I read your whole post and I really appreciate your critique! Perhaps I was too careless with my language, as I greatly admire Hirschfeld's work, and this comment will certainly get me off my ass to read the 1,500 pages of Homosexuality of Men & Women spread across the 3 rather imposing tomes that have been sitting on my desk for an embarrassingly long time. My issue isn't with Hirschfeld's work but rather with the terms in their modern form which have been almost completely stripped of all the detail you relayed.

I guess to attempt to explain myself a little more clearly, it took me several years into my transition before I stumbled across Hirschfeld for the first time. I suppose I was so caught up in actually transitioning that I didn't think to investigate the history of it all. When I first started transitioning in the early 2010s, the term "transsexual" was still in popular use but had been completely deformed into a very rigid and binary transmedicalist definition (at least in the circles where I was coming to self awareness), which obviously adversely affected the way I thought of transness and my own discomfort with slotting myself into such a binary. It's that kind experience that I view as the baggage that comes from these terms, though I did not mean to lay that at the feet of Hirschfeld. As I said somewhere else in the comments, this is still a half-baked thought and I have a bad tendency to be rather careless with my language sometimes, so I appreciate the correction!

Discovering that Hirschfeld had a century before effectively endorsed the concept of an infinite spectrum of diversity in human sex, sexuality, and gender was a big part in getting me out of the aforementioned funk, so thank you for sharing all this! Who knew that cracking your egg on 420chan's /cd/ would be so bad for you!