there are also some older trans folks who use language like that just because they aren’t “politically aware” or tuned into contemporary queer culture
I think older cis people sometimes use the term for similar reasons.
But yeah, I don’t have strong hopes for the term getting reclaimed, but it would be nice to finally have both an umbrella term (“trans” or “transgender”) that doesn’t just narrowly mean people who both socially & medically transition, and to have a neutral term for people who do happen to socially & medically transition.
Sometimes I just bite the bullet and use the longer phrase “trans person who medically transitioned” - it’s just unwieldy language, but in general audiences it’s probably best to do that to avoid upsetting someone.
I know most social convention is interpersonal and not objective in any real way but it’s still so surreal to hear people refer to it as an older term when we were still using and teaching it as terminology at my college’s Queer Student Union about 10 years ago; like, hardly ancient.
yeah, it’s not that old - it’s more like a term that became taboo as queer activism attempted to develop more inclusive language, starting with transgender which was meant to extend beyond transsexuals to include cross-dressers, drag performers, etc. … unfortunately people just started using “transgender” to mean “transsexual”, so then there was “trans*” as the new umbrella term, and then finally “trans”.
Every step along the way I think what happens is that the umbrella term just becomes the new way to refer to the default, mainstream conception of a trans person, which is basically a transsexual - a person who socially and medically transitions from one binary sex to another binary sex.
Probably what most made people abandon “transsexual” as a term was the way the term was adopted by truscum (trans people who don’t believe in non-binary people and who gatekeep trans identity mostly through pseudo-science and junk science).
It was for a while, but there does seem to be an effort to reclaim it recently.
there are also some older trans folks who use language like that just because they aren’t “politically aware” or tuned into contemporary queer culture
I think older cis people sometimes use the term for similar reasons.
But yeah, I don’t have strong hopes for the term getting reclaimed, but it would be nice to finally have both an umbrella term (“trans” or “transgender”) that doesn’t just narrowly mean people who both socially & medically transition, and to have a neutral term for people who do happen to socially & medically transition.
Sometimes I just bite the bullet and use the longer phrase “trans person who medically transitioned” - it’s just unwieldy language, but in general audiences it’s probably best to do that to avoid upsetting someone.
I know most social convention is interpersonal and not objective in any real way but it’s still so surreal to hear people refer to it as an older term when we were still using and teaching it as terminology at my college’s Queer Student Union about 10 years ago; like, hardly ancient.
yeah, it’s not that old - it’s more like a term that became taboo as queer activism attempted to develop more inclusive language, starting with transgender which was meant to extend beyond transsexuals to include cross-dressers, drag performers, etc. … unfortunately people just started using “transgender” to mean “transsexual”, so then there was “trans*” as the new umbrella term, and then finally “trans”.
Every step along the way I think what happens is that the umbrella term just becomes the new way to refer to the default, mainstream conception of a trans person, which is basically a transsexual - a person who socially and medically transitions from one binary sex to another binary sex.
Probably what most made people abandon “transsexual” as a term was the way the term was adopted by truscum (trans people who don’t believe in non-binary people and who gatekeep trans identity mostly through pseudo-science and junk science).