Talk:transfemale

Notes on spaced vs unspaced forms

• Data on commonness:

1. No form is common enough that Google Books' Ngram viewer plots it. However, I checked Google Books data manually:
   • "Transmale" gets 21 pages of hits but only 67 of the hits are relevant, i.e. use the term in English (69 if you count two that use "transmale-ize"); a small number of the hits are non-English, most are just spurious but were returned by Google for some reason. Adding "were" to the search to weed out the non-English hits lowers that to 39 hits that use the term in English: apparently many of the English hits don't use what I would have thought was a very common word, "were"!

     "Transmales" = 9 that actually use that string (including one Library of Congress list of subject headings, which seems more mentiony than use-y) plus many scannos.

   • "Transfemale" gets 7 pages of hits but only 20 are relevant. google books:"Transfemale" + "were" gets 13 relevant hits.

     "Transfemales" = 3 hits.

   • "Trans male" gets 48+ relevant hits (I got bored and stopped counting after 25 pages). "Trans male" + "were" = 30+ relevant hits, plus many hits that either contain the string but not relevantly (e.g. "...Latin trans. Male...") or don't contain the string but were returned by Google for some reason.

     "Trans males" = 8 hits (plus, not included in that number, 4+ hits for the hyphenated form, and many hits of "non-trans males").

   • "Trans female" gets 31 relevant hits and some rather intriguing spurious hits (such as a book of Charlize Theron trivia). "Trans female" + "were" = 30 relevant hits, plus many hits that either contain the string but not relevantly (especially in taxonomic contexts), or don't contain the string at all.

     "Trans females" = 9 hits (plus a few for the hyphenated form, at least 1 for "non-trans females", and again some fascinating irrelevant hits like "Of these 23 groves there were 9 in which T. setnipene trans females were found").

2. Some of the hits, both for the spaced and unspaced forms, may be scannos on Google's part for the hyphenated forms ("trans-male", "trans-female"); I didn't check scans of the books, only the snippets Google Books showed. I did note that the hyphenated forms are attested but less common than the spaced and apparently also the unspaced forms.
3. There are numerous hits for "non-trans (fe)male(s)", whereas "non-transmale" and "nontransfemale" gets just 1 hit, "nontransmale" gets just 2, and "non-transfemale" gets none.
4. COCA has 1 hit for "trans male" (and it's relevant, and from 2012, and adjectival) and no hits for "transmale". It has no hits for either "trans female" or "transfemale".

• Factors which might cause some forms to be used more than others:

1. It is easy to interpret "trans(fe)male" as a compound like transjovian, where the first element means "on the other side of", and the compound would thus mean "(now) on the other side of being female: hence, now male" (which is, however, the opposite of what people use it to mean). "Trans (fe)male" is arguably clearer / easier to understand, and hence perhaps more likely to be used.
2. "Trans (fe)male^adj." and "trans (fe)male^n." match the usual English practice of putting spaces between different descriptors, and between a descriptor and what it describes, and are hence perhaps more likely to be used than the unspaced forms (compare "red car" and "fast red car" to *"redcar" and *"fastred car"). "Trans (fe)male" also matches the "trans (wo)man", which is itself more common than unspaced "trans(wo)man" in part because the space between the descriptor and what it describes is explicitly preferred by some trans people and by some style guides.

- -sche (discuss) 01:58, 4 June 2015 (UTC)