The same word, a different life

You hear your own story in it

A word is more than a meaning. You also hear who said it to you, and how. If you first read it in a magazine or heard it in a club, you hear a friend. If you heard it from a doctor, a colleague or a group in the street, you hear something else.

So nobody is wrong. They’ve lived through different things. The City of Amsterdam’s language guide says so too: different people have different preferences, and some experience the Dutch word travestiet as less respectful.

Who says it matters

If you choose a word yourself, it’s yours. If someone sticks it on you, it isn’t. In ten experiments (Galinsky and colleagues, 2013), people felt more powerful when they used a derogatory word for their own group, and the word seemed less negative. That held only for derogatory words, and people did it sooner when their group felt strong. A later study among gay men found the same.

That’s why a friend can say “queer” in a way that hurts from a stranger.

A word can claim something about you

It also depends on what the word says about you. For someone who enjoys dressing this way now and then, crossdresser simply fits. A trans woman hears that she’s supposedly dressing up, when she’s a woman.

That isn’t being oversensitive. In research among transgender people, being misgendered more often goes together with more stress, anxiety and depression (McLemore, 2018). That shows a link, not a cause, but it does explain why people are alert to it.

What time does to words

Magnus Hirschfeld coined the word Transvestit in 1910, as a description. Medicine then took it over as the name of a disorder. It stayed a diagnosis in ICD-10, and only disappeared in ICD-11, in force since 2022, which also moved gender incongruence out of the mental disorders. So older people may know the word from a doctor’s office.

Meanwhile the community itself came up with crossdresser, and transgender became the umbrella in the 1990s. Transsexual was long the ordinary term and now sounds dated. It also suggests it’s about sex, when it’s about who you are.

Linguists know this pattern. Steven Pinker calls it the euphemism treadmill: a fresh new word gets tainted by what people think of the group, and then another new word is needed. It can go the other way too: queer was an insult and is now a home for many. So a word doesn’t get better or worse by itself. It depends on what people do with it in the meantime.

Every generation its own words

Non-binary is mostly a younger people’s word: in American research, most non-binary LGBTQ adults are between 18 and 29. Someone of seventy may still mean the word from forty years ago warmly, while someone of twenty hears an insult. Sometimes that old word is also the one that first led someone to other people.

Transgender Netwerk puts it like this: language keeps changing, and their advice isn’t a set of fixed rules but something to hold on to.

What we do about it

Your word is our word. If you call yourself a transvestite, that’s fine here, and we won’t correct you. We just don’t use that word for anyone who doesn’t use it themselves.

If we’re not sure, we ask. If we get it wrong, we say sorry, correct it and carry on. You don’t have to explain anything to us, and you don’t need a word at all.

This site sometimes uses a word not everyone likes, such as the Dutch travestie makeover. It’s there because that’s how people search, and we want them to find us.

What we don’t know

We found no figures on which words Dutch people prefer, and the research on chosen words wasn’t specifically about these words. The part on generations is partly our own reading. See it differently? Email us. We like learning.

• Gemeente Amsterdam, Regenboog Taaltips
• Transgender Netwerk, Taal
• Galinsky et al. (2013), The Reappropriation of Stigmatizing Labels
• McLemore (2018), A minority stress perspective on misgendering
• WHO, Gender incongruence and transgender health in the ICD
• Wikipedia, Transvestism (history and sources)
• Williams Institute, Nonbinary LGBTQ adults

Pick a date