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"Transgender"? What's that mean?

This post is part of a larger series I'm working on.

If you’ve somehow missed the last decade of the culture war, there are some people who call themselves “transgender”. It used to be “transsexual” before that, and “transvestite” before that, and to this day some just call them trannies to be mean. They and their allies claim they’ve existed - in some form or another - since the dawn of human history(1). Regardless of your opinion on all this, one thing is impossible to deny: They’re here, and they don’t want to go away.

A growing number of people know a trans person, but few people actually like transgender people as a group. (2) In fact, our country is in the grips of a furious debate over trans people. We’re starting to ask questions like: “What is ‘transgender’, actually?” “Why is transgender?” “Can we just make them all just go away?” and the ever-controversial: “Should we let kids be transgender?” Over the course of these next three blog posts, I will seek to answer those questions, starting with: “What is ‘transgender’, actually?”

A transgender person is defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as: “of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth”(3). There’s evidence of people like this dating back thousands of years. In ancient Sumeria and Greece, there were religious orders of people who dressed androgynously or as women (1). A modern analogue of this would be some of the” two-spirit” people of some Native American religions, or the Hijra of India, who are born male but often identify as female. (1) There was also a rich lady in medieval Byzantium (that’s the hellenic remnants of the Roman Empire, basically Greece+) who fled the capital city of the empire to live in the countryside as a monk.

However, people like this don’t really show up in most of Western history from the Roman Empire up to the 20th century. This is probably because of how attached western culture and christianity was to its gender roles - even more so than other areas of the world - but that’s boring, so let’s skip ahead to the 1920s.

It’s the 1920s, and transgender people are finally being talked about. That’s right, 100 years ago, a German scientist named Magnus Hirschfeld started studying what he called “transvestites”: people whose sense of self did not align with their “biological” sex(4). He was one of the only people of his time to acknowledge transgender people. Leading the "Institute of Sexual Science” in Berlin, Germany. He also had in incredible moustache:

Magnus Hirschfeld's portrait from Wikipedia. He is shown leaning over a table, both hands supporting his weight on it. He's wearing a mid-colored suit with a bow, round glasses, and an incredible moustache.

Hirschfeld studied all types of queer people. He even got the city government of Berlin to issue passes to his “transvestite passes” to his patients, which granted exceptions to the strict cross-dressing laws of the time.

Did you catch where and when it was all happening, though? Germany. In the 1920s. I cited source #4 in my bibliography as I introduced him. Scroll down for a moment to #4 in the bibliography and just look at the title. You don’t have to read the article, just look at it. I’m sure you can guess what happened to poor Magnus’ forward-thinking institute when the Nazis took control in 1933.

Before he had his citizenship revoked and his institute shuttered by the Nazis, Hirschfeld also studied another group: one with very little attention given to it, but all the importance to the transgender debate: Intersex people. Intersex people are folks whose physical sex in some way is abnormal. They can have a mix of sex characteristics, ambiguous genitalia, or all the appearance of one sex with underlying biology of another. Some examples include: Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, in which someone has XY or “male” chromosomes, but turns out completely female anyway(5) and mosaicism, in which someone has cell types of both chromosomes(6)

Some intersex people also have ambiguous genitalia, which are often fertile, but nevertheless different(7), Intersex people often are given purely cosmetic surgeries as infants, or forced to take hormones, not to save their lives or keep them from being injured, but just to make sure they look like the “right” type of person. (8,9)

And yet we keep insisting sex is biological, and who you are is determined by it. Statistically, you probably aren’t transgender; you were born as one of two sexes, given a name that’s supposed to go with it, referred to all your life as “he” or “she” purely based on your body, and that’s fine. If that makes you happy, if it just fits for you, then good. You deserve that.

But other people don't have that privilege.

"Transgender"? What's that mean?

Bibliography