Shemale
Shemale (also she-male) is a term used in sex work to describe trans women with male genitalia and augmented female breasts from breast augmentation and/or use of hormones. According to Professors Laura Castañeda and Shannon Campbell at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Journalism, "Using the term she-male for a transsexual woman would be considered highly offensive, for it implies that she is working 'in the (sex) trade.'"
The term she-male has been used since the mid-19th century, when it was a humorous colloquialism for female, especially an aggressive woman.
In popular culture
In addition to its use in pornography, the term has been used as a punch line or for rhetorical effect. As part of the 42nd Street Art Project in 1994, designer Adelle Lutz turned a former shop in Times Square called American Male into "American She-Male", with brightly-colored mannequins and clothes made of condoms. The 2004 Arrested Development episode "Sad Sack" had a gag where Maeby tricks Lindsay into wearing a shirt that says "Shémale", in order to convince a suitor Lindsay is transgender. Film critic Manohla Dargis has written about the lack of "real women" in summer blockbusters, claiming Judd Apatow comedies feature men who act more like leading ladies: "These aren't the she-males you find in the back pages of The Village Voice, mind you. The Apatow men hit the screen anatomically intact: they're emasculated but not castrated, as the repeated images of the flopping genitals in Forgetting Sarah Marshall remind you."
Related terms
Other slang terms for she-male that emerged from sex work include tranny and ladyboy as well as a number of rhyming terms (not to be confused with rhyming slang), including chicks with dicks, sluts with nuts, dolls with balls, & dudes with boobs.
Some mental health researchers consider attraction to transgender people to be a paraphilia. John Money and Margaret Lamacz proposed a series of terms along these lines. Gynemimetophilia denotes sexual attraction to male-assigned people who look or act like women, including genetically male crossdressers. It can also refer to an attraction to trans women. A related term is gynemimesis which refers to a homosexual male who engages in female impersonation without sex reassignment or to describe the adoption of female characteristics by a male. The terms were used by Money for classification purposes in his gender-transposition theory. He also proposed gynandromorph and gynemimetomorph as technical terms for trans women. A gynandromorph is an organism that contains both male and female characteristics. Gynandromorphy is a term of Greek etymology which means to have some of the body morphology and measurements of both an average woman and man.
Psychologist Ray Blanchard and psychiatrist Peter Collins coined the term gynandromorphophilia. Sociologist Richard Ekins writes that this attraction can include both identification and object choice in "fantasy femaling" masturbatory scripts. Blanchard has proposed that this is "partial autogynephilia. Psychiatrist Vernon Rosario has called labels like these "scientifically reifying" when applied to those attracted to trans women.
As an alternative to a paraphilic model, sexologists Martin S. Weinberg and Colin J. Williams have used the term Men Sexually Interested in Transwomen (MSTW). Slang terms for individuals with such preferences include transfans, tranny chasers and admirers.
See also Futanari and/or Hermaphrodite
See also
the Wiktionary free dictionary.
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