Today’s needull looks at debates around transgender and tries to understand the issue better. Questions like “who counts as a ‘real’ woman?” is looked at.
The term transgender can be used to replace the earlier term ‘transsexual’, but can also cover a much wider set of phenomena including those who choose to inhabit an ambiguous gender position or who reject the gender binary altogether. As used by most trans activists a trans woman is anyone who was labeled as male at birth, but has come to identify as a woman regardless of whether they have been through a medical reassignment process. The term gender, in sociological usage, originally emerged in contradistinction to ‘sex’ – as defined through external anatomical characteristics, hormones and chromosomes. Gender refers to the cultural and social aspects of being male and female as well as to the distinction between them – the, so-called, binary divide.
Needull in a haystack 