Transgender Word Wars: Dispatches from the Frontline (Part I)

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” –Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Transgender people have been engaged in a war to find words to adequately express the phenomenon that we share. The war of words has proceeded along three fronts. The first front involves whether sexual arousal is the motivation for transgender behavior or not. From the very beginning of this struggle we somehow have known that the phenomenon is neither pathological nor performed for cheap sexual thrills. The heritage of psychiatry is full of pathological sexual theories of behavior, based on a 19^th century model of the steam engine filled with unconscious sexual urges like steam driving an engine.  It is no wonder that the words they use to describe being transgender are filled with sexual pathology.

Transgender people have fought back by adopting words like “crossdressing” which were sexually neutral or by coopting and changing the meaning of originally pathological words like “transgender” and “gender identity disorder.” They also condemned certain words like “transvestism” and “fetishistic transvestism” and “autogynephilia.”  The arms race between invention of pathological words and the transgender word assimilation process continues with the issuance of the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that featured the classification of  “gender dysphoria.” This change was heralded as the end of pathologization but the truth is that while the words have changed, “gender dysphoria” is still in a listing of mental disorders which is the definition of the DSM and there are other attacking pathological categories. The conflict on this front is not over.

The second front for the war of words has been the separation of the meanings of the words “sex” and “gender.”  This war also involves social scientists and the media who would use gender as a polite word for sex. This front influenced with the first front in that the separation of sex and gender was crucial to the popularization of the word “transgender.”

The third front is the definition of the term “transsexual” which has changed somewhat since its introduction by Cauldwell in 1949 by including “gender” as well as “change of sex” in its definition.  Compared to the other two fronts, this one is a minor but important skirmish.

First Front

Magnus Hirschfeld

The history of the first front begins with Magnus Hershfeld who coined the term “transvestite” in 1910.  Although the Latin roots for “transvestite” do not imply anything but the neutral “crossdressing,” Hershfeld immediately gave the term its connotation that sexual arousal was the motivation for the behavior. This may say more about the man than the phenomenon because there was little or no evidence to back up this interpretation. However, it was consistent with psychiatric and sexology thought at the time.

Transgender people (although they were not called that until later) reacted to “transvestism” by putting it on the “politically incorrect list” and by popularizing the Anglo-Saxon term “crossdressing.” This allowed crossdressing of all kinds to be included — including “drag” and crossdressing for political protest, theater or other reasons. The idea was to replace transvestitism with a word that did not connote sexual arousal.

The next word in the fight on this front was “transgender” which was coined by the psychiatrist John Oliven in 1965. To Oliven, the word “transgender” incorporated “transvestism” but reduced the association with sexual arousal. Transgender people seized on the word and changed its meaning to mean those who behave in a gender behavior category that was not the one assigned at birth (according to sex). As with “crossdressing,” the word referred to behavior, not to anything to do with sexual arousal. This was possible because of activity on the second front which involved John Money inventing the term “gender” in the late 1950s. Sex categories were male and female while gender behavior categories were masculine and feminine.

The term “transgender” was popularized by many transgender people who did most of the work, although popularization is sometimes attributed to Virginia Prince. She undoubtedly approved of the word because she advocated gender expression without transsexual transition (although she did take hormones and develop breasts.)The popularization was undoubtedly helped at the time by the development of transgender support groups. The term was also initially used to discriminate “transsexuals” who desired body modification in order to express themselves in the other gender behavior category. Later, transsexuals have been included under the transgender umbrella and sometimes others.

Erik H. Erikson

The next term for transgender people to deal with was “gender identity disorder” (GID) which was invented by Richard Green in 1974 based on inconclusive research on transgender children. The component words of this term reflected its pathological heritage as well as the new separation of sex and gender. Disorder is an old synonym for “disease” which has come to mean a disease of undetermined origin and is primarily used in the mental health field. The word “identity” traces its pedigree from Freud and was popularized by Eric Erikson (1950).  Of course, “gender” had been coined by John Money.  GID was incorporated into the DSM-3 category of sexual disorders in 1980 along with the paraphilias (fetish disorders).  This association has been responsible for subsequent transgender shaming.

In the next version of the DSM, DSM IIIR, GID was put into the disorders emerging in childhood, which validated those practicing “conversion therapy” on children using such techniques as operant conditioning and jawboning. The goal of such “therapy” is to allay the fears of parents that their TG child will grow up to be homosexual or transsexual. There is no evidence that this assumption is correct. The battle to make such therapy illegal is still underway.

In DSM-4 GID persisted but transsexualism was eliminated, presumably subsumed by GID. But in the next version, DSM-4 TR, a new pathological term emerged that of “autogynephilia.” This was a term defined variously by Blanchard and Lawrence in the 1980s and 1990s which is purported to explain the motivation of male heterosexual transgender people. The idea was that they were in love with themselves as a woman or they were sexually aroused by thinking of themselves as a woman. The idea does not measure up to a scientific theory because it is not well defined and there is also no solid evidence for it. But it persists today in the DSM-5.  It has been put on the “politically incorrect” list.

To much press fanfare, GID was eliminated in from the DSM-5 in 2014 and replaced in a new category that of “gender dysphoria” which simply means in half-Greek that one is dissatisfied with one’s assigned gender. (Note: Some TG describe the phenomena as “gender euphoria.”) “Gender dysphoria” has been kicking around in psychiatric circles and the details of DSMs for some time. In the war of words it is a psychiatric community retreat tactic. It is hopefully similar to the tactic observed for the term “homosexuality” before that term was eliminated from the DSM.

The term “gender dysphoria” and placing it apart from fetishism does seem to reduce the sexual arousal stigma from transgender people but it does not completely resolve the word war. For one, as I have described in another post, it is translated into GID in ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) before billing. A second reason is that the definition of “gender dysphoria” implies rejection of one gender behavior category but not adoption of the other category. This might be okay for those who are “genderqueer” but it does not apply to most transgender people. A third reason is that the category of  “fetishistic transvestism” still exists and it has within it “autogynephilia” which have clear connotations of sexual arousal motivation. The fourth reason is that there still is a category for TG children which legitimizes “conversion therapy” for children.

I will transmit more dispatches from the fronts in my next post. With regard to the first front, there are dispatches related to the current use of gender identity and description of the “politically incorrect” word list. There will also be news from the second and third fronts as well as an assessment of the overall word war effort.

Part II will arrive next month. What do you think of Dana’s assessment of the Transgender Word Wars? Use the comment area below to let us know.

Tags: crossdressing, featured, History, Identity, Transgender, Transsexual, transsexualism

Category: Transgender Body & Soul