trans woman

trans woman (plural trans women)

1. 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.)

• 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.[1][2][3][4] The unspaced spelling transwoman is sometimes used interchangeably,[2] including by a few transgender people.[5] However, it is often associated with views (notably gender-critical feminism) that hold that transgender women are not women,[1][3][4] and thus require a separate word from woman to describe them. For this reason many transgender people find transwoman offensive.[3][4]

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

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

• transfem
• trans person
• woman

• trans lesbian

• trans man, cis man, cis woman

• transfeminine
• MtF

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