Transexualism

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The state of having a gender identity that differs from the sex a person was assigned at birth, often involving a desire to live as another gender
2. A deeply felt identification with a gender other than the one assigned at birth, which may or may not lead to medical or social transition
3. The condition in which a person's internal sense of gender does not match the sex recorded for them at birth

Etymology: The word is built from "trans-", Latin for "across" or "beyond", the Latin adjective "sexualis" (from "sexus", sex), and the suffix "-ism". It belongs to the early twentieth-century sexology of Germany and the United States, where clinicians needed terms for a condition they were only beginning to describe. The earliest uses are uncertain, though German sexologists were using related terms in the 1920s, and the English form appeared in print by the late 1940s. David Cauldwell's 1949 article "Psychopathia Transexualis" is often cited as a key early English use. The spelling "transexualism", with one "s", is a variant of the more common "transsexualism", which keeps the double "s" from "sexual". Both forms come from the same coinage. The single-"s" spelling appears in older medical writing, and it is now generally considered outdated. The word has also been widely criticised as a pathologising clinical label, and many people now prefer "transgender" or simply "trans".