Transmedicalism is the idea that being
transgender
A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Many transgender people experience dysphoria, which they seek to alleviate through tr ...
or
transsexual is contingent upon experiencing
gender dysphoria
Gender dysphoria (GD) is the distress a person experiences due to a mismatch between their gender identitytheir personal sense of their own genderand their sex assigned at birth. The diagnostic label gender identity disorder (GID) was used until ...
or requiring medical treatment to
transition.
Transmedicalists believe individuals who identify as transgender, do not experience gender dysphoria, and have no desire to undergo a medical transition through methods such as
hormone replacement therapy or
sex reassignment surgery, are not genuinely transgender.
They may also exclude those who identify themselves as
non-binary from the trans label.
Transmedicalists are sometimes referred to as transmeds and truscum,
a term coined by a user on microblogging website
Tumblr
Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...
, meaning ''"true
transsexual scum''," which has since been
reappropriated.
Those who believe that gender dysphoria is not required to be transgender are sometimes called ''
tucute'', meaning ''"too cute to be
cisgender''."
Transmedicalists sometimes refer to those who identify as transgender without medicalized criteria as ''
transtrenders''.
Criticism of the transmedicalist perception of gender is broad and varied. Many may view transmedicalism as akin to the
medical model of disability
The medical model of disability, or medical model, is based in a biomedical perception of disability. This model links a disability diagnosis to an individual's physical body. The model supposes that this disability may reduce the individual's qua ...
in that it
medicalizes an attribute that contains both medical and social components.
See also
*
Respectability politics
Respectability politics or the politics of respectability is a form of moralistic discourse used by some prominent figures, leaders or academics who are members of various marginalized groups to consciously set aside and undermine cultural and mor ...
*
Gender essentialism
Gender essentialism is a theory that is used to examine the attribution of distinct, fixed, intrinsic qualities to women and men. In this theory, based in essentialism, there are certain universal, innate, biologically or psychologically based feat ...
*
Psychic determinism
*
Neurosexism
References
Transgender and medicine
LGBT politics
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