One of the trickier parts of working on this site is trying to represent the vast spectrum of trans people that exist. One of the key notions about what it means to be trans is experience. Perhaps better than to say that we are trans people, we should say that we experience gender as trans people. This explains the prevalence of projection by cisgender people – because they only experience gender in a certain way, it can be very difficult to believe that gender can be experienced any other way.

And that is the crux of the issue Tris and I deal with when writing each article on Trans Sexualities, and the issue that will continually pervade our work as we write our eventual book. While this isn’t specifically an issue that falls within the scope of this project, it is one that profoundly affects this project and how we operate it. Thus, we want to address this issue while the project is still in the earliest stages.

One thing that Tris and I are constantly aware of is the limited range of experience that we share between us. We are both trans women, and one of us identifies as genderqueer. We are at different stages in our transitions, though we are both going in the same direction in our transitions. We occupy such a small range of the gender spectrum we are trying to represent through this project. Many times, we take examples from specific types of trans people to explain a more generalized idea, and sometimes articles are written with a specific range of people in mind. This is where you, the reader, come in, as your comments help us to understand the needs of people outside of the range that we occupy.

Given our topic, we must address issues of physical status with consideration for the range of people we are discussing, and how to respectfully address these issues using neutral language that still affirms the lived identities of the people we talk about. Unfortunately in our community, our lived identities don’t always match our physical sex, though in discussing sex and sexuality, we have to acknowledge the physical sex of the people we talk about (at this point, I should note that “people we talk about” is strictly in the abstract sense; we don’t discuss specific people and their experiences on this site without their explicit permission).

To that end, we need to find concise yet clear, effective and above all, respectful language to refer to people who fall under different ranges of the transgender spectrum. There are three major aspects of a person that we must sometimes acknowledge: identity, affirmed sex and physical sex. Secondary to that is whether a person’s current physical sex matches their physical sex at birth. In order to deal with this, we will be using matter-of-fact language.

First, the terms “man” and “woman” will be used exclusively to mean a person’s identified gender. This means that a male-to-female trans person would be referred to as a woman, and female pronouns would be used. Likewise, “man” and the corresponding pronouns would refer to a female-to-male trans person. Trans people have a number of primary and secondary sexual characteristics that may correspond to either sex or even in between, so to avoid ambiguity,the corresponding terms “male” and “female” will not be used on this site. Instead, the specific characteristic we are discussing will be referred to directly. This has the added effect of not focusing on a person’s “op-status,” which can be very frustrating for the many trans people who do not desire or plan to have genital surgery.

This means that we will be talking about genitals using terms such as penis, scrotum, testicles, vagina, vulva, and clitoris. There are many other medical terms that we can use as well. We will both be avoiding slang terms, for a few different reasons. First, they create ambiguity. Often slang terms can refer to either a specific part or the whole set of genitals. Also, some people can find certain terms offensive. Finally, we’re all mature enough to discuss these issues in a professional manner.

So far, we’ve mostly restricted ourselves to discussing issues within the gender binary model. This works well for trans people who follow a straightforward path in their transition, from one physical sex to the other, and taking steps such as hormones, electrolysis, and various surgeries. This mostly follows the experience of both the authors. However, this breaks down once we start moving beyond gender binary principles. There are a wide range of identities that exist beyond the binary gender model, so we will be addressing those in the next part of this article.

Question: What terms do you prefer to use for your body’s primary & secondary sexual characteristics?