‘T’ is for … Transgender

Being trans brings about many different issues to being gay or bisexual. There a whole lot of different types of trans that all come under the ‘T’ in LGBT:

Transgender: is a general term applied to a variety of individuals. Usually it refers to someone who believes that they are a different gender (male/female/neither/both) to the sex of the body they were born in (man/woman/intersex). Often they will say they were born in the ‘wrong body’. A transgender person may or may not wish to have surgery or take hormones to change their physical body parts but will usually choose to live as the gender they feel they should be.

Transsexual: usually applies to transgendered people who have had or wish to have surgery and/or hormones to change their body on the outside to match their gender on the inside.
Genderqueer: or just ‘queer’ is a term used to refer to all gender identities outside the traditional binary male and female. This includes people who define as both genders, no gender at all and those who are gender fluid (move between genders).

Transvestite or cross dresser: these terms can be used interchangably, although people will often prefer one over the other due to negative connotations associated with these terms. A cross dresser is someone who wears clothes traditionally worn by the opposite sex, however usually has no desire to change their sex and is happy with their gender. They can be gay, straight or bisexual and cross dressing is not usually done for sexual pleasure. Cross dressing is often done for performance as in the case of drag queens and drag kings.

It is important to remember that a persons gender identity is entirely separate from their sexuality. Therefore a transgender person can still be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual etc. A woman who was born a man but is still attracted to women could therefore be a lesbian transgender woman.

Although homophobia is a lot rarer than it used to be, trans people still experience a lot of transphobia from both the heterosexual and the LGB communities and it is often misunderstood.