A whitewashing

Somewhere along the line it was decided to whitewash all gender variance under the moniker of "trans". Not by clinicians mind you but instead by popular concensus. The problem with this is that all nuance is lost and I will provide a crude example to illustrate this.

Someone calling themselves Irish could be by virtue of ancestry, have been born there and then emigrated or conversely have been born in Ireland and stayed there. The differences are clearly there and yet calling them all Irish eliminates all context. 

Whitewashing makes us lose information but I can understand how it happened when we decided to drop terms like transsexual and transvestite from our lexicon. In so doing we lose information on both motivation and degree of choice (which is driven by the presence or absence of dysphoria) both of which help determine a course of action. This has of course absolutely nothing to do with hierarchies but it has helped foster an environment of confusion leading to both undershooting or overshooting of responses.

I can see how some gender variant people are very happy with the trans descriptor because it lessens stigma around their proclivities plus one big descriptor provides protection and safety. All I can say is that circling the wagons is perfectly fine provided we know what we are talking about. Plus there should be absolutely no stigma surrounding who we are provided we are content.

Introspection is key.