Trans Terminology and Crossdresser Identity
Prince helped popularize the term transgender, and she erroneously asserted that she coined transgenderist and transgenderism, words which she used to mean a person who lives full-time in a gender other than the one identified at birth but without surgical body modification, even though she herself underwent surgical body modification, took female hormones, changed her legal name to Virginia and lived full-time as a woman. This is substantially different than what the word meant in 1965 when psychiatrist John F. Oliven used the term to describe transsexualism. She also made many claims about non-fetishistic nature of most crossdressing, asserting instead that it was a display of identity. In discussions with Robert Stoller of UCLA, however, she affirmed that cross-dressing had erotic aspects. However, many crossdressers and recent psychologists disagree with Stoller's view of crossdressing as necessarily fetishistic and consider his views sexist and outdated. Stoller's discriminatory approach to cross dressing is typified by his refusal to treat the erotic aspects of clothing that matches one's assigned gender as fetishistic, while treating it as fetishistic only when people wore clothing that was not socially mainstream for people of their assigned gender. This approach of confusing social norms with mental health is embedded in Stoller's approach to gender and sexuality, and his work has been widely critiqued.
Prince is also well known for her adamant criticism of the transsexual strategy and gender Identity disorder, believing that sex reassignment surgery was unnecessary.
Prince died aged 96 on 2 May 2009.
Read more about this topic: Virginia Prince
Famous quotes containing the words trans and/or identity:
“The treason pleases, but the traitors are odious.”
—Spanish proverb, pt. 1, bk. 4, ch. 7, quoted in Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605, trans by P. Motteux)
“Whether outside work is done by choice or not, whether women seek their identity through work, whether women are searching for pleasure or survival through work, the integration of motherhood and the world of work is a source of ambivalence, struggle, and conflict for the great majority of women.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)