Transwoman

She had been attracted to Sharon from the time they met, but had not felt comfortable with the idea of dating a transwoman.

A transwoman is thus required to fashion her own body as a blank in order to gain a document that is not itself a blank; the document will not speak her sex until her body fails to.

Not only do people harass and attack transwomen for being who they are: transwomen also face scrutiny from both ciswomen and cismen over “what” they are.

Conversely, if you are a lesbian-identified transwoman who was legally married to a woman prior to transition, some people may claim your union is now illegal because it is presently a same-sex marriage.

“There’s going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to mean nothing, but for the few it does impact, it means the world,” said Facebook software engineer Brielle Harrison, who worked on the project and is herself undergoing gender transformation, from male to female. On Thursday, while watchdogging the software for any problems, she said she was also changing her Facebook identity from Female to TransWoman. “All too often transgender people like myself and other gender nonconforming people are given this binary option, do you want to be male or female? What is your gender? And it’s kind of disheartening because none of those let us tell others who we really are,” she said. “This really changes that, and for the first time I get to go to the site and specify to all the people I know what my gender is.”