So how would you define trans, as someone who says that label does not apply to them?
Before defining "trans", I think it is important to add to be some political, economic, and historical context behind the term trans (or transgender). The term trans comes from Western biomedical, legal, and academic neoliberal/liberal institutions. Western frameworks often center whiteness in how gender variance is conceptualized and erase how sex and gender are racialized, assume that gender is defined by external assignment and must be "legible" to neoliberal/liberal institutions. Within these frameworks, gender varianceness and varisexness is obscured, and gender is reduced to a narrow binary of trans and cis and woman and man.
Because the West, particularly the US and its allies, hold disproportionate, systemically enforced global power, it often imposes these frameworks are constantly exported and imposed onto other societies. This imposition often erases or marginalizes Indigenous communities' knowledge systems, including culturally specific understandings of sex, gender, embodiment, relationship structure, anattraction/attraction systems. These Indigenous systems are not “versions” of Western SROGIESC+ (LGBTQIA2S+) terminology, but distinct and independent epistemologies with their own histories, categories, and social roles. The Western SROGIESC+ framework often fails to account for this diversity, and its global spread can be invalidating, inappropriate, or even harmful when applied without consent or cultural context.
Basically, like the sex binary "female/male" and gender binary "woman/man", the gender modality "trans/cis" binary is a product of Western biomedical, legal, and academic systems designed to keep us hyper-divided and marginalized in various degrees. These systems categorize, sort, rank, enact or threaten violence, regulate, pathologize, and control access to resources using binary classification because binary classification makes populations easier to control, surveil, exploit, and kept in line. These core logics are inherently in most capitalist regime states by design, whether pretending to be a neo/liberal "democracy" or explicitly a fascist or otherwise authoritarian state/region and they produce intercommunity division, hierarchy, and marginalization.
Finally, the term trans exists within the context of a Western capitalist regimes that long co-opted, pathologized, medicalized, and exploited it, our bodies, and our experiences related to gender variantness, particularly through using the term trans and transgender. Yet folks continue to reshape, reclaim, and repurpose these terms in ways that reflect their own cultural, political, and embodied realities.
Definition:
Within this context, trans can be understood as any embodied or lived relationship to sex, gender, both, or something else that departs from, resists, or exceeds externally imposed (exornormative, perinormative, and cisnormative) and white‑centric gender assignments, without implying that such relationships form a single category or exist in binary opposition to “cis.” Trans is not a universal umbrella term that can be simply reduced to "either-or", but rather a part of a larger gender spectrum that exists on a multi-dimensional continuum in clusters. Even with this nuanced definition, it may not be appropriate in certain cultural contexts or needs more clarity and intersectionality.
I just want to end this off with:
