# trans woman
## English
### Pronunciation

* Audio (US):(file)

### Noun

trans woman (plural trans women)
* A transgender or transsexual woman; i.e., a woman who was assigned male at birth; i.e., a person who was assigned male at birth but who has a female or primarily-female gender identity.
** 1999, Jody Norton, “The Boy Who Grew Up to Be a Woman”, in Matthew Rottnek, editor, Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood‎, New York University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 263, 268:In “Femininity," Freud describes the limits of psychoanalytic knowledge of the female as follows: “psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is — that would be a task it could scarcely perform — but sets about enquiring how she comes into being.” I was born “male" (whatever the contingencies of that term may be), and I lived my childhood largely (at least visibly) as a boy. But I grew up to be a trans woman. […] At one point, she spoke of "boys who played the flute in school bands," and I suddenly realized that to have been a boy who played the flute in school bands was a mark of distinction: that to have been that kind of boy included me in a very special and wonderful "sisterhood." I will never again give in to shame about being a flute-playing sissy. I'm proud of the sissy I was, and the trans woman that sissy became. (And I will try, as well, not to be ashamed of the adolescent with hir collar turned up trying so hard to be tough. S/he was struggling hard to survive, and s/he used whatever tools s/he could find.)

#### Usage notes

* Trans woman is often spelled with a space, with trans as an adjective modifying the noun woman, similar to Asian woman, tall woman, fat woman, etc. The unspaced spelling transwoman is sometimes used interchangeably, including by a few transgender people. However, it is often associated with views (notably gender-critical feminism) that hold that transgender women are not women, and thus require a separate word from woman to describe them. For this reason many transgender people find transwoman offensive.

#### Alternative forms

* transwoman, trans-woman (proscribed)
* trans womyn (transfeminist spelling, especially of the plural)

#### Synonyms

* transgirl, trans girl
* TG girl (slang), t-girl (slang), TS girl (slang), M2F, MTF, MtF
* newhalf (slang, rare)
* zenana (South Asia)
* shemale (derogatory, offensive, proscribed, chiefly in pornography)
* trans-identified male (derogatory, offensive, proscribed)

#### Hypernyms

* transfem
* trans person
* woman

#### Hyponyms

* trans lesbian

#### Coordinate terms

* trans man, cis man, cis woman

#### Translations
### See also

* transfeminine
* MtF

### References

* 1 2 Julie Nicholson, Julia Hennock, Jonathan Julian, Supporting Gender Diversity in Early Childhood Classrooms (2019), page 40
* 1 2 Lee Harrington, Traversing Gender: Understanding Transgender Realities (2016), page 52
* 1 2 3 German Lopez, "Why you should always use 'transgender' instead of 'transgendered'", Vox, February 18, 2015
* 1 2 3 Julia Serano, Whipping Girl (2016), pages 29-30
* ↑ Cristan Williams, "Transwomans vs Trans Woman", July 17, 2013

### Further reading

* “trans woman”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.