Note: This FAQ is incomplete. I have made it available because it now contains considerably more than the original FAQ, but there is still much work to be done. Please send suggestions, comments, and contributions to Diane Wilson.

Who are we? Where did we come from? What is our place in the world?

Some people take questions like these, and use them to head into the realms of philosophy or religion. But for us transgendered people, these are questions with real and immediate practical value.

4.1 Who Are We?

Before we can even talk about this, we need to talk about terminology (yes, again).

Most people don't bother to separate sex from gender. Men are male; women are female. Nothing could be more obvious, unless you happen to be transgendered.

Sex is between the legs; everything else is gender. This is important, because the difference between sex and gender is crucial. We need different terms for them. One fairly common convention is to use male and female for sex, and to use woman and man for gender. By separating sex and gender, we allow for the possibilities that a woman might be male, or that a man might be female.

This can raise hackles pretty quickly. By this standard, it's easy to decide who is male and who is female, but the definitions of woman and man begin to get rather nebulous. And contentious. So it's time to draw another distinction.

Gender subdivides into two aspects, at least, more or less. One is gender identity, which is our internal sense of who we are. Another is gender role, that set of social niches and expectations that we do or do not fit into. Yet another aspect, which is harder to pin a label on, is our adaptation (or lack of it) to gender role, the interaction between nature and nurture in which we develop and grow as children.

As children? Yes, virtually all of us can trace the roots of our transgenderism back to a very early age. Whether as a vague yearning and escape into a world where we are different, or as crossdressing, or as full-blown realization of gender-body mismatch, most of us know by the age of five or six. We may not know exactly what's going on, but we know that we are different. It doesn't take long before we learn that this difference is not acceptable.

There are two pertinent observations to draw here. One is that the realization at this early age, and the consistency of that age, strongly point to a developmental basis for transgenderism. Whatever the roots of this issue might be, those roots develop very early, and cannot be attributed to environmental factors in childhood.

The other thing is that nurture is not all-powerful in determining gender identity. If anything, the evidence points entirely towards nature, because in story after story after story, as I talk to people in this community, I hear: Denial. Punishment. Shame. Repression. Guilt. All of these are socially influenced feelings, powerful feelings that could motivate a change--if change were possible.

Quite the opposite happens. In spite of all the pressure to conform, in spite of the restrictive roles that we are placed into time and time again, transgender feelings do not die.

In answer to the question, "Who are we?" I can only answer with this: We may have been born male or female, but our internal sense of gender identity does not match the genitals we were born with. (For better or for worse, the clinicians separate this out from intersexuals.)

Note that I've carefully stayed away from a couple of areas. I've said that our gender identity doesn't match the sex we were born into, but I haven't said what that gender identity really is. We might identify as woman or man. Or we might not. Or we might identify as some of each. We might not even be certain of how we identify ourselves. Many possibilities exist.

The other thing I haven't done is tie transgenderism to sexuality. It is in fact a complex relationship, but there is no cause-and-effect relationship in either direction. Transgendered people may be heterosexual (if we can figure out what "hetero-" means), homosexual (if we can figure out who is "the same sex" as us), bisexual, asexual, polysexual, or whatever else may be possible within human sexuality.

4.2 Where Did We Come From?

If we are people whose sex-of-birth and gender identity do not match, how did we get to be that way?

There are no hard and firm answers to this.

4.3 What is Our Place in the World?

4.4 What Can We Do to Change Things?

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Disclaimer: Use this at your own risk. Things change daily on the Net and net-related information in this FAQ may not necessarily be correct. The only part of this document that can be considered perpetually accurate is the charter quoted in the first section of the Introduction.

Copyright © 1994-1997 by Amy A. Lewis, Kymberleigh Richards, and Diane Wilson. This page may be redistributed only after notifying the authors and entirely without changes other than what may be required for formatting into another medium.

Last updated May 27, 2001.

The soc.support.transgendered FAQ was originally written by Amy A. Lewis <alicorn@pobox.com>, and was updated in late 1995 and early 1996 by Kymberleigh Richards <sysadmin@xconn.com>. It is currently maintained by Diane Wilson <diane@firelily.com>; updates and additions should be sent to Diane Wilson. The FAQ Introduction is also available via the Cross Connection archive server.