A note on language/a history of jargon: The jargon used to describe many of the people and ideas here has evolved rapidly over time. To the extent that there is orthodoxy, contemporary jargon includes but is in no way limited to:
Transgender (adj.)- having a gender identity different from that assigned/designated at birth
Cisgender (adj.) - having the same gender identity as that assigned/designated at birth
Crossdresser - a person who, usually temporarily and episodically, dresses in clothing associated with a gender other than their birth assigned gender, but whose gender identity is their birth assigned gender.
Drag queen - one who performs a heightened form of exaggerated femininity for the stage. Typically, but not always a person who is cisgender male, and one whose persona is different when performing than when not.
Drag king - as with a drag queen but someone who performs a heightened exaggerated form of masculinity for the stage.
Gender non-conforming - a person, cis or trans, who dresses, behaves, and or grooms themselves in ways that do not fit with the social expectations of their gender.
Gender Non-binary (aka Non-binary, aka Enby) - A person whose gender is neither fully male, nor fully female. This is not necessarily a mixture of male and female and may be off that axis entirely. Non-binary folks are often considered one (highly varied) set among transgender folks, but many non-binary folks consider themselves a separate grouping altogether. Some consider themselves to fall under the “Q” part of LGBTQIA2S+ initialism rather than the “T” part. Some non-binary folks have enough affinity with a gender to be a non-binary man or a non-binary woman.
Agender (adj.) - without gender - a person who has no or very limited connection to gender of any sort. Some folks consider this a subset of transgender and/or non-binary, other agender people do not.
Genderqueer - a person who has aspects of their gender(s) that vary in some fashion from being cisgender 100% of the time. This term means a number of different things to different people. Some view it as separate from all of the other gender categories. Some see it as umbrella term to include all non-cisgender categories. Some see it as a term that includes aspects of being cisgender and aspects of not being cisgender.
Genderfluid (adj.) - a person whose gender varies.
AMAB/DMAB - assigned/designated male at birth, i.e. was considered by everyone to be male at their time of birth.
AFAB/DFAB - assigned/designated female at birth, i.e. was considered by everyone to be female at the time of their birth.
Note: “assigned gender at birth” language has become used sometimes by anti-transgender people to imply that trans women aren’t women and trans men aren’t men. It can also be used in intersex circles to designate the imposed gender placed on them despite observable external differences from binary genders at birth.
Intersex - a person having congenital properties connected to both male and female phenotypes and/or genotypes. Whether or not a person is intersex is not indicative of whether or not they are transgender. Many intersex conditions remain invisible unless particular genetic tests are done and a person may remain unaware of their status until well into adulthood. Intersex people are more common worldwide than people with red hair in general (some of whom, clearly, are also intersex). “Hermaphrodite” is usually considered a slur when describing people and is also inaccurate when describing intersex people. A small number of intersex people may call themselves hermaphrodites but the term should not be used without the person it is being applied to explicitly saying so. Individual true hermaphrodites in other species are capable of full reproductive performance in both male and female roles. Humans cannot be true hermaphrodites.
Neopronouns - some folks find that neither she/her/hers, nor he/him/his, nor the singular they/them/theirs fits. There are a number of constructed pronoun sets, many of which have been used for over three decades that don’t include any of the older pronoun sets.
Angelica Ross walks through the history of the word "transgender"
However, these definitions are not universally held, and have evolved with time. It’s not always possible to use the current term to describe what is meant by historical terms because of some of the vagaries and changes. Many of the older terms have not only become deprecated but may be considered insulting or slurs.
In the mid to late 19th century, people assigned male at birth who performed femininity through clothing and behavior were called drag queens, or people in drag - but this could include people who today would be considered transgender, cisgender crossdressers, and cisgender drag queens. The term “drag” in this context dates back to at least 1870. It is said to have come from the observation that long dresses and skirts worn by such folks would drag across the floor at social gatherings or in theatrical performances. The term “drag queen” dates back to at least the 1890s” The term “female impersonator” was also used and persisted as a catch-all term well past the mid 20th century.
In the later 19th century, through the first half of the 20th century, the term “transvestite” was used to describe both crossdressers and transgender people, and sometimes drag performers. Within academic circles, at least, “cisvestite” was used to describe those who conformed to societal norms of gendered appearance and behavior as early as 1914. Its Latin roots literally translate to “cross-dresser”. There are records of the word “transvestite” or close approximations thereof such as “travesty” being used from the earliest times of modern English.
In the mid to late 1800s, in most circles, sexual and gender minorities were all grouped under one term such as “urning” in German or “inverts” in English. The terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were also coined during this period.
In the mid 20th century, the more assimilationist wing of the gay rights movement used the term “homophile” to describe gays and lesbians, separately from trans people. “Homosexual” was considered more pathologizing and was used by sexologists and psychiatrists.
In 1923, “mental transexualism” was coined in German, but didn’t promulgate widely to English for a couple of decades. By 1949, the term transsexual was defined to mean a transgender person who desired to, intended to or who had medically transitioned (undergone hormone therapy and gender confirmation surgery) - and the gatekeeping was such that this was typically reserved for AMAB individuals who were attracted to men and, in the eyes of their physicians appeared, dressed, and behaved according to prevailing feminine standards of the time. Trans men had less attention initially, and in many ways remain less visible despite being of equal numbers as trans women.
Once transsexual was defined, “transvestite” came to mean crossdressers and drag queens, but was still employed against trans women as a slur.
In 1965, Dr. John Oliven used the term transgender as a middle state between transvestite and transsexual in his writings. By the later 1960s, folks whom we might now consider cisgender male crossdressers who prefer to present female all the time, as well as transgender women who prefer not to have medical interventions or possibly who prefer to limit their medical interventions to hormone therapy, were sometimes called transgender or transgenderist or transgendered.
Meanwhile, in the 1960s through the 1980s, “gay” was used as an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities.
By the 1980s, in many circles, drag queens had been decoupled from the term transvestite. Due to its association with a medical diagnosis and use as a pejorative, by the late 1980s, the term transvestite had begun to be deprecated in favor of crossdresser (CD) in the U.S., but not in the U.K. However, the use of transvestite (TV) did persist through the 90s in many circles and often came to mean someone who was a cisgender male who presented as a woman all of the time, in contrast to a crossdresser who was a cisgender male who presented as a woman some of the time.
In the beginning and middle of the 1990s, “transgender” (TG) came to be used as an umbrella term encompassing those who then were called transsexual, as well as those who today would be considered cisgender crossdressers and drag queens, and in its earliest uses sometimes included gender non-conforming people as well. This usage, as well as “transgender” as a political identity, was promoted by author and activist Leslie Feinberg among many others.
The term “cisgendered”’s earliest known print appearance is online in 1994, carrying the modern meaning of “cisgender” and contextually implying the expectation that it was an understood established term. Its historical antecedent, “cisvestite” had seen occasional formal use since the early 20th century, appearing as early as 1914 as “cisvestitismus” and more recently “cissexual” appeared in 1991. By the beginning of the ‘00s in most spaces drag queens were no longer considered under the trans umbrella and gradually crossdressers whose presentation was sometimes female and whose gender identity was always male were considered firmly cisgender and less connected to the transgender tent. Cisgender is preferred to the term “biological”, as there are many more biological aspects of sex and gender beyond the morphology of one’s external genitalia at birth.
By the 90s, many people who were assigned one gender at birth but who identified as a different gender, were considered transsexuals regardless of whether they intended to have medical interventions or not - by some. By others, if you didn’t want medical interventions you were transgender but not transsexual.
Within the past dozen years, more or less, the use of the term “transsexual” (TS) has largely been deprecated in favor of transgender, and those who meet the mid 20th century definition of transsexual might be considered transgender people who have had or would want to have medical interventions -- but making that a distinct category of person is widely frowned upon. There are folks who want to restrict the meaning of transgender to only apply to those who want medical interventions - those folks are referred to as transmedicalists and other less generous terms.
Still others claim or reclaim the term “transsexual” over “transgender” as they have always been their gender and had nothing there to “trans” but their physical sexual attributes and social sex roles are what they changed or intend to change.
There is a wide range of pejoratives describing people who are not cisgender, which I won’t list here. They have generally been imposed from outside trans communities and in many instances have been associated with pornography. Some trans people may choose to reclaim such terms but they should be avoided by those who aren’t using them to describe themselves.
So, in part because I began coming into my understanding of trans things in the 90s, and in part because it’s not always clear which current term applies to historical situations, much of the older, deprecated jargon is used in the timeline below, but should generally be avoided when talking about contemporary people.
And while “transgender” was promoted as an umbrella term in the 90s by people such as Leslie Feinberg, and “T*” (pronounced “tee-star”) saw similar usage online for a bit due to the * character’s use as a wildcard search argument, these days I tend to use “trans” most often to encompass the overall non-cisgender community as well as when speaking about myself, not only because it is shorter to type and say, but also because it is less constrained than other terms containing the prefix, while still conveying the essential idea in context.