Here’s some interesting news about health insurance companies covering transition-related costs according to Joanne Herman at HuffPo (although I do wish the word “transgender” weren’t used when “transsexual” is the more accurate term. Plenty of transgender people don’t want or require medical intervention, like genderqueer people and crossdressers and the many transgender people who don’t want different genitals (for a variety of reasons).
It becomes more & more difficult to be inclusive of the wide range of transgender people when an article by a transsexual person about transsexual people uses the term transgender, i.e. for the people who do not medically transition. I worry that many people who live as one gender but who have no issue with the genitals they were born with are going to face that much more pressure to have surgery they don’t want & can’t afford.
Someone else who linked to the article mentioned that it was the AP Stylebook that is the reason for the use of “trangender.” Bugs me too. Just confuses people!
I don’t blame mass-media people for a terminology misstep like this. But there are a lot of transsexual people who feed them this usage, which – yes – makes everybody else who’s also transgendered invisible and/or irrelevant.
@Ariel – As far as I know, the AP Stylebook does not reference trans* issues at all and does not dictate specific language use.