Transgender
Transgender describes a person whose gender identity differs from the sex recorded for them at birth. It is the broadest word in ordinary use for that fact, and the American Psychological Association defines it as covering identity, expression and behaviour that does not match what was expected of the sex assigned. The word says nothing about whether a person has transitioned medically, socially, or at all.
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The prefix does the work. Cis- and trans- are Latin locational terms, on this side of and across, and the pair only means anything together. Cisgender was coined in 1994 as the antonym, so that the ordinary case had a name instead of going unmarked.
Where the word came from
The physician John Oliven used transgender in a medical text in 1965, and Merriam-Webster dates the word to that decade. It was not the first term in the field. Transsexual is older, modelled on the German Transsexualismus of 1923 and carried into English through the sexological literature; transvestite is older still, from Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910. Through the 1970s Virginia Prince and others used transgenderist for people living in a gender other than the one assigned without seeking surgery, which is close to the sense the shorter word later took.
What changed in the 1990s was the scope. The word stopped naming one route and started naming the whole set of people who cross the assignment, whichever way and however far. That widening is why an umbrella exists at all, and it is also why some people prefer the older, narrower transsexual for themselves.
What the umbrella covers
A trans man and a trans woman are transgender and binary at once: the assignment is crossed and the destination is a settled binary gender. Someone non-binary may also describe themselves as transgender, and many do, because the assignment is crossed even though the destination is neither male nor female. Neither reading is a misuse. Surveys that force a choice between the two get different answers depending on how the question is put, which is a fact about questionnaires rather than about people.
The spectrum terms sit inside the umbrella too. Transfeminine and transmasculine describe a direction of travel rather than a destination, and are claimed by people who are binary and people who are not. So do the alignment terms that stop short of either pole.
What is actually measured
The Williams Institute estimated in 2025 that 1.0 per cent of the United States population aged 13 and over is transgender, about 2.8 million people, modelled from state health surveys. The Ipsos LGBT+ Pride survey put the figure at around 1 per cent averaged across thirty countries in 2023. Those are the two general-population sources worth citing, and they agree.
Almost everything else quoted is a community sample. The US Transgender Survey drew 92,329 responses in 2022 and the Gender Census draws tens of thousands each year, but both are self-selected, and neither measures how common anything is in a population. They measure what the people who chose to answer call themselves. That is a different question, and a useful one, but the two are constantly reported as though they were the same.
Why the grammar matters
Transgender is an adjective. A trans woman, a transgender man, transgender people. Used as a noun it reads as hostile to most of the people it describes, and transgendered is dated for a related reason: the suffix implies something done to a person rather than something a person is. The shortened trans is standard and neutral, and trans with an asterisk is a 1990s convention that most style guides have now dropped.
An intersex person may be transgender or not, and the two are unrelated categories: one is about sex characteristics, the other about gender identity. Intersex sets out that distinction.
Where the umbrella is argued about
Two disagreements recur and neither is settled. The first is whether the umbrella is too wide: some people who transitioned medically before the 1990s hold that a word covering every relation to a birth assignment stops describing their situation, and prefer transsexual for that reason. The second runs the other way, from people outside the binary who find the trans framing assumes a crossing from one pole to another when their own account has no poles in it.
Both objections are about scope rather than about whether anybody is real, and both are visible in the survey data as inconsistent answers to questions that assume the categories nest neatly.
Told apart
Often confused with Transgender
- TranssexualTranssexual is older and narrower, and usually implies medical transition. Some people still claim it; many consider it dated.
- Non-binaryOverlapping, not equivalent. Many non-binary people call themselves transgender and some do not, because the assignment is crossed but the destination is not a binary gender.
- CisgenderThe antonym, coined in 1994 so the ordinary case had a name rather than going unmarked.
- IntersexUnrelated categories that are routinely conflated. Intersex is about sex characteristics; transgender is about gender identity.
Common questions
Questions about Transgender
- Is transgender the same as non-binary?
- No, though the two overlap heavily. Transgender is the wider word and covers anyone whose gender differs from the sex assigned at birth, including trans men and trans women who are firmly within the binary. Non-binary names a destination outside male and female. Many non-binary people also call themselves transgender, and some do not.
- When was the word transgender first used?
- The physician John Oliven used it in a medical text in 1965, and Merriam-Webster dates the word to that decade. The broad sense covering everyone who crosses their birth assignment settled during the 1990s, which is why older sources use the word far more narrowly than current ones do.
- How many transgender people are there?
- The Williams Institute modelled 1.0 per cent of the United States population aged 13 and over in 2025, about 2.8 million people, and Ipsos found roughly 1 per cent across thirty countries in 2023. Larger figures almost always come from self-selected community surveys, which measure a different thing.
- Is transgender a noun?
- No. It is an adjective, as in a transgender person or trans people. Transgendered is dated for a related reason, since the suffix implies something done to someone.
- Does the transgender umbrella include intersex people?
- Not by default. Intersex describes variations in sex characteristics and says nothing about anybody's gender identity. An intersex person may be transgender, or cisgender, exactly as anyone else may be, and the two categories are decided independently of one another.
Added 2026-08-27 · Revised 2026-08-27
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Related entries
- 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.
- Non-binaryAn umbrella term and an identity at the very same time, and the reason its two headline figures are not remotely comparable with one another.
- CisgenderA word invented in 1994 to name the default, because prose contrasting trans women with women has already decided which group is real.
- IntersexA fact about bodies that nearly every gender list files as an identity, and two prevalence figures thirty times apart from one source.