For many decades, the terms transsexual and transgender have been used interchangeably to label and describe people who do not identify with either gender, such as male or a woman. The term transsexual first emerged following the work of Harry Benjamin in the early 1950s to describe people who wanted to change their bodies to match their representation of themselves across gender. He wrote The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966, in which he explored the different perspectives of transgender and transsexual people in the medical world. "The challenge lies in the novelty of these observations and in the attempt to describe clinical pictures and events without preconceived ideas, without lines of work and with" Given our cultural rules of gender identification (i.e. (say that there are only two and that masculinity is assumed in the absence of evidence to the contrary)” (Lucal, 1999). The binary being defined as the heterosexual and cis-gender normative categories of societal norms in which the assumption and narrative is that your gender, masculine or feminine, defines your attraction to the opposite sex. Through this social construction, we learn to “read people’s gender by learning rules that allow us to classify individuals with a wide range of gender presentations into two and only two gender categories” (Kessler and McKenna, 1978). . Furthermore, the presumption of the binary relegates the categories of sexual preference and gender to be defined by each other, even though it is generally understood in academia that "sex and gender are something distinct, and that gender is something that we do” (Lucal, 1999). It's important to recognize this distinction because the idea that sex and gender are intrinsically linked is outdated, but is still often considered true by the general public. “This assumption affects not only our perception, but also individuals’ perception of their own gender identity.” (Lucal, 1999). This then creates problematic ideologies around sexual politics and the self, the self being that of the gender or non-gender you transgender is a Western concept that describes individuals who do not identify with their assigned gender at birth. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “An identity which does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of masculine or feminine gender, but which combines or moves between them. » This definition has become commonplace and is the preferred definition for many, but it remains problematic for some. There is a common misconception that anyone who identifies as transgender wants to transition. Because of this erroneous ideology, transgender people end up having their bodies medicalized and abnormal without valid authorization..