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Revision as of 11:11, 27 December 2002 by MartinHarper (talk | contribs) (summary of TS - detail moved to main article)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Transgender is a catch-all term for a variety of individuals, behaviors and groups centered around the full or partial reversal of gender roles. This includes a number of sub-categories, which include transsexuals, transvestites, and drag queens.
Occasionally the term gender dysphoria is used to describe this tendency, and the reaction to its social consequences, as a psychological condition.
Transsexual
Main article: Transsexual
A transsexual is a person who establishes a permanent identity with the opposite gender to his or her sex. The typical explanation is of a "man trapped in a woman's body" or vica-versa. A transsexual makes or desires to make a transition from their birth sex to another gender, with some type of medical alteration to their body. This alteration may be hormonally induced, and may include sexual reassignment surgery.
Transvestite
Main article: Transvestite
In cross-dressing or transvestite behavior, a person enjoys wearing clothes considered typical to the opposite sex (colloquially, "drag"), but may have no desire or intention of adopting other behaviors or practices common to that gender. (For example, contrary to common belief, most male-bodied transvestites prefer female partners.) Some transvestites endeavor to project a complete illusion of belonging to the opposite sex, down to mannerisms, speech patterns, and emulation of sexual characteristics; others use a more "mixed" approach, as for instance a man who may wear both a dress and a beard.
Sometimes men practise transvestism in a sexual context. In those cases it is often difficult zu distinguish between fetishism that happens to have female clothing as an object and transgender behaviour that includes sexual play. If sexual play is involved, the term cross-dressing is not applied.
Drag
Main Article: Drag queen
A behaviour often identified with transvestism involves wearing highly exaggerated and outrageous costumes or imitating movie and music stars of the opposite sex, is a form of performing art called drag, practiced by drag queens and kings.
However, since the terms transvesitism is almost never, and cross-dressing only rarely used for female-bodied persons, the term Drag King can also apply to everybody from the female-to-male side of the transgender spectrum who do not see themselfes as exclusively male identified.
Other
Transgender is also used to describe behaviour or feelings that can not be cathegorised into these older sub-cathegories, for example, people living in a gender role that is different from the one they were assigned at birth, but who do not wish to undergo any or all of the available medical options, or people who do not wish to identify themselfes as transsexuals, men or women.
Many non Western cultures legitimized cross dressing. The berdache in many Native American tribes is recognized as a separate gender, a woman-living-man, not as a man who wants to be a woman. The husband of a berdache is not viewed as a berdache, but as a 'normal' male. In some societies there is a correspondig gender for man-living-women (amazons).
See also: gender dysphoria, intersexuals, fetish, autogynephilia, Sex-change, two-spirit