this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
197 points (94.6% liked)
Brand New Sentence
236 readers
373 users here now
Showcasing the brazen and nouveau in English communication.
- Be cool to each other.
- Post title must be the sentence, or relevant portion of the sentence if it's very long.
- Link for context if possible.
- Tag NSFW where applicable.
I'm looking for another mod, someone chill. DM me if you're interested.
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This isn't me hating on trans folks, but as a word nerd it bothers me that we started using "transgender" with the explanation that gender isn't sex... but mostly because "transexual" had a bad flavour. And by now the term has completely lost its distinction and transgender basically means transexual, but we don't like saying "transexual", which is where things like this meme came from.
The dinosaurs weren't transgender, because they aren't expressing a gender. They're not changing clothes or pronouns, or wearing or not wearing makeup, or going by a name that suits them best. They changed sex. Or maybe they were intersex all along, that's fine too.
Anyway, again, human people who experienced gender dysphoria are lovely, I'm not hating on them, I just wish we were able to keep both terms around to separate the different opinions and desired outcomes for folks.
So you basically just hate how convoluted the terminology got.
No, the terminology got simplified which made the actual meaning of Transgender unclear. Theoretically, Transgender is supposed to refer to expressed gender differing from sex (includes all nonbinary people; difficult to apply to non-humans), while Transsexual refers to the desire to permanently transition to a different sex (may be applicable to some, but not all, nonbinary people; hermaphroditic animals can sometimes be defined by this term), but nowadays people just use Transgender for both meanings.