Reclaiming "Transgender" and speaking for ourselves

[Shana A]

Friday, 18 June 2010
Reclaiming "Transgender" and speaking for ourselves
Posted by Natacha at 13:01

http://uncommon-scents.blogspot.com/2010/06/reclaiming-transgender-and-speaking-for.html

This post is about the dangers in allowing non-transgender people to define and speak for transgender people. This is something which is becoming more common and which is likely to become increasingly so as trans people become more visible and political progress towards greater trans liberation is made. The conspicuous absence of trans people at David Cameron's LGBT reception in Downing Street suggests that the trans community has to consider who represents it and misrepresents it to the rest of the world.

The word "transgender" has become a phenominal success. Indeed it is one of the linguistic and political success stories of the last 20 years. Yet, in its current usage it is only 18 years old. In fact "transgender" was originally coined by Virginia Prince back in the 1970s to describe people (like myself) who were somewhere between "cross-dresser" and "transsexual". However it was used by Leslie Feinberg in a publication entitled "Transgender Liberation: A movement whose Time has Come" in 1992.