Some people feel the term is outdated. They say this while parading around what to me seem oxymorons, like “non binary women” or “he/him lesbians”.
When a lot of these people say they aren’t comfortable with their gender, I notice they often mention things like clothes, makeup, hobbies. More generally, they seem to talk about gender roles- masculine and feminine- than something to do with their bodies.
Here’s the fact of the matter. Bathrooms, pronouns, legal documents; they aren’t referring to any of that. They’re referring to what’s in your pants, or if you have boobs, or grow facial hair. Most people, myself included, don’t care if you wanna wear clothes or behave in a way assigned to the opposed sex (there are folks who do of course, and most of us here know they’re assholes). But unless you’re changing something about that, it doesn’t warrent a change in your pronouns or documents or bathrooms. As much as my own rights are under threat, I can’t help but sympathize with the folks upset with that, I don’t wanna share the ladies’ room with what amounts to a femboy or “metrosexual” either.
Sex is bimodal, and I use the term bimodal specifically. There are edge cases, such as intersex people, or those with hormonal conditions like PCOS. I would argue transsexuals, those like myself who seek to change or sex, are among them. And hell, actual enben who seek out procedures like gender nullification too. I don’t take hormones because I want to be feminine. I take them to be as close to female as I can possibly get with the medical technology available. That’s how I want to be seen, and treated. I plan on surgery to change what’s in my pants. If I could get a menstrual cycle out of that, I would, and probably go on to have children (because infertility is another perk of transition).
I don’t have anything against the sorts of people I’m talking about- I want to be abundantly clear on that. Same with those who say, dont want bottom surgery. My frustration is more with the terminology, because there is a delineation there that I feel is erased. People decry older terms like transsexual as “outdated”, but I feel it’s much more apt for my experience. I am transitioning to the other sex (or as close as I can). My gender has been constant all the while
I get what you’re saying.
From the outside, the struggle over language seems rushed and mostly misdirected to begin with, and I see the kind of problem you have with the terminology irl when talking with friends, so it isn’t just you.
I don’t really care what the eventual terminology lands on, I’ll adapt as it goes on, but I don’t have to live with the dissonance, so I don’t have a horse in the race. I just stick with trans rather than adding sex or gender to it because it isn’t a full, consensus driven, universal finality at this point.
Tbh, for the first forty years of my life, transexual was the quasi-official word. People may not remember Tula, who was the first trans woman in playboy, which was a huge deal. Most people never heard of sex change surgery before that. And that’s what the surgery was called then. It’s only been maybe fifteen years that there’s been a push to change the terminology.
That’s not a very long time for language to shift. It just isn’t realistic to pretend that widespread changes in language are going to happen in anything less than a generation. Since the preferred terminology isn’t universal, and keeps changing, I say you use whatever works for you, and that’s that. Hopefully, you’d also be chill when someone else uses different terminology as long as they aren’t being jerks about it.
And, hell, you’re right. Gender is being delineated as the presentation of the internal self perception, the things we do that express our selves regarding the bimodal/spectrum nature of manhood and womanhood. Sex is being delineated as the physical structure, with disagreement on exactly what the criteria should be. So, people that are wanting to change their bodies are transitioning their sex, not only their gender presentation.
But it’s still all up in the air. It isn’t like there’s a single authority for trans people. There’s not even an official organization that has widespread recognition as being an authority supported by a vast majority of trans people.
From the outside, all I can say is that I support your right to self determination, and that I’m willing to adapt my language as things settle out. And I support your wish (and that of others) to use transexual just like I do for those that prefer transgender.