From a 1923 German coinage to an asterisk search engines can't read
The vocabulary for gender identity has been rebuilt several times in a century. Magnus Hirschfeld coined one German phrase in 1923, an English version followed in 1949, and by 1995 someone on a Usenet forum had added an asterisk that still confuses Google, which reads it as a wildcard.
Magnus Hirschfeld's 1923 phrase seelischer Transsexualismus inspired the English word transsexual, which David Oliver Cauldwell introduced in 1949 and Harry Benjamin popularised in 1966. Benjamin also devised a six-category Sex Orientation Scale, sorting people by their reasons for cross-dressing and how urgently they wanted surgery. It was built around heterosexual trans women, fitted trans men poorly, and modern practice no longer treats sexual orientation as a diagnostic criterion.
The competing word arrived through a Columbia University psychiatrist, John F. Oliven, whose 1965 reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology argued that transgenderism described the situation better, since sexuality was not the main factor. Community figures picked it up. Virginia Prince, founder of the cross-dressers' magazine Transvestia, used transgenderal in its December 1969 issue, and Christine Jorgensen told newspapers in 1979 that she was trans-gender, explaining that gender concerned identity rather than bed partners. Transgenderism itself later came to be seen as pejorative, according to GLAAD.
An organised umbrella took shape in the 1980s and 1990s. A transgender community was being discussed by 1984, and in 1985 Richard Ekins opened the Trans-Gender Archive at the University of Ulster. A 1992 conference on law and employment policy defined the word broadly, and Leslie Feinberg's pamphlet of the same year pitched it as a unifying label for every kind of gender nonconformity. The anthropologist David Valentine later cautioned, in a 2007 ethnography, that activists had swept in people who never used the term for themselves.
Newer shifts continue. Female to male and male to female, dominant from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, gave way to trans man and trans woman, moving emphasis from anatomy to identity. Style guides such as GLAAD's and The Guardian's treat transgender as an adjective, never a noun. In 2020 the International Journal of Transgenderism renamed itself the International Journal of Transgender Health. Canada became the first country to count its transgender and non-binary residents in a census, in 2021.
Source: Transgender
