I am a gendered person and, therefore, a transgendered person (although I don’t consider myself transgendered now – I consider myself a transsexual person). My chosen descriptor is trans man, short for transsexual man. Longtime readers of my blog know my preferences and my reasoning, but for me, keeping up the fight was too stressful. Now I just want the world to stop using an apostrophe to make a plural noun!

Thank you for a well spoke and argued counterpoint to the madness.

Get a life, I say.

As someone who grew up through life with a hormone imbalance and the inability to function as a male, I consider myself more intersex than transsexual. I did not “transgender” myself. I was already this way, I only made some changes to make things more correct. It was either that or a gun to my head.

I find the word “transgendered” in reference to the intersex/transsexual community to be insulting and a complete improper usage. I even question the use of “transgender” for those who like me are medically diagnosed with GID or something else and are transitioning or transitioned medically and psychologically.

If you want to call the crossdressers and drag-queens who are dressed “en-femme” as “transgendered”.. fine. But please do not put me in that category.

With the APA, AMA, WPATH and others speaking on the issues that affect transsexuals and intersex, I think it’s time we need to separate ourselves from those who just want to dress up. The “gender expression” community continues to take down the “gender identity” community by demanding to be added to certain rights such as sex-segregated public accommodations when downstairs, they are still “fully functional”. The hate groups will still continue to scream “bathroom rape”, but if medical experts speak up that those who use the faciltiies are medically diagnosed and for all intents and purposes are considered their congruent gender of appearance. We need to attack this a different way and that’s through adding an identity aspect to the definition of “sex” at the state and federal levels. If you are a true intersex or transsexual, you will have identification (either a state driver’s license or US Passport/Passport Card) that shows your identified gender. That is how the government should recognize you. The weekend crossdressers can’t provide this.

My point is that within the T segment of the rainbow, there are two very distinct sub-groups that have different needs and as a member of the intersex/transsexual (medically diagnosed) sub-group, I highly oppose being called “transgendered” (with the “ed”).

I’d like to point out an additional common but incorrect usage for these terms that the article did not take into account, which may well have been a larger part of the context in which GLAAD made it’s definition.

I frequently hear people incorrectly use both transgender and transgendered as nouns, and in this respect the GLAAD definition was well meaning and correct in affirming transgender as an adjective. Just as we would never call a black person "a black", or a gay person "a gay"; we vitally need this clarification to avoid our objectification and dehumanization. Furthermore, I feel this would help avert the tendency to homologize the wide spectrum of transgender people that causes so many of us to dislike the term.