Abstract

My work leads us through an exploration of the phenomenon of transgender, highlighting the way traditional medical and legal, medicolegal from now on, conceptualisations of gender were caught up in ‘hegemonic and stereotypical cultural ascriptions of masculinity and femininity’. Psychiatric and health diagnostic manuals, such as the DSM and ICD have themselves previously been framed within essentialist, hetero-normative assumptions of the past, and thus historically, atypical gender identifiers were seen as some manifestation of sexual inversion. However, new scientific knowledge, contemporary philosophical understandings and an emerging generation of transgender and gender-queer individuals are offering new ways of conceptualising the phenomenon. From these challenges to the status quo, we find the old medical models are simply no longer fit for purpose. The way I am using semantics is in the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of text, which is intimately linked to the study of the relationships between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and the users of the language.