Definition of Transgender Community

Q. Response by Chrysalis

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A. Thank you for your inquiry. The question posed has no absolute answer, speak to a dozen members of the Transgender Community and you will get a dozen different and equally valid answers. The term transgender in and of itself is used in several different connotations.

First as a term to describe a segment of society, i.e. the Transgender Community; which in fact covers all conceivable forms of gender expression from Heterosexual Cross Dressers to Drag King/Queens to Non-/Pre-/Post-Operative Transsexuals and everything in between.

Second it is used describe a specific sub-group within the T-Community, i.e. an individual who lives and works full time in the gender opposite of their physical sex as determined by external genitalia. These individuals may or may not seek hormone replacement therapy and generally do not seek surgical intervention.

Within the Transgender Community the terms MtF (male to female) and FtM (female to male) are used to differentiate the genders. However even this is not standard as those individuals who are Transsexual identify fully and completely within the bi-gender standards that is generally accepted throughout society. In fact most Post-Operative Transsexuals do their best to fade into the woodwork as it were since they now appear without question to belong to their appropriate gender.

Unless, this survey is being used for a dissertation on the subject of Transgenderism, any choices beyond male and female would lead to potential problems in the area of discrimination and would also invalidate the data since the majority of the people within the Transgendered Community self-identify according to their mental image of themselves regardless of the physical appearances. The concept of gender and sex for the vast majority of the population at large is gender equals physical sex, cut and dried. This however is NOT true. Gender is one's self-perception of their self without regard to physical manifestations. Sex is the actual physical manifestations that are readily visible. As one of my contemporaries put it "Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs and never the two shall meet". In the majority of the population, gender and sex match in the individual which has been designated rightly or wrongly 'normal male or female', while in the transgendered individuals the gender (self identity) and sex (physical appearance) are in conflict.

I hope that this has helped, it is a very difficult subject to explain especially in the short context of a survey. The combinations of self identity are almost limitless and no matter how the questions are constructed beyond the simple 'female' or 'male' answers the less valid and more confusing will be the results.