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For historical purposes, the term transgender was primarily used (and invented) to describe cross dressers. In 1965, Owen used it to distinguish cross dressers from transsexuals (on the point that transvestites were not primarily acting for reasons of sexuality). The term was used later by Prince again to differentiate cross dressers in 1969. It was apparently a term in common usage as an umbrella term by the mid 70s. However, understanding of the whole area has vastly grown since those days, so there's a wide range falling into the transgender rubric.
Really, though, at a certain point the term came to mean what it means now because there was a decision to renormalize language used. It used to be that "normal" and "abnormal" were used in certain views of gender behavior. There was regular gender behavior and transgender behavior. So, the terms were set into their more modern form as "cisgender" and "transgender," which have come to common usage. Cisgender behavior concerns matching birth sex and gender behavior. Transgender is anything that does not conform, which is culturally relative. Now, sometimes people don't like this kind of renaming, but that's what it means.
So, really, it's just a way of not using abberrant or abnormal in discussion; instead, the words express that the behavior is different and potentially valid within its own context.
The trick about this whole discussion is that I think there is an underlaying topic that many people _are_ interested in, but it gets lost by associating transgender with transsexualism. I think people are asking the question of whether one can be 100% male (whatever that is) and still express cross dressing. Then there's the question of what being "male" and "female" really means. Is there something else? Why do some people differentiate themselves into two personas, but other fuse them? That's the discussion that I think would be more interesting, and which I think is really under the surface in all of these discussions.
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