Yes, tranny is definitely being used and reclaimed by radical trans folks, and I do mean re-claimed as in ‘being claimed again’. Kate Bornstein is probably the most well known activist to call herself a tranny. Here are some of her words:
Tranny is a word coined by the outcast trans people — drag queens, transsexuals, transvestites, whores and street fairies — in Sydney, Australia in the mid to late ‘60s and early ‘70s. They’d always been fighting with each other over whose identity was better than whose. But they recognized they were family with each other, and they coined tranny as one name to include them all. The bickering about who was better continued, but they always came to rest in the reality of family. Doris Fish moved to San Francisco in the late 70s, and brought the word with her.
Doris was my drag mom when I moved to SF in 1988, and she welcomed me into her family of trannies. All of us used the word back then: male-to-female transsexuals, female-to-male transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, whores and street fairies. Then porn moved to video and became more accessible. A genre of porn developed: tranny porn. And there were tranny hookers who prided themselves as chicks with dicks and she-males, and they advertised themselves as trannies. And the miracle of all of this is that we made each other smile — we were family.
My best guess is some guys who hating themselves for having availed themselves of tranny porn, or the services of tranny whores… well, they turned tranny into a hate word. But it’s always been our word. There’s no reclaiming about it. Tranny is still a valid trans identity today, across several generations, class and race — we are the gender outlaws and outcasts who haven’t reached a tipping point yet. No, you should never refer to a trans man or a trans woman as a tranny — that would be mean. But when I and other outlaws speak the word, we speak it with love about each other as family — and if you like us, and you’re really nice, you can call us that, too.
[..] It’s our first own language word for ourselves that has no medical-legacy.
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“Tranny” is to trans, what “fag” is to gay, what “dyke” is to lesbian.
It’s a more queer form of sexuality – more bent.
[The movement against tranny] is a class thing, it’s a sex-negative thing. Because if you search for tranny online you find tranny porn, you find transgender sex-workers. There’s a group of transwomen, mostly older, mostly middle class or more, who do not want to have anything to do with those people. And I don’t think that’s right.
Source: Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger (the Movie)
QueerAnarchism 