The growing use of the term 'transgender' is recognition of the fact that gender, like most human attributes, is not an either/or, a this or a that, but is a continuum. The idea that gender is a fixed set of behaviors that can be predicted at birth based on an infant's external genital organs is, not a necessary truth, but a self-reinforcing cultural myth.
People are very complex, and we all give lip service to the idea that we're each unique individuals. Then we turn around and expect everyone to behave and feel the way we do, because that's what we know and understand. If we can't figure someone out, we classify them as 'other,' and absolve ourselves of the ability to learn how they feel and think, while we hasten to compare notes with the people we want to be grouped with so we aren't mistaken for 'other' ourselves.
We create hosts of these artificial us/them categories: man and woman, black and white, native and foreign, abled and disabled, smart and dumb, old and young, left and right handed, this and that religion. As statistical populations, many of these categories have validity. But forcibly applied to individuals, these categories can be brutally destructive.
For example, people are not short or tall. Adults have a height that falls on a continuum of heights. We can draw arbitrary lines at two places on that continuum and say that between the lines is average, beyond one line is tall, and beyond the other line is short. If we then design automobiles and doorways and clothing to fit average people but not short or tall people, we give a social meaning to the constructs short and tall, a meaning that did not exist previously, and that has significant negative impact on the lives of those people we have labeled as short and tall.
And so it seems to be with many, if not all, attributes that make up what we call gender. Take any gendered attribute about which everyone knows, 'all men and no women do this,' or 'all women do this better than all men,' examine it, and you will find exceptions. And so there are people who are not comfortable in the social roles man and woman, who feel they belong in the 'other' role, or in some role completely different than man or woman.
One can blindly defend the social roles 'man' and 'woman' and the placement of people in one of these roles based on the sex they are assigned at birth, or one can reexamine these social roles and what it means to have a sex and a gender. The situation is somewhat akin to, and perhaps an extension of, the centuries long process of understanding the social concepts of race and ethnicity, and how these do and should affect the way we live together.
The point isn't that gender does not exist or that people do not have a biological sex, or that people who are comfortable with their place in the sex/gender system need to change. The point is that the binary sex/gender system flat does not work for some people, and is in fact a system of oppression for them. The first step in doing something about the situation is listening to the personal stories of the transgender and intersexed and gay people in your life. (I guarantee we are there. Make it safe for us to tell our stories, and we will speak.)
Transgender is a relatively new term, having come into widespread use only within the '90s as an umbrella term to include crossdressers, drag kings and queens, butch lesbians, transsexuals, and others, some of whom felt that those labels, defined in the context of a binary sex and gender system, could not adequately express who they were. The Transgen email list spun off from the soc.motss (members of the same sex) newsgroup in January 1991. I believe we will find, looking back, that the Internet played a necessary part in the formation of a transgender community, allowing a very sparse and mostly hidden population to converse for the first time.
Though transgender has been, at times reluctantly, tacked on to many gay and lesbian organizations, a growing number of people are beginning to think that transgender encompasses gay and lesbian and bisexual people, who, after all, many say do not correctly fit the social roles of man and woman. A furious amount of thinking, talking, writing, and theorizing is taking place around the world about all of this. It's an exciting time, and I hope the result will be an increase in personal understanding, freedom, and dignity.
[Published in the August 1998 issue of Q-News at Michigan State University.]