Quote Originally Posted by ReineD View Post
Sophie, I'm not wanting to be flippant, really. But we do have many words that share the same root. "Trans" means to cross over and it makes sense that many of the words in this community would share that root.

People confuse the two because they are ignorant of the fact that gender is separate from sexuality. I mean, most people are gender conformant and they are hetero. They take it that gender and sexuality are tied together, it is "normal" to be opposite-sex attracted, they don't know the difference between a person who wants to change their sexual characteristics and someone who doesn't but wants to express femininity, and they don't immediately think that "sex", "sexual", or "sexuality" means both, a person's biology and also their attraction to others. They don't take the time to think deeply about gender and sexuality issues. This is why we seriously need to teach our kids what this is all about.
This has nothing to do with gender vs sex. It's about the prefix 'trans' and whether it applies to crossdressers. The parallel with 'transsexual' cannot be glibly dismissed. In that word, 'trans' means crossing over permanently. There is no reason to read it otherwise in 'transgender'. It would be far easier to simply use a different word than it would be to go around and explain to everyone on the planet that the word doesn't mean what it ought to mean based on its etymology.

Here's a question for you: Why do you insist that the word 'transgender' must be the name for this concept of gender nonconformity? Why are you unwilling to consider that a different word would be more readily acceptable to crossdressers?