Originally a medical term used to classify someone who wants to change their bodily characteristics through surgery and other means so that it aligns with their felt gender identity. Someone born with male genitals might thus seek to have them surgically transformed into female genitals so that their body matches their felt identity as female. It is underpinned by the idea that sex and gender do not automatically coincide and that the one---sex---does not determine the other---gender. It is thus a refutation of biological determinism and an argument in favour of social constructivism. Sex in this instance stands for a biological category, a certain fact about the body---in short, whether it has male or female genitalia, while gender is seen as a subject position and an identity, both how one chooses to live oneâs life and how one is compelled to love according to social norms. Gender in this instance is a marker of identity coherence---one is either male or female and not something else---that stands in conflict with the felt incoherence of the body. Transsexual in this context is not âsomething elseâ, a âthird sexâ as it is sometimes labelled, but the passage from an incoherent identity to a coherent identity that may or may not result in surgical gender reassignment. Transsexual tends to be caught up in a medicalized discourse of âcorrectionâ and âreassignmentâ, which is one of the key reasons the term transgender is increasingly replacing it in contemporary gender studies discourse. Further Reading: S. Stryker and S. Whittle The Transgender Studies Reader (2006).