I know most social convention is interpersonal and not objective in any real way but it’s still so surreal to hear people refer to it as an older term when we were still using and teaching it as terminology at my college’s Queer Student Union about 10 years ago; like, hardly ancient.
yeah, it’s not that old - it’s more like a term that became taboo as queer activism attempted to develop more inclusive language, starting with transgender which was meant to extend beyond transsexuals to include cross-dressers, drag performers, etc. … unfortunately people just started using “transgender” to mean “transsexual”, so then there was “trans*” as the new umbrella term, and then finally “trans”.
Every step along the way I think what happens is that the umbrella term just becomes the new way to refer to the default, mainstream conception of a trans person, which is basically a transsexual - a person who socially and medically transitions from one binary sex to another binary sex.
Probably what most made people abandon “transsexual” as a term was the way the term was adopted by truscum (trans people who don’t believe in non-binary people and who gatekeep trans identity mostly through pseudo-science and junk science).
I know most social convention is interpersonal and not objective in any real way but it’s still so surreal to hear people refer to it as an older term when we were still using and teaching it as terminology at my college’s Queer Student Union about 10 years ago; like, hardly ancient.
yeah, it’s not that old - it’s more like a term that became taboo as queer activism attempted to develop more inclusive language, starting with transgender which was meant to extend beyond transsexuals to include cross-dressers, drag performers, etc. … unfortunately people just started using “transgender” to mean “transsexual”, so then there was “trans*” as the new umbrella term, and then finally “trans”.
Every step along the way I think what happens is that the umbrella term just becomes the new way to refer to the default, mainstream conception of a trans person, which is basically a transsexual - a person who socially and medically transitions from one binary sex to another binary sex.
Probably what most made people abandon “transsexual” as a term was the way the term was adopted by truscum (trans people who don’t believe in non-binary people and who gatekeep trans identity mostly through pseudo-science and junk science).