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Notes -
Declaring "tranny" to be a slur feels like something recent and artificial, though admittedly I'm not a linguist, and it's been a while since I hung out with the LGBT crowd.
It's the euphemism treadmill. In a society that values agreeable politeness, any term used to describe a undesirable concept will sooner or later come to be seen as a slur. What do you call a cripple nowadays? I honestly lost track.
Was "tranny" ever a neutral way to call a transsexual (compare and contrast, btw)/transgender person, like "cripple" was for people with disabilities?
My standards are fairly simple I think - if it isn't a word my grandma would have used when trying to be polite, it is not acceptable for a polite discussion. This allows words like "colored" or "cripple", but not "nigger", "tranny" or "faggot".
Tranny was very much a neutral word, in the vein of Jap for Japanese we still see for arborists casually referring to Jap Maples. It's a natural diminutive.
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