Q: What does 'transgendered' mean?

A: 'Transgendered' means someone who transcends the conventional definitions of 'man' and 'woman'. Butch lesbians, transsexuals, radical faeries, boss girls, crossdressers, drag queens, sissies, tomboys, and many other kinds of people vary from the conventional expectations of their birth gender.

Q: Isn't it a psychological disorder of some kind?

A: Conventional medical diagnosis recognizes several kinds of psychiatric disorders relating to gender, such as 'gender identity disorder', 'gender dysphoria', 'transsexualism', and so forth. Many transgendered people, however, believe very strongly that the right to choose one's own destiny is not a pathology; but is instead the sign of a mature, thoughtful, and intelligent adult.

Q: Aren't transgendered people just gay or lesbian people who are so deeply closeted they can't acknowledge their true orientation?

A: Transgenderism cuts across all orientations, all races, all economic classes, and all walks of life. Some transgendered people prefer members of their own sex, some prefer members of the opposite some. Some change their preference after adopting a transgendered lifestyle. Some do not. Some prefer transgendered people, some prefer people who are not transgendered. There is no correlation between sexual orientation and gender identity.

Q: Don't people who consider themselves transgender just think this because they feel they don't fit society's nice little pigeonhole categories regarding gender roles? (i.e., they're not REALLY transgendered, they're just rebelling against our sexist homophobic society....)

A. That's a complex question. Part of the definition of transgender IS that you don't fit into the tight binary system of gender that society gives us. But it's not a rebellion against The Man, it's a realization that your assigned gender is wrong for you and a fight to find one that feels right (or escape gender entirely) and live it fully.

Q. Don't female-to-male people just want to be men because they know men have it better? Aren't they just buying into the sexist society that tells them men are better?

A: The argument that women who identify as men must just have internalized sexism is exactly like the homophobic argument that lesbians just want to be men. Neither argument is true. Lesbians are women who love women; f2ms are "women-born-women" who identify as male. It's not that they want to be men because of some rational argument about male privilege; it's a matter of feeling inside that your body doesn't match up with who you are.

Q: Isn't it all just theory anyway?

A: It's not theory, it's people's lives! Queer theory is great, but it doesn't help homeless queer teens. Same thing.
You can say that, "well, the ideas you propose about gender being nonbinary and societally constructed are all very fancy-sounding, but they don't correspond to what we experience in real life." But our point is that they DO. For every idea you can come up with and every gender you can think of, there's someone living it. You can read books and books about how gender must be fluid because of this and that and we should be able to choose our own gender, but it's not the same as realizing that people ARE doing that. It's not theory: it's the man who binds his breasts after he shaves in the morning, and the woman who is forced to be a prostitute for a living because she can't get a job anywhere else because she's a pre-op transsexual, and the man who gets raped twice and then murdered because the local newspaper mentions that he's biologically female, and the person who lives as male one day and female another day and something else entirely the day after that, and the person who is a boy by day and a fabulous drag queen by night and a woman the next morning - AND the boy who identifies as a boy and lives as a boy but is accepted at a woman's college and often read as a butch dyke.

Q: Look, this is totally un PC of me, but as far as I'm concerned, if your genitals are female, you're female. I say this because also as far as I'm concerned, gender doesn't mean a f*cking thing past what your privates look like (and other secondary sex characteristics) and what distribution of hormones you get.

A: It's too bad the folks who beat us up don't think that way. On the other hand, if more people agreed with you, we'd have to accept that there were only two genders, and that'd be awfully dull!

Q: Don't "transgendered" women just get sex changes so they can have male privilege?

A: IF you can pass as a man, and IF you've been able to afford and complete the operation, and IF you're white and middle- or upper-class, then yes, you probably do get male privilege. You can also get straight privilege if you're gay and you stay in the closet. But if you're trans and people know it, or if they "clock" you (figure out you're trans), you get bashed as badly as any other minority group. And while you'retransitioning, you have two or three years, or more, of trying to pass as one gender or the other in a way that won't get you fired and beat up all the time. Plus the pain of gender dysphoria.
If you think that women would go through the intense, long, painful, and expensive process of gender reassignment surgery and gender dysphoria just to get male privilege, you're welcome to do it yourself.