Trans man

Transgender is the wider word and covers him. Transmasculine is wider in a different direction, taking in people assigned female at birth whose identity is masculine without being male, so every trans man is transmasculine while a good many transmasculine people are not trans men.

Where the term trans man was recorded

Dictionary.com dates the compound to between 1995 and 2000, which places it a generation behind the vocabulary it displaced. Transgender is recorded in John F. Oliven's Sexual Hygiene and Pathology in 1965, and trans on its own is a shortening of both transgender and transsexual.

What the compound pushed out was female-to-male, abbreviated FTM or F2M. That term is now treated as dated by many of the people it describes, on the grounds that it confuses sex with gender and that it draws a line between two poles, which leaves nowhere to stand for anyone off the line.

The sense of the newer term widened as well. Trans man at first meant a person who had had hormone replacement therapy or sex reassignment surgery, or both. The definition of transition then broadened to take in psychological development and other routes to self-acceptance, and the noun broadened with it.

How transition is described for trans men

Transition covers social, medical and legal ground, and few people take all of it. Social transition means a name, pronouns, clothes, and disclosure to family, friends and usually a workplace or a school. Legal affirmation means correcting the name and sometimes the sex marker on identity documents. Medical transition means hormones, surgery, or both, and many trans men cannot afford either or do not want them.

Those who have not had chest surgery often bind, with a sports bra or a purpose-made binder; tape and bandages are what popular culture tends to depict rather than what is generally used. Some pack, with anything from rolled socks to a manufactured packer, and some packers are built to allow standing urination. None of this is universal and the reference record is careful to say so.

Being read as male without physical transition can be difficult, and some trans men present as female in particular settings such as a workplace. Some transmasculine people become pregnant, give birth and breastfeed.

Why the closed spelling gives offence

Transman, written as a single word, turns up interchangeably with the open compound, and many trans people find it offensive. The objection is about what the spelling implies rather than about how it looks: a separate word for trans men marks them as a separate kind of thing from men, and the closed form keeps company with the position that holds exactly that. Transwoman attracts the same objection for the same reason.

The GLAAD media reference guide makes a parallel point about transsexual, advising that nobody be described that way unless it is the word they use of themselves. Some trans men reject transgender for themselves too, which is a preference about a word rather than a claim about the category.

What the counts of trans men measure

There is no clean figure. Estimates of the ratio of trans men in the United States population run from one in two thousand to one in a hundred thousand, and the reference article marks both ends as poorly sourced. A United States Census Bureau study in 2015 found around 58,000 name changes in census records consistent with a transition to male, of which about 7,500 also changed the sex coding, and that figure is flagged in the same article as having failed verification.

Most published numbers count trans men as a share of trans people rather than of everyone. The Williams Institute's 2025 modelling puts trans men at 34.2 per cent of transgender adults in the United States, and the transgender population that is a share of is 1.0 per cent of everyone aged 13 and over. The US Transgender Survey collected 92,329 responses in 2022 and 25 per cent of them came from trans men, but that survey is self-selected: its percentages describe the people who chose to answer it and nobody else.

How trans men describe their sexuality

Like Cisgender men, trans men hold every sexual orientation, and the common assumption that a trans man is straight and has a lesbian past is not what the surveys return. In the National Center for Transgender Equality's 2015 survey, 23 per cent of respondents who identified as trans men called themselves heterosexual or straight, while 65 per cent gave another answer: 24 per cent queer, 17 per cent pansexual, 12 per cent bisexual and 12 per cent gay or same-gender loving.

The Trans PULSE project in Ontario, reported by Bauer, Redman, Bradley and Scheim in 2013, found 63 per cent of female-to-male spectrum trans people in the province reporting non-heterosexual identities or sex in the past year with trans or non-trans men. Dan Irving and Rupert Raj set that finding against the standing misperception in Trans Activism in Canada.

A history in lesbian communities is genuinely common, and a number of trans men identified as Butch before recognising themselves as trans. Integration into cisgender gay men's communities has been harder, and Yitzchak and colleagues report gay trans men partnering with each other more often than with cisgender gay men. Miriam J. Abelson writes that "there is no question that trans men's experiences are men's experiences and give insight about men, masculinity, and gender inequality".