transgender
/ˌtɹænzˈd͡ʒɛndəɹ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.91 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Of a person: having a gender (identity) which is different from one's assigned sex; that is, the identity of a trans man, trans woman, or someone non-binary, for example, agender, bigender, or third-gender.
adj
Of a person: having a gender (identity) which is different from one's assigned sex; that is, the identity of a trans man, trans woman, or someone non-binary, for example, agender, bigender, or third-gender.
adj
Of a person: transgressing or not identifying with culturally conventional gender roles and categories of male or female.
adj
Of or pertaining to transgender people (adjective sense 1), or their experiences or identity.
Example Sentences
- "We have taken to the local radio station, to talk about transgender problems. Carol Fremont is working in this area, and by General Conference we should have some interesting insights and understandings to share regarding transgender persons."
- "Christine Jorgensen, the world's first highly publicized transsexual – or "trans-gender" patient – never planned to be famous because of her surgery."
- "One head of a small gay charity visibly flinched when I mentioned my boyfriend and has been cold towards me ever since. I've even caught someone staring down my top to see if I'm transgender."
- "The film, "Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives," is described by its creator, Israel Luna, as an homage to 1970s exploitation films. But the inclusion of the word "trannie"—a pejorative, in some circles—in the title, and the film's parodic representation of transgender women, has offended many people."
- "A Chinese court on Thursday found that a transgender man was unjustly fired from his job, a first-of-its-kind ruling that activists called a step forward in the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. […] Mr. C, a transgender Chinese man who says he was fired for wearing men's clothes, stands outside a court in Guiyang, China, July 27, 2017, holding the court’s ruling that his dismissal violated his employment rights."
- "When Kim Petras teamed up with English singer Sam Smith on "Unholy," a song about male infidelity and betrayal of the ideal of marriage, she may not have expected to make history. But now, the German pop singer Petras is the first transgender woman to win a coveted Grammy in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category. At the Grammy Awards on February 5, 2023, Petras thanked "transgender legends before me who kicked these doors open for me so that I could be here tonight." […] Back in October 2022, the duo Petras and Smith had already become the first publicly transgender and nonbinary solo artists, respectively, to have reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts with their single."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *terh₂-der. Proto-Indo-European *térh₂t Proto-Indo-European *-ónts Proto-Indo-European *tr̥h₂ónts Proto-Indo-European *tr̥h₂n̥ts Proto-Italic *trāns Proto-Italic *trāns- Latin trans-bor. English trans- Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁- Proto-Indo-European *-os Proto-Indo-European *ǵénh₁os Proto-Italic *genos Latin genus Old French gendrebor. Middle English gendre English gender English transgender The adjective sense is derived from trans- (“extending across, through, or over”) + gender, modelled after transsexual (adjective) and probably modified from transgenderism which was coined by the American psychiatrist John F. Oliven (1915–1975) in 1965; the terms transgender, transgenderal, transgendered, transgenderist, and similar terms arose in the decades after this. By the 1990s, the word transgender had acquired its current senses, and had also largely displaced the earlier term transsexual: see the usage notes. The noun and verb senses are derived from the adjective. Regarding noun sense 2 (“synonym of transgenderism”), compare transsex (noun).
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌtɹænzˈd͡ʒɛndəɹ/
- British English: /tɹænzˈd͡ʒɛndə/