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Transgender

"Transgender" is not a fixed category but an umbrella term with a profoundly shifted meaning. What designated a specific clinical group in 1990 now encompasses diverse self-designations without a common definition — a creed that defies all scrutiny and yet justifies puberty blockers, mastectomies, and the legal reversal of sex registration.

Definition according to proponents

Today, "transgender" is defined as anyone whose "gender identity" does not correspond to the sex registered at birth. Earlier definitions required dysphoria, social role transition, or medical interventions; those requirements have been abandoned one by one. The current threshold is self-declaration.

Origin: from Virginia Prince to TikTok

Popularized by Virginia Prince in the 1960s and 70s to distinguish themselves from transsexuals who underwent surgery. From the 1990s onwards—influenced by queer theory and activism—it became an umbrella term. See spread 1990 and spread 2010 .

The semantic drift has consequences. Figures on "transgender persons" from different decades measure different populations: Hirschfeld and Benjamin's clinical group had nothing in common with the contemporary adolescent ROGD cohort — almost exclusively girls aged 13-19 with comorbid autism, anxiety, depression, or trauma.

Criticism: a term that covers everything, covers nothing.

Without a common definition, "transgender" loses its diagnostic and epidemiological utility. Someone who identifies as such could be a 60-year-old man with lifelong dysphoria or a 15-year-old with a few months of online self-identification. Clinically, these are incomparable cases; policy-wise, they are treated as a single group. A textbook example of circular reasoning and unfalsifiability : transgender = deviant identity, identity = what someone feels they are. There is no marker ; only self-reporting . See also DSM evolution for how the diagnosis has been stretched.

Kathleen Stock (2021) and Helen Joyce (2021) point out the philosophical and legal consequences: a construct that cannot be refuted cannot bear an empirical or policy basis either. Levine (2022) and Hruz (2020) mention the clinical consequence: without objective diagnostics, irreversible interventions do not meet evidence-based standards. The Cass Review (2024) calls the evidence "remarkably weak". Anyone who points out this gap is silenced and dismissed as a hater or transphobe — faith tolerates no scrutiny.

Damage: puberty blockers, mastectomy, legal dismantling of woman

The flexible definition justifies puberty blockers in healthy children, mastectomy in adolescent girls, hormonal and surgical interventions in adults based on self-declaration, and legal reversal of gender registration, thereby undermining the category of woman as a protected class. Transition does not cure — see detransition research and regret research .

Related identities

• Transman — F-to-M within the umbrella.

• Trans woman — M-to-F within the umbrella.

• Non-binary — often grouped under the same umbrella.

• Transmasculine — euphemistic intermediate layer.

• Transfeminine — euphemistic intermediate layer.

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