A gender identity defined by transitivity or fluidity in the movement between traditional male and female gender identities. It is simultaneously not one gender and not yet another gender, but a passage between the two. This passage may have as its end point surgical gender reassignment, but this is not a necessary condition. For some it is sufficient to occupy the desired gender position. Transgender generally applies to people who identify as a gender that is different from the biological sex they were born with, but its scope is much broader than that because it also encompasses people who refuse all existing gender types. It is a paradoxical category because it includes both those people who see themselves as trapped in the âwrongâ body and seek to find ways to correct what they see as ânatureâsâ mistake and those people who see all gender categories as restrictive cultural constructs. These two positions are at odds with one another because the one seeks to put an end to gender ambiguity while the other seeks to extend and indeed intensify it. In this sense, the category âtransgenderâ casts into doubt the category of gender itself and is for that reason a highly useful critical term in gender studies. Transgender is increasingly used in place of transsexual because it recognizes that gender identity is more fluid and problematic than the original meaning of transsexual can accommodate. Further Reading: J. Rose âWho do you think you are?â London Review of Books (2016). S. Stryker and S. Whittle The Transgender Studies Reader (2006).