Transgender is an adjective, not a noun

For those who wish to know the correct grammatical use of the word “transgender” or “trans”, I want to share a post I compiled from other resources a couple of years ago on Facebook.

The words ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ are adjectives — they are used to describe a noun, just as ‘cis’ is also an adjective. Unless we’re talking about something other than gender, you should never use ‘trans’ as anything other than an adjective. Here are some ways to use them: ‘She is a transgender woman.’ ‘He is a trans man.’ ‘Her sister is transgender.’

“A” TRANSGENDER;

You should not refer to trans people as “a” transgender. You shouldn’t say, “Tony is a transgender”. You would say, “Tony is a transgender person”.

It isn’t considered grammatically appropriate to refer to someone as “a” transgender using the word transgender as a noun.

TRANSGENDERS;

Again, the word transgender is an adjective, not a noun. Therefore, you wouldn’t say, “The parade included many transgenders”. Instead, you would say, “The parade included many transgender people”.

TRANSGENDERED;

The word transgender never needs the extraneous “ed” at the end of the word. In fact, such a construction is grammatically incorrect.

Only verbs can be transformed into participles by adding “-ed” to the end of the word, and transgender is an adjective, not a verb.

The word transgender is considered to be an adjective in the same sense that tall or short are adjectives. You wouldn’t say, “she is a talled woman”, you would say, “she is a tall woman”.

“Transgendered” is the linguistic equivalent of describing someone as “blacked”, “colored people”, or “gayed”

TRANSGENDERISM;

Transgenderism isn’t a thing. This isn’t like environmentalism or feminism any more than the practice of modern medicine is ‘medicineism’.

Transgenderism is most frequently associated with hate groups and religious extremists rather than with scholarly work.

In referring to transgender issues as “transgenderism” it can be framed as an ideology, philosophy, political strategy. It places transgender issues in the realm of Environmentalism, Feminism, Libertarianism and any other -ism you’d care to think about. If a thing is a philosophy, ideology or political strategy then it can be diminished from the status of objective fact to controversial opinion.

One last word.

Transgender even as an adjective is not always necessary. Woman and man describe trans woman and trans man just fine, and in fact, that’s probably better unless the story is somehow about them being trans.