The Importance of Being Honest About Trans Language

The fuzzier and more subjective the definitions of these words have become, the more ferociously we’ve fought over them.

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About the Author

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of HOUSEWIFE: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead and TOMBOY: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different. She’s currently researching a book on the youth gender culture war.

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In 1961, Virginia Charles Prince, nee Arnold Lowman, founded the Hose and Heels Club, a social group for transvestites in the Los Angeles area, many of whom read Prince’s magazine Transvestia. Prince had started cross-dressing around age 12, first by trying on his mother’s clothes, but understood himself to be heterosexual. In 1967, he published a book called The Transvestite and His Wife. He made sure to contrast his particular experience with others in what we’d now call the “LGBT community,” particularly “homosexuals, transsexuals or emotionally disturbed people.”

Transvestite, homosexual, transsexual—these were discrete categories with clear edges and boundaries. A straight man who liked to wear women’s clothes; a same-sex attracted man or woman; a person who undergoes “sex change” surgery to appear as the opposite sex. Prince described himself as a “femmiphile,” or FP—a lover of the feminine, who was male.

Then, in 1968, Prince “crossed the line,” in his terminology, not to dress as a woman, but to live as one—not to change sex, which is “between your legs,” but gender, which is “between your ears.” Now he—she—was a heterosexual male who lived as a woman. Prince coined a term for such a person: transgenderist, someone who may or may not take hormones, but definitely did not get sex reassignment surgery.

By the mid-1990s, to Prince’s chagrin, transgender had become an umbrella term for many different kinds of experiences related to sex and gender, and an academic field of transgender studies blossomed. Third wave feminism “queered” the field of women’s studies, which morphed into gender studies. By the end of the decade, we saw the emergence of transgender children, and by the 2000s, a focus on gender identity.

The problem is, we now have very little understanding of what any of these words mean. They are so imprecise, so subjective and personalized, that we’ve lost common language.