Trans woman

The word sits under Transgender and against Cisgender, and its counterpart on the other assignment is trans man. Transfeminine is wider than either, taking in people assigned male at birth whose identity is feminine without being female.

Where the compound trans woman was recorded

Dictionary.com dates the open compound to between 1995 and 2000, and Merriam-Webster defines it plainly as a transgender woman, a woman who was identified as male at birth. What it replaced was male-to-female, abbreviated MTF or M2F, which is now treated as outdated.

The older medical word was transsexual, which named the subset of trans people who wanted to transition medically. It came out of medicine and psychology, was largely displaced by transgender, and is now generally considered dated, though some trans women still claim it alongside transgender or instead of it.

What transition covers for trans women

Social transition often means a new name, a different hairstyle and wardrobe, and work on the voice, with the aim of being read as female. Medical transition centres on feminising hormone therapy, usually an oestrogen combined with an antiandrogen and sometimes with progestogens or a gonadotropin-releasing hormone modulator. The reported effects include breast development, softer skin, a redistribution of body fat, reduced muscle mass and changes in mood.

Hormones do not appreciably alter an adult voice, which is why voice therapy is a separate matter, aimed at fundamental frequency, resonance and phonatory pattern, and pursued through speech therapy or through laryngeal surgery. The surgical options described in the literature include vaginoplasty, vulvoplasty, orchiectomy, breast augmentation, facial feminisation and tracheal shave. Relatively few trans people reach surgery at all, for legal and financial reasons rather than clinical ones.

Why the closed spelling is resisted

Transwoman as a single word is used interchangeably by some writers and is widely rejected by trans people, because a separate word implies a separate category, and that is the claim it is usually found next to. The gender-critical position that trans women are not women is its habitual company. Some trans women prefer to drop the modifier altogether and be described simply as women, which is a request about a particular sentence rather than about the vocabulary.

Which words other languages use instead

Several Latin American countries use travesti for people assigned male at birth who develop a female gender identity. The word predates transgender in the region and its relation to trans woman is contested, with readings running from a regional equivalent to a Third gender category in its own right.

In Thailand, kathoey covers transfeminine people, and transgender is applied to them only rarely. The usual English rendering is ladyboy, while most transfeminine Thai people describe themselves as women, or as phuying praphet song, another type of woman.

Among Native Hawaiians and Tahitians, Mahu names a third gender with spiritual and social roles. It has historically been applied to people assigned male at birth and now covers a wider range of identities, and it is also used as a slur.

What the counts of trans women measure

The Williams Institute's 2025 modelling puts trans women at 32.7 per cent of transgender adults in the United States, out of a transgender population estimated at 1.0 per cent of everyone aged 13 and over. The US Transgender Survey took 92,329 responses in 2022 and 35 per cent came from trans women.

The second figure is not a population share and cannot be read as one. That survey is self-selected, and what its percentages measure is the composition of the people who chose to fill it in.

How trans women report their orientation

A survey of roughly 3,000 American trans women returned 31 per cent bisexual, 29 per cent gay, lesbian or same-gender, 23 per cent heterosexual, 7 per cent asexual, 7 per cent queer and 2 per cent other. A European study that followed trans women for twelve months found 22 per cent heterosexual, with the remainder distributed across attraction mostly or exclusively to men, mostly or exclusively to women, and to both, and found that orientation did not shift over the year. A smaller Italian study in 2013 found 82 per cent identifying as heterosexual, which is a reminder of how much the sampling frame does to the answer.

A 2018 study found that the most common partner before transition was a cisgender woman, and that trans women ten years or more into transition were likelier to report a change in orientation. A 2008 study found no statistically detectable difference in libido between trans women and cisgender women, and none of the correlation with serum testosterone reported in men; a 2014 study found 62.4 per cent reporting decreased sexual desire after reassignment therapy.

Why transmisogyny is named separately

The discrimination trans women meet in employment and housing is specific enough to have acquired its own word, transmisogyny. In the United States it falls hardest on trans women who are not white, at the intersection of transphobia, misogyny and racism, and it registers as a raised risk of physical and sexual violence and of hate crime. Media portrayal has run heavily on a small repertoire of stereotypes, with some improvement across the twenty-first century alongside transgender rights activism.