transgender

(adjective)

Not identifying with culturally conventional gender roles and categories of male or female; having changed gender identity from male to female or female to male, or identifying with elements of both, or having some other gender identity.

Related Terms

Examples of transgender in the following topics:

  • Gender Identity in Everyday Life

    • Transgender individuals are those whose gender identity does not align with their sex organs.

  • The Movement for Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights

    • The LGBT Rights Movement refers to the attempts of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocates to improve the legal and social status of LGBT people.
    • Analyze the efforts of the LGBT rights movement to achieve equal rights and opportunities for homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered individuals

  • Gender Socialization

    • For example, individuals that identify as transgender feel that their gender identity does not match their biological sex.

  • The Feminist Perspective

    • Gender stratification occurs when gender differences give men greater privilege and power over women, transgender, and gender-non-conforming people.

  • Theories of Gender Differences

    • In gender socialization, the groups people join are the gender categories, "cisgender women and men" and "transgender people".
    • Men's dominance of women and cisgender dominance of transgender is seen as an attempt to maintain power and privilege to the detriment of women.

  • Gender vs. Sex

    • Similarly, a transgender male (sometimes this person will also be a transsexual and other times this person will have no desire to transition sex categories) will be assigned female at birth (based on the interpretation of biological material), but then seek to learn and display the symbols, codes, and cues (based upon existing gender norms in his society) to be interpreted (by himself and others) as first a boy and later a man or as a boy/man sometimes and a girl/woman at other times.
    • As a result, support groups and community centers sprung up in the 1980's (forming a national Transgender movement in the 1990's) to (a) teach people the story they would need to tell to acquire transexual services and identities, and (b) lobby medical and psychological communities to remove these newly added (or newly socially constructed) "disorders" from the record books (this process has been somewhat successful as transsexuality has been reinterpreted repeatedly throughout the last two decades and in some countries gained legal recognition and protection).

  • Sexism

    • Some believe that cisgender people are normal and better than transgender people while others do not even factor transgender people into their reasoning.

  • Values as Binders

    • For example, transgender individuals hold the value of freedom to identify and express their gender as they choose; however this value is not shared by much of society, and discriminatory laws and practices prevent this freedom.

  • Homophobia

    • Homophobia, or the fear of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals, is often the impetus for discrimination, which can be expressed through either institutional or informal means.

  • Minority Groups

    • Recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as a minority group or groups has gained prominence in the Western world since the nineteenth century.