A transsexual (or transexual) person is a specific kind of transgender person: one who takes a physical transition, especially surgery. They do this order to relieve the dissonance between how they feel about how their body is and should be (gender dysphoria) and make their body match how they see themself (their gender identity). The words transsexuality and transsexual were created by doctors and psychologists to describe such people, who first thought of it as something medically wrong (pathological). Because of this, some transgender people who could call themselves transsexual prefer not to be called that, and only called transgender, because they don't want their identity to be thought of as pathological. There are many kinds of transsexual people:
- Transsexual women (transgender women), who were assigned a male gender at birth (or sometimes intersex), and identify as female, therefore they are women. Depending on the individual's wants and needs, their physical transition may include hormone therapy that gives them a higher estrogen balance, which creates a puberty in which they usually develop breasts. They may seek a surgery to change their genitals into a vagina (vaginoplasty).
- Transsexual men (transgender men), who were assigned female at birth (or sometimes intersex), and identify as male, therefore they are men. Depending on the individual's wants and needs, their physical transition may include hormone therapy that gives them a higher testosterone balance, which creates a puberty in which they usually grow hair on their faces and bodies. They may seek a surgery to take away their breasts (mastectomy), and they have several options for surgery to change their genitals.
- Many people with nonbinary gender identities can or do call themselves transsexual, and seek a physical transition. A nonbinary person could have been assigned female, male, or intersex at birth. The goal of a transsexual nonbinary person's transition depends on that individual's unique personal wants and needs. It might make their body more like what most people would think of as androgynous, having qualities of both female and male, or neither female nor male, or conventionally female, or conventionally male, or like that of someone born with one kind or another of a natural intersex condition, or something else.
See also[]
- Identities
- Sex
External links[]
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