soline wrote:No. The terms are entirely distinct and refer to different things. It would be like going "Why don't we just call straight and gay people bisexual!"
Trans - Entity who was one thing, and is now/is becoming a different thing. At heart it is simply 'transition'. Typically transgender but there's plenty of transformation art out there, and a character in the process of turning from a human to a gator or something is also 'trans'.
Herm - Entity that is, was and will continue to be hermaphroditic, possessing both male and female genitalia
Futa (and I suppose Shemale/dickgirls/whatever else in the fetish context?) - Entity that is female, with everything female excluding the genitals, which are exlusively male.
Now I am 100% for more trans characters, personally I love em for various reasons and to hell with equal representation, I just want to see more of a particular subset of character traits I like. However I am 10000% against just collapsing a bunch of 'similar' terminology into one. Maybe it's just the linguistic nazi (or Brit, that's the other word for us :p) in me, but it's exceptionally irritating to be mislead into viewing something based on false premises and misleading labels. I really really enjoy AV, but it's extremely irritating to click on something labelled 'unbirth' and discover it's actually anal-vore the artist has labelled 'unbirth into his man-pussy' or whatever, I came to this picture for people up the wazoo, not people up the backdoor!
If you're fine interpreting herm characters as trans, then go for it and just search two tags at once. I do it with 'fisting' on FA (because y'know....fisting is the gateway fetish to vore!)
Actually, "futanari" is actually just Japanese for "hermaphrodite".