What are your opinions on using transgender vs using transexual? Ive been seeing more trans feminine people use transexual to refer to themselves these days and I thought I had it figured out but im confused. Originally, how i saw it was transphobic dolls trying to distance themselves from the rest of the transgender community at large. But the more i read about trans theory and talk to trans women, im finding more and more “cool” trans women calling themselves transexuals. What am I missing?
Throwing in my non English two öre that at least over here, and I imagine it to also be the case in other countries, transsexual is a medical term imported over from the English speaking world without actually making much sense linguistically, and is often used by the medical establishment in their gatekeeping.
For me transsexual is objectively something that is connected to binary sex, because that is how the medical establishment defines it, and uses it to gatekeep access to medical and legal processes from nonbinary people, and on top of that the -sexual suffix is not one that has the dual meaning of sexual relationships and personal sex in my language, it only refers to sexual relationships.
This will be changing at some point though, with transsexualism and the other lesser diagnoses being replaced with a blanket of “gender incongruence”, and much of the gatekeeping being removed with it, or so the plan seems.
This fascinates me deeply, good post. Probably not a word anyone should have imported in this context tbh.