ABSTRACT
What is the trans of trans youth? Many books, dissertations, and Internet forum threads have been devoted to parsing out the histories and implications of the ways that the terms “trans,” “transgender,” and “transsexual” are used with and against each other, and it would be impossible to do these things justice in the space I have here. 1 Briefly and unjustly, then: transgender has come in many institutional and activist spaces to signify as an umbrella term covering a variety of genderings (and sometimes sexings) deemed atypical or inauthentic or wrong in a given social context. 2 Transsexual often comes to signify something imagined as more corporeal and more likely to involve medical intervention. 3 Many times both endings are dropped and trans is used a capella as a compact reference to both words.
