Of course it was transsexual until not long ago - not transgender...and 'transsexual' is still how much of the public thinks of this particular phenomenon.This transitioner suggests that the shift happened in the 1980s.
"The term transsexual was defined as a medical one and was what appeared in all my early medical files when I was sent from doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital and into psychiatric units.
By the time I got to the point of surgery - always the end of the process and after several years of other therapy first back then - something had shifted. As you were asked to sign a waiver before they consented to do the surgery that you understood that it was not changing sex but reassigning gender.
I was told by the psychiatrist about to pass me onto the surgeon that this was a legal requirement because the law would not recognise any change of sex and he was sure never would as he had just gone to court to give evidence to help annul a transsexual's marriage to a man as illegal on those grounds.
So gender was introduced into the nomenclature not for any reason other than to give a separation from sex.
This is probably why transsexuals have always been realistic about this concept of changing sex. We had to get that before we passed that point. If we didn't then you were not taken further.
I would guess based on how many people today seem not to get this biological reality within the transgender community that it is not part of the treatment path nowadays.
After I was signed off by Charring Cross in the early 80s (they only did two or three years follow up after my final surgery) I was basically left alone and never really asked about the subject again, even by GPs, though, of course, I told them all every time I moved to a new area. I did not even see my notes until 2004 when my GP wanted to check them with me during the application for a GRC and I discovered that they wrongly claimed I had had breast enhancement. I had been offered it on the NHS in 1980 but had turned it down.
All the records still used the term transsexual. I never even heard the term transgender until all the stories started appearing on Digital Spy where I had posted regularly on media matters and the subject had suddenly become something everyone was talking about. But calling it transgender.
That's when I first started searching the net to find out what was going on, joined the only non fanatical forum I could find (Angels) and started catching up on what had been going on over the past decades whilst I was getting on with living.
Whenever I used the word transsexual I was reminded not to, just as I was told to use terms like Cis and Terf. I looked into what these meant as I had no idea and quickly decided they were needless or provocative so I was not going to follow that pattern. But transgender or trans for short seemed a harmless enough word and I thought, as transsexual emphasised the misconception of 'sex change' perhaps it was a sensible modification.
The reclamation independently seeming to happen now appears to be happening partly out of distancing to some degree, but also I think because it emphasises that in our case - whilst the biological reality is understood - it always was about changing as far as possible the sex characteristics of the body. And not about expressing a girly gender identity, or indeed any kind of lifestyle preference or interest in clothes or hobbies.
For some gender expression very much seems to be what it is about. I think for transsexuals it is about the body. Probably why there is very little interest in physical transition by those transgender and it is really more about expressing personality in a way they find more comfortable.
So without presuming different causes or origins as we are still guessing on those with any of us - I think there are two very different focal points of what we seem to be doing about it.
Reclaiming transsexual just seems to have occurred to a few people at the same time as a way to point that out"