Transgender People In North America

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In recent years, there have been some major advancements for the rights and liberties of transgender people in developed nations, particularly those in Western Europe and North America, and it is gradually becoming more socially acceptable to be an openly transgender person. Despite these however, progress in uprooting deeply entrenched societal prejudices remains painfully slow, and elsewhere in the world, transgender people still face extreme, in some cases life threatening, discrimination and harassment; in many regions it is common for them to be completely excluded from their communities, simply for expressing who they are.
Definition of Key Terms:
Transgender – An umbrella term for people who do not conform to traditional gender identities, …show more content…
Gender Identity – An individual’s personal sense of who they are in terms of gender, whether male, female or other, regardless of whether they express this externally.
Gender Reassignment Surgery – Surgical procedure/s to modify a person’s physical features to better reflect their gender identity.
FTM – A transgender person who has transitioned from female to male.
MTF – A transgender person who has transitioned from male to female.
Transition – The period when a transgender person shifts to a lifestyle reflecting their personal gender identity, as opposed to that which they were assigned at birth
Human Rights – Rights which are believed to belong to each and every person, such as the right to life, as laid out under the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Civil Rights – Rights that a person gains through citizenship to a particular nation, which grants them freedom of expression, choice and thought, without interference from any private individual, organisation, or the state itself.
Bi-gendered – A transgender person whose gender identity is comprised of two or more genders.
Contextual …show more content…
Oliven of Columbia University in his ‘Sexual Hygiene and Pathology’ publication, and differed from the previous, and now widely obsolete, label ‘transsexual’ in that it made a distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity. Transgender people have existed for far longer than this however, with significant historical figures including King Henry III of France frequently cross dressed and while dressed as a woman was referred to as her majesty by his courtiers. Despite this, they have faced discrimination and persecution for their identity for much of this time. The first official public trial of transgender people in Britain was conducted in 1870, for charges of sodomy, when Ernest Boulton and Fred Park were arrested for indecent behaviour after dressing as women in public. Whilst conditions for transgender people have improved subsequent to the passing of protective legislation in recent years in the Western world, this is not the case elsewhere, particularly in Africa, the Middle East and South America, with 50% of all known murders of transgender women in the world in 2014 taking place in Brazil. One particular exception is Iran, where transgender people have been officially recognised by their government since the mid 1980s, a stark contrast to all of its deeply religious neighbours in the Middle East. By 2008, Iran was carrying out more sex reassignment surgeries than any other nation in
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