsexual is someone who experiences a deep and long-lasting discomfort with their anatomical (genital) sex, and wishes to change their physical characteristics, including genitals, to the opposite of those usually associated with their anatomical sex, and to live permanently in the gender role opposite to that normally associated with their anatomical sex.

What transsexualism IS NOT

What Transsexualism Is Not
There are several other possible human conditions that are commonly confused with transsexualism, but are quite distinct. These are described briefly here to eliminate them from this discussion:

Transvestism. Very commonly confused with transsexuals, ->-bleeped-<-s lack the overwhelming need to change their physical sex characteristics that characterises transsexuals. ->-bleeped-<-s feel a need to dress as the opposite sex from time to time, but have no wish to change sex. There are two broad types of ->-bleeped-<-, Gender-Motivated and Fetishistic, although there may be some blurring of the distinction.
Gender-Motivated ->-bleeped-<-s are usually unremarkably masculine, heterosexual men, who construct a female alter ego to allow themselves to express the 'feminine' character attributes such as sensitivity and emotionality that they deny themselves in their male role. The female persona is kept totally separate, and the ->-bleeped-<-, when in his male mode, will often refer to his female persona as if she was a totally different person. Gender-Motivated ->-bleeped-<-s may or may not be gender dysphoric: some cross-dress to escape from a feeling of unhappiness with the male social role, many simply because they enjoy playing at being (their idea of) female. The former type would probably be regarded as being mildly gender dysphoric, the latter would certainly not. Nevertheless, ->-bleeped-<-s are emphatically different from transsexuals: the ->-bleeped-<- always has a core male identity, even if he occasionally likes to escape into a female alter ego , while the (male-to-female) transsexual always has a core female identity.

Fetishistic ->-bleeped-<-s cross-dress to obtain some form of sexual pleasure or stimulation. They are almost universally heterosexual, and are not regarded as gender dysphoric.

->-bleeped-<-s generally regard themselves as fundamentally male, and most would be appalled by the idea of actually changing their sex. However, it is not uncommon for transsexuals to go through a phase of seeing themselves as (or perhaps trying to convince themselves that they are) merely ->-bleeped-<-s, before they come to fully accept their true condition. Conversely, a few ->-bleeped-<-s carry their fantasy 'female self' too far and delude themselves into thinking that they are transsexual. Rigorous psychiatric screening is used before allowing 'sex-change' treatment to minimise the possibility of such people embarking on a course of action that they would come to regret.

->-bleeped-<-s are relatively common: some estimates would have several percent of the male population showing some degree of ->-bleeped-<- behaviour.



Homosexuality and Bisexuality. This has no connection at all with transsexualism --- gay men and lesbians are generally totally happy with their anatomical sex, and their gender identity is in accordance with it. They are merely attracted to persons of their own anatomical sex, or to both sexes in the case of bisexuals. Of course, there are also gay ->-bleeped-<-s ('drag queens'), who cross-dress from a different motivation: generally for show or humour, or perhaps as a political statement.
Homosexuality and bisexuality are very common; some statistics even suggest that people exhibiting some degree of bisexual or gay attraction could outnumber pure heterosexuals. At the minimum, homosexuals and bisexuals represent a large minority.



Hermaphroditism and Intersex. Hermaphroditism is a very rare condition in which the genitals are neither clearly male nor clearly female. There is a school of thought that maintains that this is related to transsexualism, but is a much more extreme case resulting in a strongly intersexed body, rather than the mind/body mismatch that characterises transsexualism.
Many milder intersex conditions exist, often resulting in varying degrees of malformation or dysfunction of the genitals. Such conditions do appear to be significantly more common among transsexuals than among the general population, though the majority of transsexuals are not obviously physically intersexed.

The incidence of true hermaphroditism is reportedly somewhere around the one-in-a-million mark, although milder physical intersex conditions are very much more common. As many as 1 in 200 live births exhibit some degree of physical ambiguity, and as many as 1 in 400 people have a chromosome configuration that does not match either the standard male (XY) or standard female (XX) karyotypes.