This story in the Independent Life/Style Fashion section, titled “Gender-blending: Sexual ambiguity in fashion” could so nearly have been a nice “Hey, look, transgender gender-f**kery is cool” story. But, instead, they’ve managed to completely confuse transgender and transsexual in a way that ends up being downright offensive.

It’s not just the usual confusion of nouns and adjectives that one expects, with references to “a pre-operative transsexual in little beyond a smattering of magenta body-glitter“. I could live with that, largely because if one gets annoyed with every grammatical error in the papers, one would spend life in a constant rage.

No, it’s far worse than that:

Of course, the Blitz Kid cult of the early Eighties had its roots in the peacock glamour of Seventies rock, and performers such as Roxy Music and, of course, David Bowie. Knight cites those as his own personal reference points but states: “Now, it’s much more upfront. It’s now 2011 – it’s not 1970. And, with the advances in cosmetic surgery, there’s the ability, medically, to go further.”

Uh, what? Cosmetic surgery isn’t some sort of glamour thing for Transsexual folk. It can quite literally be the difference between being beaten in the streets and not, between life and death. Or by “go further” do they mean genital surgery? That’s certainly been around since the 70s. OK, so perhaps we can skip this one, after all it’s a quote rather than the journalist themselves.

But then we get this gem: (My emphasis)

The appeal of Candy’s first issue, featuring Kelly Osbourne’s then-boyfriend, Luke Worrall, in a powder-pink negligee, was such that cult Swedish clothing label Acne approached Venegas to create a selection of transsexual-friendly pieces. That’s transsexual rather than unisex. “I wanted to make the opposite of unisex. Unisex clothes are usually very neutral – in this case, I wanted people not to say, ‘Oh, these are clothes for men and women’, but to ask, ‘Oh, are these clothes for men or women?’ The same feeling you get in front of a transgender person, that’s what I wanted to create with the clothing.” Acne has previously collaborated with Fantastic Man and Lanvin. “The last thing you can call that is underground,” Venegas says.

A true head-in-hands, oh-my-gods moment. It seems we’re being told transsexual means people saying “Is that a man or a woman”? If this sort of offensive confusion is the result of the “designers’ fixation with sexual ambiguity reaching new extremes“, then I’d quite like it if those designers – and the journalists that follow them – took their fixation and got the hell off our turf before they do some real damage.