Transgender

• 1. Introduction

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  Transgender identity sits at the intersection of language, medicine, law, and lived experience, and the word itself has a contested, evolving history that stretches back more than a century. A transgender person, often called trans, has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. That simple definition opens onto a world of enormous variation: trans men, trans women, non-binary people, and many others who navigate identities that societies have struggled for generations to name, categorize, and understand.

  How did the word transgender come to mean what it means today? Who shaped its definition, and who has been included or excluded by it? How do medicine, law, and culture treat trans people around the world? And what does the data actually tell us about how many transgender people exist, and how they live? These are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Word in Progress

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  John F. Oliven, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, used the term transgenderism in his 1965 reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, arguing that the earlier word transsexualism was misleading because sexuality was not the central factor. The term transgender was then spread through communities and publications by figures including Christine Jorgensen and Virginia Prince, who used the word transgenderal in the December 1969 issue of Transvestia, a national magazine for cross-dressers that Prince founded.

  By 1984, a concept of a transgender community had taken shape, with transgender functioning as an umbrella term for a range of identities. Richard Ekins established the Trans-Gender Archive at the University of Ulster in 1985. In 1992, the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy formally defined transgender as encompassing transsexuals, transgenderists, and cross-dressers. That same year, Leslie Feinberg circulated a pamphlet titled Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come, which framed transgender as a unifying term for all forms of gender nonconformity. Gender theorist Susan Stryker refined that definition further in 1994, describing transgender as covering all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex and gender boundaries.

  The word that had once been a clinical substitute became, across three decades, a political and cultural concept. In 2020, the International Journal of Transgenderism changed its name to the International Journal of Transgender Health, describing the change as a move toward more appropriate and acceptable language in the field.

• 3. Before the Word Existed

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  Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term Transvestit in 1910, borrowing from the 19th-century French word travesti, as part of work that would lead to the 1919 founding of the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin. His research represented the most systematic study of gender nonconformity the world had yet seen. The Institut was destroyed after the Nazis seized power in 1933, and its research was burned in the book burnings of May 1933.

  Long before Hirschfeld, records of gender-nonconforming individuals appear across cultures and centuries. One of the earliest documented gender-nonconforming people in colonial America was Thomas(ine) Hall, a seventeenth-century colonial servant. The most detailed historical account of the period came from the life of the Chevaliere d'Eon, a French diplomat who lived from 1728 to 1810. William A. Hammond wrote an 1882 account of transgender Pueblo shamans called mujerados, comparing their situation to descriptions from ancient sources. Some historians consider the Roman emperor Elagabalus to have been transgender, based on reports that he dressed in a feminine manner, preferred to be called Lady rather than Lord, and may have sought a primitive form of gender-affirming surgery.

  The term transsexual was introduced to English in 1949 by David Oliver Cauldwell, drawing on Magnus Hirschfeld's 1923 term seelischer Transsexualismus, and was popularized by Harry Benjamin in 1966. Harry Benjamin also invented a classification system called the Sex Orientation Scale, which assigned transsexuals and transvestites to one of six categories. That scale was designed for use with heterosexual trans women, and trans men's identities did not align with its categories.

• 4. Healthcare and the Body

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  Medical and surgical options for transgender people span a wide range. Hormone replacement therapy for trans men induces beard growth and changes to skin, hair, voice, and fat distribution. For trans women, it feminizes fat distribution and breast tissue while diminishing muscle mass and strength. Surgical procedures for trans women can address the voice, skin, face, Adam's apple, breasts, waist, buttocks, and genitals. Procedures for trans men can masculinize the chest and genitals and remove the womb, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. Not all transgender people desire these treatments, and some cannot access them due to legal, financial, or medical barriers.

  The mental health dimension is documented in stark figures. A 2014 study by the Williams Institute, a UCLA think tank, found that 41% of transgender people had attempted suicide, with higher rates among those who faced discrimination in housing or healthcare, or rejection by family. A 2019 follow-up found that transgender people who wanted and received gender-affirming medical care had significantly lower rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts. Among trans children with supportive parents, a study found that only 4% had attempted suicide, a 93% decrease compared to the broader population in the 2014 study.

  France removed transgender identity from its list of mental diseases in May 2009, becoming the first country in the world to do so. The Danish parliament abolished the F64 Gender Identity Disorders diagnosis in 2017. The DSM-5 shifted to using the term gender dysphoria, reinforcing that being transgender is not considered a mental illness, while clarifying that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria applies only if being transgender causes distress or disability.

• 5. Law and Recognition

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  Canada was the first country to introduce collection of census data on its transgender and non-binary population, doing so in 2021. The 2021 Canadian census found that 59,460 Canadians, 0.19% of the population, identified as transgender. Earlier, on the 19th of June 2017, Bill C-16 received Royal Assent and became law, updating the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to include gender identity and gender expression as protected grounds from discrimination.

  In the United States, transgender people are protected from employment discrimination by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with exceptions for employers with fewer than 15 employees and religious organizations. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed those protections in the case R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A report released in February 2011 found that 90% of transgender Americans faced discrimination at work, and were unemployed at double the rate of the general population.

  In April 2014, the Supreme Court of India declared transgender to be a third gender in Indian law, with Justice KS Radhakrishnan noting that society seldom realizes or cares to realize the trauma, agony and pain which members of the Transgender community undergo. In 1998, Shabnam Mausi had become the first transgender person elected to office in India, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. In Europe, a survey conducted in 2011 by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK found that of 10,026 respondents, 1.4% would be classified into a gender minority group.

• 6. How Many, and Who

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  Accurate counts of the transgender population are difficult to produce. According to a systematic review, an estimated 9.2 out of every 100,000 people have received or requested gender affirmation surgery or transgender hormone therapy, while 355 out of every 100,000 people self-identify as transgender. The gap between those numbers reflects how differently the concept is measured depending on method.

  In the United States, over 2.8 million people identify as transgender. That breaks down to about 1% of adults, roughly 2.1 million people, and 3.3% of youth between the ages of 13 and 17, about 724,000 people. Among adults, 32.7% are transgender women, 34.2% are transgender men, and 33.1% are non-binary. The Social Security Administration has tracked the sex of U.S. citizens since 1936; a 1968 estimate by Ira B. Pauly put the number of transsexual people in the United States at approximately 2,500, with four times as many trans women as trans men.

  The 2021 Australian census estimated that 178,900 Australians, 0.9% of the population aged 16 and over, reported a gender different from their sex recorded at birth. People aged 16-24 were more likely than any other age group to be trans and gender diverse, at 1.8%. A 2020 study found that since 1990, among those seeking sex hormone therapy for gender dysphoria, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of trans men, such that they now equal the number of trans women seeking the same treatment.

• 7. Visibility and Symbol

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  The Transgender Pride Flag was designed by Monica Helms, an American transgender woman, in 1999, and was first shown at a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2000. Its five horizontal stripes of light blue, pink, white, pink, and light blue have become one of the most recognized symbols of the transgender community worldwide.

  Transgender Day of Remembrance is held every year on November 20 in honor of Rita Hester, who was killed on the 28th of November 1998. Her murder remained unsolved, but was described in 2022 by the Office of the Mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, as a result of transphobia and anti-trans violence. The holiday memorializes victims of hate crimes and raises awareness of violence against transgender people. International Transgender Day of Visibility, observed on March 31 each year, was founded by Michigan-based transgender activist Rachel Crandall Crocker in 2009.

  In 2014, Time declared that the United States had reached a transgender tipping point, citing a level of media visibility higher than ever before. Trans marches now take place in cities including Paris, San Francisco, and Toronto. The term trans* with an asterisk first appeared in 1995 on an online Usenet forum and entered wider use in the early 21st century; it was designed to explicitly signal the inclusion of genderqueer, agender, and genderfluid identities beyond the binary, though its use remains debated within the community.