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Virginia Prince

Virginia Prince (1912–2009), an American heterosexual crossdresser, coined "transgenderist" in the 1970s as a deliberately political umbrella term — not as a scientific category. This laid the foundation for the contemporary semantic stretching in which an autogynephilic crossdresser, a confused teenager, and a surgically treated transsexual fall under a single label.

A separate category — with an explicit sexual dimension

Prince — a married man, father, and biologist by training — used "transgenderist" to distinguish himself from transsexuals who sought surgery. For Prince, it was about social crossdressing, not medical procedures or a claim to womanhood. He explicitly described the sexual arousal associated with crossdressing — a phenomenon that Blanchard later clinically typologized as autogynephilia . AGP is a paraphilia, not an identity.

Prince's own writings, collected in Transvestia (from 1960), describe the sexual dimension of crossdressing — a dimension that has been systematically downplayed or denied in later transgender discourse to uphold the political narrative of "true female identity." Ray Blanchard (2005) and Anne Lawrence (2013) have empirically documented that AGP remains clinically dominant in a significant proportion of late-transitioned M-to-F individuals. The denial is ideology, not science.

From "transgenderist" to "transgender": the deliberate stretching

In the 1980s and 1990s, "transgender" was borrowed from Prince as an umbrella term, but without his nuance: from then on, it also included transsexuals, non-binary people, ordinary crossdressers, drag queens, and all self-declared identities . This semantic stretching was not a scientific development but a political move — comparable to the Yogyakarta Principles : lobbying presented as fact. It makes the current claim "1% of young people are transgender" possible because clinically distinct groups are lumped together.

Helen Joyce (2021) and Kathleen Stock (2021) analyze this semantic stretching as a key moment: a term with sharp content was hollowed out into an umbrella, causing activist counts to sum clinically distinct groups and political claims to gain scale. Biggs (2022) has empirically documented how this stretching coincided with the explosive growth of registrations from 2010 — a socially contagious pattern, not the discovery of a hidden population.

Legacy: how a subculture became a diagnosis

Prince founded Transvestia in 1960 and the Society for the Second Self (Tri-Ess) in 1962, both for heterosexual male crossdressers. His work forms one of the roots of contemporary activism — more than is admitted within activism itself, because recognition reveals the autogynephilic origins. The lineage continues through Benjamin , HBIGDA, and WPATH to the current global rollout .

The Cass Review (2024) explicitly places this historical trajectory in an evidence-based perspective: a term originating from a specific subculture was elevated to a diagnostic umbrella without external verification. Levine (2022) calls this the core problem of contemporary gender care: a history of category expansion without validation. What Prince began as a self-description was elevated by the WPATH lobby to a global treatment indication.

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