Transgender women often shortened to trans women are women who were assigned male at birth. Trans women have a female gender identity and may experience gender dysphoria distress brought upon by the discrepancy between a person's gender identity and their sex assigned at birth. Gender-affirming care may include social or medical transition. Medical transition may also include one or more feminizing surgeries , including vaginoplasty to create a vagina , feminization laryngoplasty to raise the vocal pitch , or facial feminization surgery to feminize face shape and features.
This, along with socially transitioning, and receiving desired gender-affirming surgeries can relieve the person of gender dysphoria. Trans women face significant discrimination in many areas of life—including in employment and access to housing—and face physical and sexual violence and hate crimes, including from partners. In the United States, discrimination is particularly severe towards trans women who are members of a racial minority , who often face the intersection of transmisogyny and racism.
The term transgender women is not always interchangeable with transsexual women , although the terms are often used interchangeably. Transgender is an umbrella term that includes different types of gender variant people including transsexual people. Transgender commonly abbreviated as trans [ 5 ] is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity or gender expression are different from those typically associated with members of the sex they were assigned at birth.
Trans women may also be short for transsexual women. Transsexual is a subset of transgender, [ 8 ] [ 9 ] referring to people who desire to medically transition to the sex with which they identify, usually through sex reassignment therapies , such as hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery , to align their body with their identified sex or gender.
The term is rejected by some as outdated, though others within the trans community still identify as transsexual. Transfeminine or transfemme is a broader umbrella term for assigned-male trans individuals with a predominantly feminine identity or gender expression. This includes trans women, but is used especially for AMAB non-binary people, who may have an identity that is partially feminine, but not wholly female.
