Trans person

Generally, a trans person (short for transgender and transsexual, each having distinct meanings) is someone who experiences the phenomenon called "gender dysphoria", meaning they do not feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth and at some point wish to change their appearance and behavior to conform with a different gender.

All those terms (transgender, transsexual, gender dysphoria, etc.) are very new, being a few decades old at most, and are being quickly adopted and accepted by many. The whole concept discussed here is still either new or unknown to a great share of people. In more traditional parts of the world, they be still completely unknown. For those reasons, this article refers mostly to a Western context.

Opinions
Opinions diverge about the nature and implications of gender dysphoria and trans people.

Pro-trans views, which are majority in leftist/socially liberal political circles and most of the current Western mainstream media, believe in a radical distinction between sex and gender, asserting that the first refers to the physical characteristics (such as male penis, testicles, prostate, more body hair and rougher skin as opposed to female vulva, womb, less body hair and softer skin) and the latter to behavioral, psychological and often socially determined traits (such as men's inclination to leadership and interest in engineering as opposed to women's inclination to nurturing and interest in psychology, for example). According to pro-trans views, with sex and gender being completely separate, one can be born with the wrong gender assigned due to their incompatible sex and suffer with this "misgendering"; this person would be called a transgender and, if submitting to genital surgery, transsexual. Trans supporters assert that a person's gender is not determined by their genitals, so trans women and trans men have always been women and men since they were born, but it may have taken some time for them to find it out.

Anti-trans views, shared by some groups such as social conservatives and certain radical feminists, maintain that the separation between sex and gender either does not exist or is exaggerated by a pro-trans mainstream media and supporters, that gender dysphoria is more of a mental disorder than a healthy condition and that transitioning is harmful and dangerous. They typically believe that there are groups lobbying in favor of pro-trans views and persecuting those who oppose it, including silencing doctors who try to perform research that may not conform with those views. Trans objectors often refuse to accept the self-declared gender of a trans person, which, depending on context, can be seen as insulting or even a crime. Anti-trans views are condemned by most of the mainstream media and often called "hate speech" and banned from certain social media.