Article by Christine Burns
Labels are always hopelessly inadequate to describe the sheer diversity of human existence, and no more so in the area of sex and gender, where the most fundamental mistake of all is to assume that life is "normally" simple and clear cut. We're all taught that there are only two sexes, right? And people are born one sex or the other, right? Wrong. Think about other human characteristics for a moment... Are you a tall or a short? Are you a fat or a thin? A clever or a dim? A white or a black? A nice or a nasty?
Sometimes we use these simple distinctions, of course, but few would deny that they mask many shades and subtleties in every case. It is nature's design to encourage diversity, in order to maximise the chances of a species' survival ... and so, on every plane of measurement you care to examine, people are seldom actually at one extreme or the other.
Most of us think of ourselves as "average", which is a way of expressing the simple fact that we may be generally like the next person, but that doesn't mean we are identical. In fact, the combination of where we are on all the scales of measurement taken together ... height, build, intelligence, skin colour, personality and all the rest ... are what make each of us absolutely unique.
So why should we be so naive as to build a society on the peculiar assumption that sex ... and the perception of which sex we are (our "gender identity") should be simply one thing or another? We even know that people have different sized and shaped genitals, yet we're taught from our earliest recollections to assume that there is an exact cut-off point somewhere ... or perhaps, more comfortably, a yawning un-bridgeable chasm ... on one side of which there are males, and on the other side of which there are females.
Ponder a statistic : One in every two hundred children born anywhere in the world has something which is a bit ambiguous about the most obvious physical manifestation of their sex ... their external genitals. In about one in five of those cases (i.e. one in 1,000 babies) the ambiguity is sufficient that doctors may decide to take some sort of action to "correct" the ambiguity. The quotes are significant, because a thousands upon thousands of people grow up to vehemently resent that "correction", carried out without their consent, depriving them of options which nature gave them, and very often destroying their capacity for sexual enjoyment.
We digress, perhaps ... but the point is to illustrate that on a physical plane, there is no such thing as "one sex or the other" ... only a society constructed on the assumption that there is, and prepared to use surgery upon an otherwise healthy and comfortable child to maintain the myth by cutting away the evidence.
So it is with human personalities too, and the self-identificational part of ourselves which leads us to feel that we "belong" with one sex or the other.
The important point is that there is no reason why the intangible bit (your identity) and the whole gamut of physical bits (your genitals, your internal reproductive organs and the chromosomes which first nudge a foetus in one direction or the other) need to develop in sync. The two are formed at very different times for one thing (see "Explaining it to others" for a more detailed account of this), and all have so much capacity for variation that they can easily vary in opposite directions and overlap.
For all sorts of reasons, therefore, people can find that what they look like, how they feel, who they feel like, and how they'd like to be seen and treated by others brings them into conflict with the over-simplified contemporary norms of the society they live in.
When people live that conflict openly, by challenging the limitations upon their expression, we call them "trans". And, if you really must have further labels to try and break that down, transgendered people are those whose sense of self places them so far into the opposite camp to the one suggested by their physical sex characteristics, that they take varying steps to solve the conflict by altering or disguising those features. Again, simplistically, those who are happy enough to merely disguise their features using the powerful signals sent out by gendered clothing are dubbed "transgendered" and those who go to the lengths of wishing to alter their physique to completely resemble the sex they feel themselves to belong to are labelled by medicine as "transsexual". Medicine "owns" the transsexual label because, of course, transsexual people require the assistance of surgery to achieve a physical expression of who they are inside.
Usage of the terms differs, however, and has evolved over the years in line with a growing sophistication in trans people's own awareness. The above distinctions invite the assumption that "transgendered" is in some way inferior or short of "transsexual" for instance. More recently, therefore, the term "transgender" has come to embrace both ... and Press for Change and other organisations worldwide have gone a further step and now advocate the use of the adjective "trans" to describe people who, in expressing their sense of identity, come into conflict with the contemporary gender behaviour norms of their society.
We stress however that whether you use the word "trans" or older, more prescriptive, terms like "transsexual" these are adjectives not nouns. It is no more polite to say that somebody is "a transsexual" than "he is a blind" or "she is a deaf". Please remember that trans people, transsexual people, transgender people ... or whatever description you use ... are people first, and the "T" adjective describes only one of the many interesting and individual characteristics which make up that person.
Now aren't you glad you asked?