Introduction
As an umbrella term, “transgender” can have different meaning to different individuals. It is used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth and/or whose gender expression differs from cultural masculine and feminine stereotypes. It is also used by people to describe a gender identity and/or expression that is not binary (man/male/masculinity vs. woman/female/femininity). Cisgender describes individuals whose gender identity is comfortably congruent with the sex they were assigned at birth. Gender identity is a person’s internal sense of gender (GLAAD 2017).
The term “transgender” was coined and popularized in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s by cisgender-headed academic research and community-based publications (Transgender 2017). The term is based on the following premises. First, it assumes the differentiation of one’s gender identity (boy/girl/other, woman/man/other) from one’s assigned sex at birth. Second, it is based on the...
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Malpas, J., Glaeser, E. (2017). Transgender Couples and Families. In: Lebow, J., Chambers, A., Breunlin, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_496-1
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