Transgender Research

The general term transgender is applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies that diverge from the normative gender role (man or woman) commonly, but not always, assigned at birth, as well as the role traditionally held by society. Transgender is the state of one's gender identity (i.e., self-identification as man, woman, or neither) not matching one's assigned sex (i.e., identification by others as male or female based on physical or genetic sex). The term transgender emerged in the 1960s, popularized in the 1970s to describe people who wanted to live cross-gender without sex reassignment surgery, and expanded in the 1980s as an umbrella term to unite all those whose gender identity did not mesh with their gender assigned at birth. Today, ...