Being Transgender Research Paper

If you took a look around an average American high school, how many of the students would be assumed to be part of the LGBT+ community? The answer tends to be a higher number than most would assume. This is commonly because people are uninformed and ignorant to the topic. The LGBT+ community is growing steadily, and yet the only words in many students’ vocabularies are “gay, lesbian” and maybe “bisexual”. There are an incredible amount of terms and ideas in the LGBT+ community that should be understood, such as the gender spectrum and gender binary, cisnormativity, cisgenderism, transgenderism, nonbinarism, gender neutrality, pronoun importance, and gender fluidity.

It should first be understood that gender is not strictly male and female. “Historically, the terms "sex" and "gender" have been used interchangeably, but, in modern society, their meanings are becoming increasingly distinct” (Newman). While sex is the biological term used to describe the combination of chromosomes, genitalia, gonads, and hormones a person has, the word “gender” is a psychological term used to describe the internal feelings of a person. Between the lines of male and female, there

One such word is transgender. While there are other gender identities that may fall under the general idea of being transgender, the main idea is that a person’s gender identity is opposite or not matching to their sex assigned at birth. Commonly, the word transgender (or the common abbreviation of trans) is used alongside the standard male or female. This means that a trans guy/man/boy is someone who was assigned female sex at birth, but that their gender identity is male. A trans woman/girl is someone who was assigned male sex at birth, but identifies as female. It is important to understand that not all transgender people go through the process of physical transition (such as hormones, genital surgery, etc.), and that a person’s transition is only what they make it to