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Transgender studies became a distinct field of academic research in the early 1990s, emerging out of the broader discipline of LGBT studies when the initial focus on gay men and lesbians expanded to include bisexual and transgender people. This new visibility masks a complex, older history of publication and research that librarians wishing to develop and maintain collections in this field should be aware of. Much of this body of literature initially appeared in the form of journal articles in periodicals
in the fields of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and sexology, a tradition that has continued into the present, augmented by specialized titles focused explicitly on transgender subjects and available in both print and online. This essay will examine the patterns of monograph publication, archive creation, website use, and journal formation across the three decades of the evolution of transgender studies. Works that are reprints of specifically themed issues of journals on trans subjects and books on counseling and trans psychology have been omitted, the latter because general works on trans studies by their very nature deal with the psychology of gender identity.
Terminology
A PRIMARY ISSUE IN DOING COLLECTION development in transgender studies is the confusing language historically used to refer to this population. The lexicon includes words that are frequently regarded as equivalent, but which have very distinct and precise meanings. The oldest of these words, transvestite and transsexualism, were coined by German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910 and 1923 respectively; the term transsexual was introduced into English in 1949 by David O. Cauldwell in an essay in Sexology magazine titled "Psychopathia Transsexualis," a clear homage and reference to the famed 1886 work Psychopathia Sexualis, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing.1, 2 The more contemporary transgender was first used in the mid 1960s and has since become the preferred and widely used term; its short form, "trans," has also received a degree of acceptance and use. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, transgender refers to any individual "whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond to that person's sex at birth." By contrast, the OED defines transsexual as a person "born with the physical characteristics of one sex but who identifies as belonging to the other sex; living or wishing to...