As a rebuttal to Monalisa's node of transsexual in which she writes, "...whereas 'transgendered' refers to all persons who have have gender issues, Gender Identity Disorder and/or are other gendered, as well as transsexuals as defined above." There has been recent scholarship arguing the difference of transgender and transsexual.
In the recent years there have been a small group of academics who have broken from the common practice of utilizing the tools of queer discourse to theorize about transsexual communities and individuals; rather these rogue academics have been critical of queer appropriations of the transsexual through theory and activism. Consequently, the appropriation of the transsexual community within the queer discourse has resulted in the marginalization of certain individuals of the community, namely those who pursue a heterosexual lifestyle post-transition, those who wish to undergo surgical modifications of their bodies to conform to heteronormative ideal of the genital labeling of sex, and individuals who essentialize their gender identity.
As Viviane Namaste states,
"While the term "transgender" is currently one of the most popular, it needs to be pointed out at this point in history that increasingly transsexuals object to being included under a catch-all phrase of "transgender." They argue that the health care and social service needs of transsexuals are quite specific, and that this specificity is lost when people use a vague "transgender." Furthermore, the popularity of the term "transgender" emerges from the Anglo-American lesbian and gay community. While this discourse may have meaning for some transsexuals who understand their lives in these terms, it does not speak to the transsexuals who do not make sense of their lives, and their political struggles, within the confines of a lesbian/gay framework. It is important to point this out, because most of the Anglo-American writers and activists on "transgendered" issues come out of the lesbian/gay community and express themselves in those terms. My empirical research contradicts this underlying assumption, since most of the transsexuals I have interviewed do not articulate their needs according to a lesbian/gay framework. All of this to say that questions of language are deeply political!"1
There have been increasing numbers of transsexual individuals who have stopped identifying as transgendered, seeing it as a term imposed upon them by an outside community. Transgender should not be thought of a catch-all phrase that embodies all trans-prefixed identities but rather as a political identifications for individuals who wish to queer the binary gender system.
1. Namaste, Viviane. “Addressing the Politics of Social Erasure: Making the Lives of Transsexual People Visible – An Interview With Viviane Namaste.” New Socialist Magazine. Issue 39. December 2002-January 2003. 25 Nov 2007. < http://www.newsocialist.org/magazine/39/article04.html>.