I had honestly never considered that. Are you one of those people?
No. The same logic can be applied to almost all aspects of a person's personality/identity, really. If a part of who you are is seen as 'normal', you tend to just go along with it. But since there will be certain aspects that are 'unusual', or as not being 'the default', by necessity one has to consider those aspects of themselves much more in the context of society as a whole.
It's common for it to be said, "So what, just enjoy what you want to enjoy, it doesn't matter what sex you are" Not only will said person often not be telling the truth with such a statement (think about how much society ostracises the idea of a man wearing a dress or a skirt), but it also conflates the idea of 'gender identity' (an intrinsic sense of how you see yourself) and 'gender expression' (how 'masculine' or 'feminine' your mannerisms and behaviour are perceived to be). The latter is especially prone to change over time - a good modern example is the idea of pink being a girls' colour and blue being a boys' colour, when before the 1950s it was actually the other way round.
In fact, there's also the whole cultural idea that masculinity is superior to femininity, but I'm starting to veer off-topic a bit...
I don't know much about this subject, but I have to admit that for someone to cease to accept their biologically "assigned gender" and decide that their sex shouldn't dictate their identity takes a lot of courage.
Even on a simple level, a man who decides he should be a woman... Well, that takes balls.
...damn it, I knew I wouldn't be able to make a serious post without a bad pun.
Although being transgender certainly isn't easy for anyone, it's even harder on the whole for trans women because there's the whole misogynistic assumption that no one in their right mind would want to be considered a woman if they were 'born male'.
The vast majority of media representation of transgender people focuses on trans women (trans men and non-binary identities tend to be ignored), and most of it is negative. For some teenagers, their only knowledge of transgender issues might stem from something like South Park.
While many are of the opinion that sex dictates gender, I see it as the other way round - your gender dictates your sex.
besides jargon, english doesn't really have any layman words to describe trangender people. the best we can do is simply "male" or "female", but then we get people who refuse to call them M/F and instead call them he-she's or vice versa.
and also, what carp said.
This is very true. The English language is embedded with various such prejudices, and there's not much in the short-term that can be done to escape it. But language
does evolve over time, so we'll have to see.
At the very least, the English language isn't nearly as gendered as many other languages are. In French, for instance, every single noun is either masculine or feminine - that must be even harder to circumvent linguistically speaking.
