Trans & Binary Identities
Trans & Binary Identities · 10 entries
Man, woman, trans and cis: every term for the relation between a person and the sex recorded for them at birth. The group exists because its members only make sense together: Cisgender was coined in 1994 as an antonym, purely so that Transgender had an opposite and the ordinary case stopped going unnamed. Sources on any one of these terms cite the others, which is the practical test that they belong in one place.
What separates this group from the rest of the catalogue is that the binary is the reference point rather than the thing being escaped. A trans man crosses the assignment and arrives at a settled binary gender. The alignment terms, transfeminine and transmasculine, name a direction of travel without committing to a destination. Even the terms here that reject the binary do so by naming it. The other categories describe genders that are partial, multiple, moving or somewhere else entirely, and those are defined by an operation performed on this reference point rather than by the point itself. The only real population figures in the catalogue are also here, and with them most of the caution about which numbers mean what.
In this category
All 10 trans & binary identities
10 entries
- CisgenderA word invented in 1994 to name the default, because prose contrasting trans women with women has already decided which of the two counts as real.
- ManA word that meant any person until Middle English, a category that holds cisgender and transgender men together, and a slang sense that inverts it.
- Trans manA compound dated to the closing 1990s, the term it replaced, why the closed spelling is contested, and what the published counts actually measure.
- Trans womanWhere the compound was recorded, the medical word it replaced, why the closed spelling is rejected, and the categories other languages use instead.
- TransandrogynousCoined with a flag on one dated day in 2017, the androgynous member of a trans alignment set, and documented by community wikis and nothing else.
- TransfeminineA word proposed in a 1985 magazine article to be silent about surgery, lost for twenty-five years, and now naming a direction rather than a gender.
- TransgenderAn umbrella carrying a 1965 medical coinage and a 1994 antonym, and one of the very few figures in this subject that is a population estimate.
- TransmasculineA word in institutional use from 2000 and in print from 2011, covering trans men and masculine non-binary people because it names a direction.
- TranssexualA German coinage of 1923, an English one of 1949, why transgender displaced it, who still claims it, and what Blanchard's typology actually said.
- WomanA compound of wif and mann that once meant woman-person, a category holding cisgender and transgender women, and a plural whose spelling fits nothing.
Keep going
The other categories
- Gender Around the WorldThis is the largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender.
- Pronouns & Forms of AddressThe words in this group do not name a kind of person.
- Gender Expression & PresentationWhat these gender expression terms report is presentation, stance and the scene a person comes from, rather than an answer to the question of what their gender is. [[butch]] is the clearest case: Wikipedia files it inside the lesbian subculture, with its own traits, behaviours and styles, and the word grew out of working-class bar culture in the 1940s, not out of any theory of identity. [[genderpunk|Genderpunk]] and gender bending belong here for a related reason, since both describe an active stance against a norm.
- Distinct Nonbinary GendersThe microlabels here share one insistence, and their sources make it in almost the same words every time: this is not a partial gender, not a blend, and not a point between two poles.
Common questions
Questions about trans & binary identities
Why are man and woman in a gender catalogue at all?
Because a reference work that lists eighty terms for genders outside the binary and omits the two inside it has quietly agreed that only unusual genders need explaining. Man and woman have etymologies, histories and contested boundaries like anything else here.
Does crossing the binary mean medical transition?
No. The terms in this group describe the relation between a person's gender and their birth assignment, and say nothing about surgery, hormones or any other step. Some people in every part of this group transition medically and many do not.
What is the difference between transfeminine and a trans woman?
A trans woman is a woman. Transfeminine names a direction rather than a destination, and is used both by binary trans women and by people outside the binary whose presentation or identity leans feminine. The first is an answer; the second is a bearing.
Why does this group have real prevalence numbers when others do not?
Because general-population surveys ask about being transgender and not about the eighty other terms in this catalogue. The Williams Institute and Ipsos figures exist for that reason, and they are the only two usable as population estimates anywhere on the site.