On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, transgender activists the world over will hold their 13th annual Day of Remembrance. The gatherings and vigils are meant to draw attention to “transphobia” and, according to the event’s website, to “memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.” Despite major strides that have been made in the acceptance of LGBT people in the U.S., hundreds of LGBT Americans are still seriously harmed each year, and dozens are murdered, according to 2008 statistics, the latest available, from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Bias lingers too. Just last week, a transgender teen said she was suspended for using the womens’ bathroom at her high school in Fort Collins, Colo. She said she and another transgender student weren’t allowed to enter the bathrooms they wanted, and were told to use the few staff bathrooms at the school instead. (The school didn’t comment.) MORE: Health Equality: Portland Embraces Transgender Rights The students’ predicament shows how hard it can be for people to move beyond the traditional gender labels they grew up with, even if they’re not “transphobic.” Part of the problem may be that people still don’t understand what transgender really means. The term transgender, which describes some 700,000 Americans, has been around for more than 35 years — as long as Microsoft and disposable razors. And yet, according to a recent survey of about 2,000 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 3 in 10 Americans still can’t define it. To be sure, the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) definition of transgender is a mouthful — and not one you’d expect the average Joe to remember: “a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these.” MORE: The ‘Sissy Boy’ Experiment: Why Gender-Related Cases Call for Scientists’ Humility The first recorded instance of joining together the Latin prefix trans-, meaning “across, beyond or over,” and the 14th-century word gender, to designate “male or female,” was in 1974, according to the OED,![]()
