Transgender

Transgender describes someone whose gender is not the one they were assigned at birth. That is the whole definition. It does not require surgery, hormones, a diagnosis, a legal change, or any particular appearance.

It is an adjective, which matters more than it sounds. Someone is a transgender woman, or a transgender person, the same way someone is a tall person. It is not a noun and it is not a verb: nobody is *a transgender*, and nobody is *transgendered*.

The word is an umbrella, and people underneath it have very little in common beyond that one fact. A trans man in his fifties who transitioned twenty years ago, a nonbinary teenager who has told two friends, and a trans woman three months into changing her name are all transgender, and their days look nothing alike.

Trans is the ordinary short form and is not a shortening of respect. Most trans people use it about themselves far more often than the full word.

The opposite is cisgender, meaning someone whose gender is the one they were assigned at birth. Having a word for that is the point: without it, cis becomes the unmarked default and trans becomes the deviation from it.

Transgender is not a stage of a process

It is often heard as a description of someone mid-way through something, who will at some point arrive and stop being trans. That is not how the word works. Someone is trans from the moment their gender differs from the one assigned to them, whether they have done anything about it or not, and they do not stop being trans by finishing anything.

This is why questions about surgeries and hormones are not a way of finding out whether someone is really trans. They are a way of finding out something private that has no bearing on the answer.

Saying it well