Gender transitioning

Transitioning is sometimes confused with sex reassignment surgery (SRS), but that is only one possible element of transitioning. Many people who transition choose not to have SRS, or do not have the means to do so. Whereas SRS is a surgical procedure, transitioning is more holistic and usually includes physical, psychological, social, and emotional changes. Some transgender and non-binary people have little or no desire to undergo surgery to change their body but will transition in other ways.[2]

Passing refers to being perceived and accepted by other people in a manner consistent with one's own gender identity. This can be one aspect of transitioning, though some transgender people may choose to purposely not pass. Not passing, in this case, can bring about a variety of negative consequences, including misgendering, violence, abuse, and refusal from medical professionals to deliver appropriate services.[3]

Going full-time refers to a person living one's everyday life as the gender one identifies with. One's passing can be limited by safety, legal or bodily restraints. For instance, someone who has worked at a job as female may feel they cannot safely present as male and may switch jobs instead. Mental health professionals who go by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People do not normally require a patient to go full-time for at least a year (a period of time generally referred to as the "real-life experience" (RLE) or "real-life test" (RLT), but mental health professionals who do not adhere to these guidelines do, before recommending surgery.[4]

Going stealth means to live as a gender without other people realising a person is transgender. Trans people often go stealth in public but not with family, partners, or intimate friends. There have been many cases of people who have lived and worked as a gender identity different from their gender assigned at birth. See Category:Transgender and transsexual people for some examples.

A social transition is the aspects of transition involving social, cosmetic, and legal changes, without regard to medical interventions. People who socially transition may ask others to refer to them by their preferred name and pronouns, and some may legally change their name.[5]

Detransitioning is the process of changing one's gender presentation and/or sex characteristics back to accord with one's assigned sex.[6] Detransitioning has also been called retransitioning, though retransitioning can also mean transitioning again after detransitioning.[7]

Transitioning is a complicated process that involves any or all of the gendered aspects of a person's life, which include aesthetics, social roles, legal status, and biological aspects of the body. People may choose elements based on their own gender identity, body image, personality, finances, and sometimes the attitudes of others. A degree of experimentation is used to know what changes best fit them. Transitioning also varies between cultures and subcultures according to differences in the societies' views of gender.[8]

Over the course of a gender transition, people who are close to the transitioning individual may experience a sense of loss, and work through a grieving process.[13] This type of loss is an ambiguous loss, characterized by feelings of grief where the item of loss is obscure. Feelings that arise are described as a way of seeing the person who is transitioning as the same, but different, or both present and absent.[13]

• List of transgender-related topics

• "What does the scholarly research say about the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being?". What We Know. Center for the Study of Inequality, Cornell University.