What does it mean to be transgender?
Facing stigma and legislation, 1.6 million US trans individuals navigate identity and dysphoria, seeking authenticity and well-being.
Transgender media coverage has surged in recent years for a wide range of reasons. While there are more transgender television characters than ever before, hundreds of bills are targeting transgender people’s access to medical care, sports teams, gender-specific public spaces, and other institutions.
Despite the increase in conversation about the transgender community, public confusion around transgender identity remains.
Read on to learn more about what it means to be transgender and understand challenges transgender people may face.
What does it mean to be transgender?
Transgender—or “trans”—is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity or gender expression does not conform to their sex assigned at birth. People can discover they are trans at any age.
Gender identity refers to a person’s inner sense of being a woman, a man, neither, both, or something else entirely. Trans people who don’t feel like women or men might describe themselves as nonbinary, agender, genderqueer, or two-spirit, among other terms.
Gender expression describes the way a person communicates their gender through their appearance—such as their clothing or hairstyle—and behavior.
A person whose gender expression doesn’t conform to the expectations of their assigned sex may not identify as trans. The only way to know for sure if someone is trans is if they tell you.
Cisgender—or “cis”—describes people whose gender identities match the sex they were assigned at birth.
How long have transgender people existed?
Being trans isn’t new. Although the word “transgender” only dates back to the 1960s, people whose identities defy traditional gender expectations have existed across cultures throughout recorded history.
How many people are transgender?
A 2022 Williams Institute study estimates that 1.6 million people over the age of 13 identify as transgender in the United States.
Is being transgender a mental health condition?
No. Conveying and communicating about your gender in a way that feels authentic to you is a normal and necessary part of self-expression.
Social and legal stigma, bullying, discrimination, harassment, negative media messages, and barriers to gender-affirming medical care can cause psychological distress for trans people. This is especially true for trans people of color, who face significantly higher rates of violence, poverty, housing instability, and incarceration—but trans identity itself is not a mental health condition.
What is gender dysphoria?
Gender dysphoria describes a feeling of unease that some trans people experience when their perceived gender doesn’t match their gender identity, or their internal sense of gender. A 2021 study of trans adults pursuing gender-affirming medical care found that most participants started experiencing gender dysphoria by the time they were 7.
When trans people don’t receive the support they need to manage gender dysphoria, they may experience depression, anxiety, social isolation, suicidal ideation, substance use disorder, eating disorders, and self-injury.
How do trans people manage gender dysphoria?
Every trans person’s experience with gender dysphoria is unique. Some trans people may alleviate dysphoria by wearing gender-affirming clothing or by asking others to refer to them by a new name and use pronouns that accurately reflect their gender identity. The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey found that nearly all trans participants who lived as a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth reported that they were more satisfied with their lives.
Some trans people may also manage dysphoria by pursuing medical transition, which may involve taking hormones and getting gender-affirming surgery.
Access to gender-affirming medical care has been shown to reduce the risk of depression and suicide among trans youth and adults.
To learn more about the trans community, visit resources from the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Trevor Project, PFLAG, and Planned Parenthood.
If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741. For international resources, here is a good place to begin.
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago
Dr. Jenn Simmons shares vital tips on preventing cancer and inflammation, advocating for lifestyle changes and proactive health management at any age.
Get Abreast And Keep Abreast
This is Dr. Jenn Simmons. Her specialization is integrative oncology, as she—then a breast cancer surgeon—got breast cancer, decided the system wasn’t nearly as good from the patients’ side of things as from the doctors’ side, and took to educate herself, and now others, on how things can be better.
What does she want us to know?
Start now
If you have breast cancer, the best time to start adjusting your lifestyle might be 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. We realize our readers with breast cancer (or a history thereof) probably have indeed started already—all strength to you.
What this means for those of us without breast cancer (or a history therof) is: start now
Even if you don’t have a genetic risk factor, even if there’s no history of it in your family, there’s just no reason not to start now.
Start what, you ask? Taking away its roots. And how?
Inflammation as the root of cancer
To oversimplify: cancer occurs because an accidentally immortal cell replicates and replicates and replicates and takes any nearby resources to keep on going. While science doesn’t know all the details of how this happens, it is a factor of genetic mutation (itself a normal process, without which evolution would be impossible), something which in turn is accelerated by damage to the DNA. The damage to the DNA? That occurs (often as not) as a result of cellular oxidation. Cellular oxidation is far from the only genotoxic thing out there, and a lot of non-food “this thing causes cancer” warnings are usually about other kinds of genotoxicity. But cellular oxidation is a big one, and it’s one that we can fight vigorously with our lifestyle.
Because cellular oxidation and inflammation go hand-in-hand, reducing one tends to reduce the other. That’s why so often you’ll see in our Research Review Monday features, a line that goes something like:
“and now for those things that usually come together: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and anti-aging”
So, fight inflammation now, and have a reduced risk of a lot of other woes later.
See: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
Don’t settle for “normal”
People are told, correctly but not always helpfully, such things as:
- It’s normal to have less energy at your age
- It’s normal to have a weaker immune system at your age
- It’s normal to be at a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, etc
…and many more. And these things are true! But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for them.
We can be all the way over on the healthy end of the distribution curve. We can do that!
(so can everyone else, given sufficient opportunity and resources, because health is not a zero-sum game)
If we’re going to get a cancer diagnosis, then our 60s are the decade where we’re most likely to get it. Earlier than that and the risk is extant but lower; later than that and technically the risk increases, but we probably got it already in our 60s.
So, if we be younger than 60, then now’s a good time to prepare to hit the ground running when we get there. And if we missed that chance, then again, the second-best time is now:
See: Focusing On Health In Our Sixties
Fast to live
Of course, anything can happen to anyone at any age (alas), but this is about the benefits of living a fasting lifestyle—that is to say, not just fasting for a 4-week health kick or something, but making it one’s “new normal” and just continuing it for life.
This doesn’t mean “never eat”, of course, but it does mean “practice intermittent fasting, if you can”—something that Dr. Simmons strongly advocates.
See: Intermittent Fasting: We Sort The Science From The Hype
While this calls back to the previous “fight inflammation”, it deserves its own mention here as a very specific way of fighting it.
It’s never too late
All of the advices that go before a cancer diagnosis, continue to stand afterwards too. There is no point of “well, I already have cancer, so what’s the harm in…?”
The harm in it after a diagnosis will be the same as the harm before. When it comes to lifestyle, preventing a cancer and preventing it from spreading are very much the same thing, which is also the same as shrinking it. Basically, if it’s anticancer, it’s anticancer, no matter whether it’s before, during, or after.
Dr. Simmons has seen too many patients get a diagnosis, and place their lives squarely in the hands of doctors, when doctors can only do so much.
Instead, Dr. Simmons recommends taking charge of your health as best you are able, today and onwards, no matter what. And that means two things:
- Knowing stuff
- Doing stuff
So it becomes our responsibility (and our lifeline) to educate ourselves, and take action accordingly.
Want to know more?
We recently reviewed her book, and heartily recommend it:
The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer – by Dr. Jenn Simmons
Enjoy!