P.S.A. 'Tranny' is incredibly offensive to the LGBTIQ community.

[HiPointDem]

83. I read the word "tranny" long before the 80s -- I keep thinking in some book along the lines of

Last edited Tue Apr 17, 2012, 12:17 AM - Edit history (1)

"Last Exit to Brooklyn," only that wasn't the book (checked google) -- but it was something like that, from that era and of that ilk. Not the NYT best-seller list kind of book.

My memory is that I started hearing "transgender" around the 80s. Transsexual predated that.

Stonewall = 1969 & is kind of a dividing line as to how openly such things were discussed in major media (as opposed to academic press, underground press, specialty publishers, etc).

According to this source:

We must be careful with our words. 'Transvestite' originated in 1910 from the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who would later develop the Berlin Institute where the very first 'sex change' operations took place. 'Transsexual' was not coined until 1949, 'transgender' not until 1971, and 'trans' (a very British term) not until 1996. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of 'androgyne' was recorded in 1552, but it has only been in the last 10 years that people have claimed it for themselves to describe a state of being in-between, or having both genders. 'Polygender' is a late 1990s Californian invention used to describe a state of being multiple genders.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/02/brief-history-transgender-issues