African American Transsexuality - Relation To Transgenderism

Relation To Transgenderism

Transsexualism is often included within the broader category of transgenderism, which is generally used as an umbrella term for people who do not conform to typical accepted gender roles, for example cross-dressers, transvestites, and people who identify as genderqueer. Transsexualism refers to a specific condition in the transgender realm. Thus, even though a crossdresser and transsexual are both transgender people, their conditions differ radically. Though some people use transgenderism and transsexualism interchangeably, they are not synonymous terms.

Some transsexual people object to being included in the transgender spectrum; anthropologist David Valentine contextualizes the objection to including transsexual people in his book "Transgender, an Ethnography of a Category." He writes that transgender is a term coined and used by activists to include many people who do not necessarily identify with the term. He observes that many current health clinics and services set up to serve gender variant communities employ the term, but that most of the service-seekers do not identify with the term. The rejection of this political category, first coined by self-identified activist Leslie Feinberg, illustrates the difference between a self-identifier and categories imposed by observers to understand other people.

Historically the reason that transsexual people rejected associations with the transgender or broader LGBT community is largely that the medical community in the 1950s through the late 1980s encouraged this rejection of such a grouping in order to qualify as a 'true transsexual' who would thus be allowed to access medical and surgical care. The animosity that is present today is no longer fed by this same kind of pressure from the medical community.

Though the beliefs of some modern day transsexual people that they are not "transgender" reflects this historical division (Denny 176), other transsexual people state that those who do not seek SRS are very different from those who need to be of "the other sex", and that these groups have different issues and concerns and are not doing the same things. The latter view is rather contested, with opponents pointing out that merely having or not having some medical procedures hardly can have such far-reaching consequences as to put those who have them and those who have not into such distinctive categories. Notably Harry Benjamin's original definition of transsexualism does not require that they need to have had SRS.