Transgender

What transgender covers and what it does not

The umbrella has a settled core and an argued edge. At the core are trans men and trans women, whose gender identity is the opposite of the sex assigned at birth and whose gender is as binary as anybody else's. Past that core it may also take in people who are Non-binary or Genderqueer, and this is where the readings divide. Some definitions have transgender mean a gender identity different from the sex assigned, which collects everyone who departs from that assignment; others have it mean a gender identity opposite to it, which does not. The APA notes that some genderqueer people do not identify as transgender.

Three separations do most of the remaining work. Being transgender is not a sexual orientation: the APA records that transgender people may be straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual or asexual, and that they usually label their orientation by reference to their own gender rather than to their assignment. It is not gender nonconformity: the APA is explicit that not everyone gender-nonconforming in appearance or behaviour identifies as transgender, and Gender-nonconforming describes a way of presenting, not an identity. And it is not Intersex, which names atypical development of physical sex characteristics and says nothing about anybody's gender identity.

The word carries no information about medical steps either. Gender dysphoria is common among transgender people, and some pursue hormone therapy, surgery or psychotherapy in response. Others want none of that, and others again are blocked by cost or by law. The word is the same word in every case.

Where the word transgender came from

The coinage is documented, recent, and argumentative. Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, a reference work published in 1965 by the Columbia University psychiatrist John F. Oliven, put transgenderism into print, and put it there to correct an existing term. The word previously in use, he wrote, "is misleading; actually, transgenderism is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism". His complaint was with the sex inside transsexualism, and his replacement changed nothing else.

Oliven was writing into a vocabulary already half a century old and almost entirely German in origin. Magnus Hirschfeld coined Transvestit in 1910, borrowing the nineteenth-century French travesti; his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft opened in Berlin in 1919, was destroyed when the Nazis took power in 1933, and had its research burned that May. Hirschfeld's seelischer Transsexualismus of 1923 supplied David Oliver Cauldwell with the term he introduced into English in 1949, which Harry Benjamin popularised in 1966. Virginia Prince, who founded the national cross-dressers' magazine Transvestia, used transgenderal in its December 1969 issue.

None of those four words named an umbrella. Each named a particular kind of person, and the widening came later, from outside medicine.

How the umbrella around transgender widened

Two of the words became umbrellas and two narrowed. By the middle of the 1970s trans-gender and trans people covered the whole field, while transgenderist and transgenderal had contracted to somebody living in a gender other than the assigned one and not seeking surgery. Community material of the 1980s shortened the first of those to TG. By 1984 a transgender community was being written about as something that existed, and in 1985 Richard Ekins established the Trans-Gender Archive at the University of Ulster.

The decisive decade was the 1990s, and the widening is datable to particular documents. The International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, meeting in 1992, wrote an expansive definition covering "transsexuals, transgenderists, cross dressers" and anybody in transition. Leslie Feinberg's pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come circulated in the same year, using the word to gather every kind of gender nonconformity under one heading. In 1994 the gender theorist Susan Stryker defined it as encompassing "all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries", a definition wide enough to gather in drag, butch lesbianism and non-European categories such as Hijra, which this catalogue describes in their own terms instead.

The traffic since has run the other way, away from the abstract noun. GLAAD's position is that transgenderism, Oliven's coinage of 1965, was once acceptable and now reads as pejorative. In 2020 the International Journal of Transgenderism became the International Journal of Transgender Health, a rename the journal explained as tracking what its own field had come to regard as appropriate language.

What has been counted about transgender people

Counts of this population are unusually hard to compare, because each survey measures whichever definition it wrote into its question. The APA states flatly that there are no population studies that accurately and completely account for the range of gender identity and gender expression.

The strongest current estimate for a single country comes from the Williams Institute at UCLA, whose August 2025 report by Jody L. Herman and Andrew R. Flores modelled the 2021 to 2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System together with the 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. It put 2.8 million people, or 1.0 per cent of everyone in the United States aged 13 and over, as identifying as transgender: 0.8 per cent of adults, over 2.1 million people, and 3.3 per cent of youth aged 13 to 17, about 724,000. Among transgender adults the split was close to even, at 32.7 per cent transgender women (698,500), 34.2 per cent transgender men (730,500) and 33.1 per cent transgender nonbinary adults (707,100).

Age moves the figure more than anything else. People aged 13 to 17 are 25.3 per cent of the transgender population aged 13 and over, against 7.7 per cent of the population at large, and adults aged 18 to 24 are 28.9 per cent against 10.7 per cent. Those young adults were more likely to identify as transgender, at 2.72 per cent, than people aged 35 to 64 at 0.42 per cent or people 65 and over at 0.26 per cent.

Outside the United States the record thins quickly. Fewer than 1 per cent of people worldwide are transgender on the available figures, which range from under 0.1 per cent to 0.6 per cent; the Ipsos LGBT+ Pride survey averaged around 1 per cent across thirty countries in 2023. The first national census anywhere to count transgender and non-binary residents was Canada's, in 2021.

The largest survey of transgender people is not a prevalence estimate at all. The 2022 US Transgender Survey, conducted by Advocates for Trans Equality, collected 92,329 responses from binary and nonbinary transgender-identifying people, 84,170 of them adults and 8,159 youth aged 16 and 17, drawn from all fifty states, the District of Columbia, five territories and overseas military bases. It is the largest survey ever run on the experiences of transgender people in the country, and it is self-selected: it measures what respondents report, not how many exist.

How transgender is used as a word

Transgender is an adjective and Merriam-Webster files it as one: a transgender person, transgender people. Trans is the standard shorthand, and the APA records it as such. The abstract noun is the form to leave alone, since transgenderism is the word GLAAD identifies as having turned pejorative.

Health-practitioner manuals, journalistic style guides and LGBTQ advocacy groups converge on one further rule: others should use the name and pronouns the person has identified, including for references to that person's past.

The unstable vocabulary is at the edges. The APA's own guidance carries a note that transsexual is largely outdated and should be used only for someone who specifically claims it, while its Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity reviews the term. Wikipedia's own article states the general case plainly: transgender has no universally accepted definition, including among researchers.

Why the scope of transgender is disputed

The disagreements are about who the umbrella collects, and they run in both directions. From inside the older vocabulary, some people who identify as transsexual object to being included under the transgender umbrella, and Transsexual sets out that distinction as the people who draw it draw it. Christine Jorgensen went the opposite way in 1979, publicly rejecting transsexual and identifying herself in newsprint as trans-gender, on the ground that "gender doesn't have to do with bed partners, it has to do with identity."

From anthropology comes a criticism of the category itself. In Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, published in 2007, David Valentine argues that activists made the word and then applied it to a great many people who claim no such thing about themselves, and that anybody rejecting the label belongs outside the count. Feinberg made a version of the point from a different position: for some people the word is not something they call themselves, but a bin that observers put them in.

Both objections concern where a word stops, not whether anybody it names exists.