Since My Journey I have seen That people are very much confused between Transsexuals & Transgenders. Specially In India, People knew only a few words Gays, Shemales, Hijda (eunuch) and Crossdressers. Until People from LGBT community started coming out in society openly.
I Clearly Remember when I was in 5th Standard and I decided that I will go for Sex Reassignment Surgery and will Become the Girl I wanted to Be. But issue was, our society our families they didn’t knew about these terms and our feelings. I remember when my cousins or My relatives use to see my moves and feminine movements they use to Tease me That you are Boy why you are behaving like HIJDA( Transgender/ eunuch) because in Our Indian Society they believe there are only two sex Male & Female apart from them all are Hijdas. Be it a boy who has feminine side or a Girl with Masculine side. They don’t understand what is Gay, Lesbian, Transgender & Transsexual.
As time passed our society learnt a new word Gay. They started making difference between Hijda & Gay. A person who is loud & claps on streets called Hijda (transgender/eunuch) and a Guy who walks n talks like girls is Gay. Thanks to Our Bollywood Coz they started showing characters in the movies where a Man use to out loud make up, feminine clothes and unpleasant actions. People use to make fun of the characters and called by bad names. Thus our society started taking all LGBT community under this tag. So this is how our society learnt one new word Gay for all LGBT, but with wrong perception. I use to felt Bad when people used to Consider us as Gays. I was a Girl inside so never accepted myself as Boy or Gay. Thanks to Bollywood for creating wrong perception.
When I started My treatment then I got to know about the exact terms very clearly. In 2005-2009 our society learnt another words like Shemales, Ladyboy and transgender thanks to their visits to Thailand. I remember while my transition some people use to ask me are you a Shemales? Ladyboy? Or Gay? Oh My God Seriously? But I was never bothered about them Coz I knew that they don’t have knowledge about it so its waste fighting or explaining them. But yeah deep inside somewhere I used to feel very Bad… Coz we go through so much to be what we want to be but when people tag u with something you don’t even relates to then it breaks your heart.
All the transgirls (I love this word to be called for all my transsexual sisters) will agree with me on this that the hardships & emotional trauma we go through is much different than other feels. When I came out openly in media about myself there was a big reason. That I will share in my other blog. But I will share one reason here. I came out in media Coz I wanted to help those Parents, families & kids who are somewhere in problem because they can’t understand what transsexualism is? I wanted to help those parents to understand their child if he/she is not comfortable or relating himself/herself to assigned sex by birth. I wanted to help those children who are confused and dsnt know what to do?
Out society was n still confused about Transgenders & Transsexuals. They believe that if a guy becomes like a woman that is Hijda or Transgender. That was my major fight with society n I wanted to educate people about this. When my interviews use to come in newspapers in India. Reporters who knows about this they use to write exact word or term for me. That She (Nikkiey chawla) is India’s first Transsexual Female Model. But in some newspapers where I have not given my interview and the reporter has not done his/her homework properly has stated me as Transgender model. I called or mailed a few of them to pls correct it and suggested them to do proper homework next time. Now the qus why I felt bad? Because being transgirl we go through so much our journey is very long like the hormone therapy, psychiatrists sessions, laser treatments, adjusting ourselves to society n our desired roles, living full time girl before surgery, mood swings etc and after surgery the maintenance, follow ups, dilation and most importantly change of our legal documents. That is our major fight and achievement too. & after going through so much if someone calls u or associates u with Shemales and transgenders then you feel bad. I am not saying that transgenders are bad people they also have their own journeys. It’s just I want to clear we are transgirls-transsexuals not transgenders.
So I decided to make a blog about this so that people can differentiate between both. I have written and taken reference from some website too about difference between Transsexual & Transgender.
Transsexuals are people who transition from one sex to another. A person born as a male can become recognizably female through the use of hormones and/or surgical procedures; and a person born as a female can become recognizably male. That said, transsexuals are unable to change their genetics and cannot acquire the reproductive abilities of the sex to which they transition. Sex is assigned at birth and refers to a person’s biological status as male or female. In other words, sex refers exclusively to the biological features: chromosomes, the balance of hormones, and internal and external anatomy. Each of us is born as either male or female, with rare exceptions of those born intersex who may display characteristics of both sexes at birth.
Transgender, unlike transsexual, is a term for people whose identity, expression, behavior, or general sense of self does not conform to what is usually associated with the sex they were born in the place they were born. It is often said sex is a matter of the body, while gender occurs in the mind. Gender is an internal sense of being male, female, or other. People often use binary terms, for instance, masculine or feminine, to describe gender just as they do when referring to sex. But gender is more complex and encompasses more than just two possibilities. Gender also is influenced by culture, class, and race because behavior, activities, and attributes seen as appropriate in one society or group may be viewed otherwise in another.
Transgender then, unlike transsexual is a multifaceted term. One example of a transgendered person might be a man who is attracted to women but also identifies as a cross-dresser. Other examples include people who consider themselves gender nonconforming, multigendered, androgynous, third gender, and two-spirit people. All of these definitions are inexact and vary from person to person, yet each of them includes a sense of blending or alternating the binary concepts of masculinity and femininity. Some people using these terms simply see the traditional concepts as restrictive. Less than one percent of all adults identify as transgender.
Gender identity and sexual orientation are not the same. Sexual orientation, according to the American Psychological Association, refers to an individual’s enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to another person. Transgender people may be straight, bisexual, lesbian, gay, or asexual. Biological factors such as prenatal hormone levels, genetics, and early childhood experiences may all contribute to the development of a transgender identity, according to some researchers.
A significant shift occurred late in 2012, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or the DSM-5) officially changed the term “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria,” to describe the emotional distress that can result from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.” In 1973, homosexuality was similarly declassified as a mental disorder. The current change suggests an evolution of thought on the matter of gender that may influence not only how many people see themselves, but also how they are perceived by others
No matter how they label themselves, many people do not entirely conform to a single, rigid gender definition with most people having traits that don’t exactly fit the profile. Even more importantly, some of the traditional gender differences between men and women may be slight. Due to changes in social attitudes, general changes in the perception of gender also occurs over time. A trait considered masculine in one generation may be a feminine norm in the next. A woman wearing pants, for instance, would have been considered manly at one time. And though it may have been unusual in the not-too-distant past, many women earn equal to or more than their husbands today, while their husbands perform more of the household and childcare duties once assigned to women. Ultimately, gender is a shifting ground on which each of us stands.
The term transsexual was introduced to English in 1949 by David Oliver Cauldwell and popularized by Harry Benjamin in 1966, around the same time transgender was coined and began to be popularized. Since the 1990s, transsexual has generally been used to describe the subset of transgender people who desire to transition permanently to the gender with which they identify and who seek medical assistance (for example, SRS) with this. However, the concerns of the two groups are sometimes different; for example, transsexual men and women who can pay for medical treatments (or who have institutional coverage for their treatment) are likely to be concerned with medical privacy and establishing a durable legal status as their gender later in life.
To Be Continued……….
Please do leave comments or message me if any qus or if you find something confusing.
Nikkiey Chawla 