Unpopular Opinion

I get what you're saying.

From the outside, the struggle over language seems rushed and mostly misdirected to begin with, and I see the kind of problem you have with the terminology irl when talking with friends, so it isn't just you.

I don't really care what the eventual terminology lands on, I'll adapt as it goes on, but I don't have to live with the dissonance, so I don't have a horse in the race. I just stick with trans rather than adding sex or gender to it because it isn't a full, consensus driven, universal finality at this point.

Tbh, for the first forty years of my life, transexual was the quasi-official word. People may not remember Tula, who was the first trans woman in playboy, which was a huge deal. Most people never heard of sex change surgery before that. And that's what the surgery was called then. It's only been maybe fifteen years that there's been a push to change the terminology.

That's not a very long time for language to shift. It just isn't realistic to pretend that widespread changes in language are going to happen in anything less than a generation. Since the preferred terminology isn't universal, and keeps changing, I say you use whatever works for you, and that's that. Hopefully, you'd also be chill when someone else uses different terminology as long as they aren't being jerks about it.

And, hell, you're right. Gender is being delineated as the presentation of the internal self perception, the things we do that express our selves regarding the bimodal/spectrum nature of manhood and womanhood. Sex is being delineated as the physical structure, with disagreement on exactly what the criteria should be. So, people that are wanting to change their bodies are transitioning their sex, not only their gender presentation.

But it's still all up in the air. It isn't like there's a single authority for trans people. There's not even an official organization that has widespread recognition as being an authority supported by a vast majority of trans people.

From the outside, all I can say is that I support your right to self determination, and that I'm willing to adapt my language as things settle out. And I support your wish (and that of others) to use transexual just like I do for those that prefer transgender.

I'm a cis het guy (I think that's right?) and I'm just genuinely curious about why the labels we use have taken on such significance. I'm not some conservative 'this woke stuff has just got out of hand' person, more in a sense of have the waters become too muddy to navigate, and have we, in an an attempt to become more inclusive, done a bit too much Top Down classification.

Instead of just letting people be who they want to be and define themselves how they want to be defined without having to justify it? Because it seems from your post you're feeling the need to justify your use of a term which you feel applies to you where really... It's _ our_ language. It feels to me you shouldn't be put in that position

My pronoun policy is based on a live and let live frame of reference, and disregard the lexical accuracy considerations. I don't know what's accurate, but will use whatever pronouns a person wants.

I personally want to bypass any "men and females" vibe, where I try to tell a trans person what pronouns are technically correct, at the expense of disregarding/dismissing their subjective reality. I wouldn't want to do that even if I had all the linguistic leverage to press the point.

I might be wrong, but I'm comfortable with not insisting on specific labels and names for people who are not me.

I don't think this is a controversial opinion in a vacuum. It's regrettable that transsexual was a blanket term for transgender people to begin with.

I think for simplicity it can be boiled down to transgender being how you present yourself, and transsexual being what's under your clothes.

The only grey area would be whether breast surgery counts towards being transsexual. I don't think it would be, as cis-women don't become men after breast reduction surgery. But I feel like a man getting breast enlargement surgery is different somehow.

I don't understand why "conservative" trans people identify as transsexual instead of transgender. Transsexuality is currently impossible. Transgender is much more in line with what "conservative" trans people push.

I hatched my sister into transitioning. Transgender seems to be more accurate for how things currently work.

I think bathrooms should be segregated based on gender, not based on sex. Or even better, not segregated at all. Cheap bathroom "walls" and "doors" are part of what makes builders build more bathrooms per building.

Oh hell nah man. How much time you got on your hand for this shit