I wanted to address my use of the term transsexual in this piece. It is largely an outdated term but it is still used by some and should be respected as such. I specifically used the term to reflect the terminology that would have been in use at the time periods and people I was discussing.

So, the history of the term transsexual is a murky one. Initially, it was a word used to refer to a person who had transitioned their reproductive organs surgically. Later on, during the Gay Liberation Front's heyday, "transsexual" and "homosexual" started becoming conflated, and transsexuals grew to be thought of (falsely, of course) as predatory gay men who wanted to "get with" straight men by changing their bodies. The -sexual suffix made it get conflated with a sexual orientation rather than a gender or sex based category. As a matter of fact, the T in LGBT initially stood for transsexual.

So, there is the obvious issue with the predatory usage of the term, but more important is the initial surgical usage. The issue here is that transsexual is defining a person's identity by some obscure medical characteristic. Calling someone a transsexual woman is akin to calling a person a hysterectomized woman. It degrades one down to physicality.

The term "transgender" came forth in 1965 by a psychiatrist named John F. Oliven who wished to combat the conflation of homosexual and transsexual. The community at large began to use transgender, not only to negate the assumption of sexual orientation that came with the term transssexual, but also to overhaul the predominant view of gender. Under the term transgender, there is no criteria aside from identifying differently than the gender you were assigned at birth. Therefore, as a term, it is far more useful to nonbinary people, genderqueer people, genderfluid people, binary trans people who do not wish to undergo surgery, and many more groups of people. It also made the statement that gender and sex need to be separated. By identifying as transgender, you were making the statement that your sexual organs should not be a factor whatsoever, because your gender is what is important.

Nowadays, some people do use the word transsexual for themself, and that's completely okay. Some people are still alive from before the word "transgender" was coined and wish to stay with their reality. Some do so for a feeling of connection with their trans roots in history. Some do it because they prefer to use that term, and either do not care about, or perhaps even enjoy the connotations it carries. Some do so because they are a sex worker or a model, and the term "transsexual" is more appealing to the public as something salacious. And there are plenty of other reasons one may use the term as well. However, at large, using the term to describe the trans community as a whole or to describe transgender individuals tends to carry an anti-trans tone, and so it should only be used intentionally and not by default.