Anonymous asked:
pervocracy answered:
(re: “transgendered”)
I don’t know. The events of the last few weeks are starting to make me really feel like I’d much rather have “I support the transgenders! Transgendereds are just people trying to live their lives!” over the sort of people who use absolutely perfect up-to-the-minute gender studies terminology but don’t actually like anyone.
(I mean, not that those are the only two groups, obviously someone can use correct terminology and be supportive and that’s great, but if they’re not willfully misgendering an individual, terminology is like 0.5% of someone’s Trans-Friendliness Score in my book.)
Maybe the difference is whether someone’s just unfamiliar, or whether they’ve been told “transgender is an adjective” and doubled down on “I’ll call you what I want to call you!” But I see the mere-unfamiliarity more often, and I don’t have a problem with that–it means they’re a new supporter, and new supporters are good and valuable to have.
“During their youth”? You mean… within the past ten years?
Look, I after hearing this shit, I smelled bullshit, so I checked the dates and terminology of some of my trans books (as in, by trans creators). And it’s a pretty mixed bag; I see no consensus at all.
Charlie Jane Anders, in The Lazy Crossdresser (from 2002) uses the word ‘transgender’, as does Tristan Crane for self-bio in How Loathsome (2004). But Alicia Goranson’s Supervillainz, from 2006, uses “transman” and “transchick” in the book itself, and both ‘transgender’ and ‘transgendered’ are on the back cover. (If you want to split hairs, Patrick Califia, uses the term “transgendered” in his back cover review, while “transgender” is used on the blurb itself.)
Kate Bornstein in Hello Cruel World uses “transgressively gendered” and “transgender” and that’s also from 2006. But in her earlier book, My Gender Workbook, from 1998, she uses “transgendered.” (Pg. 74, my edition.)
Joey Alison Sayers uses the word ‘transgendered’ for herself in August 2007, in her comic strip Freaking Out the Parents. The Princess comic used the word ‘transgender’ but it seems to have come from later down the line, in 2011. Ditto Take Me There, from the same year, but it mostly “trans.”
As personal experience, when I first started exploring the trans circles online around 2008,
“transgendered” was the polite term, and “transgender” was the one
clueless cis people used. (Because transgender was perceived as a noun or something, while transgendered was perceived as an adjective. I’m not saying this makes sense, but let’s be real, all of this is horseshit anyway.)
If you don’t like the word, fine, but let’s not pretend that this was something everyone agreed was offensive long ago, and that this was a term only used by jerks. Ten years ago is not long, and it was being used by the activists on the front lines.
This is some really good context for the whole discussion.
I had literally never heard “transgender” before I got to tumblr. We consistently used “transgendered”. It was not, ever, considered “offensive”. The idea that it should be considered offensive appears to be a modern invention of the last decade or so. So far as I can tell, some people who don’t know how English does adjectives declared with no evidence that “transgendered” implies the past tense of something done to you, and therefore was offensive. But that’s not actually a rule in English at all, any more than “transgender” means “someone who is transgending”.
If you look back a decade or so, there’s a lot of fierce fighting over this as new people show up, report that “transgendered” is highly offensive because someone told them it should be offensive, and the existing trans people say “what no that’s what we’ve always called ourselves”. And since the new people are angry and prone to harassment campaigns, they eventually “won”, in that “transgender” is more widely accepted now.
But it still sounds wrong to me, and marginally-offensive – like, this is the same kind of vibe I get from people who say “homosex” because they’re unwilling to actually write out the whole word.
So basically, anon is full of shit. And I’ve never seen an actual real-world example of “transgendered” being used in an offensive or hostile way. I’ve seen lots of people use “transgenders” as an obviously-pejorative noun. And I’ve never actually seen the claim that “transgendered” is offensive used in any context but aggressively shitting on other pro-trans activists for not being good enough. I’ve never seen it used in any context where the person being attacked was not, in fact, pro-trans. (And I’m not even entirely sure I’ve ever seen that attack made on anyone who wasn’t actually trans.)
I’ve seen this “’transgendered’ is wrong because GRAMMAR!” argument pop up in various contexts, and it’s never seemed very compelling to me. I seriously doubt anyone with preferences about the terminology arrived at them by soberly sitting down and pondering the nuances of English grammar, and even if they had that doesn’t necessarily mean much. Ultimately, language is whatever people accept and use in practice, regardless of whether it ‘makes sense’ in some abstract way. English in particular is about the last hill you’d want to die on when it comes to consistency—maybe this is just another exception, lord knows we’ve got enough of them already.
(To take some concrete examples: consider terms such as “long-legged”, “redheaded”, and “freckled”. Do any of these imply that the trait they indicate was ‘done to’ the person they describe?)
That being said, if most people have clear preferences about using “transgender” over “transgendered” or vice versa, I have no problem with using the more commonly-preferred one as a general convention. But I don’t think the purported linguistic logic is really the underlying reason for those preferences. I think it’s a historical accident that could just as easily have gone the other way, and “but grammar!” is a post hoc rationalization for what was basically an arbitrary choice. If the Tumblr community had happened to standardize on “transgendered” instead, I strongly suspect we’d be reading lots of similar-sounding explanations of why “transgender” is obviously offensive and wrong. Likewise for ‘trans’ with or without an asterisk, or any other case where it’s more important that some choice be made than which one in particular wins.
My personal favorite was the claim that “trans*” is offensive because it suggests that trans people have similar problems and experiences, which means it doesn’t specifically point out that trans women have everything way worse than everyone else, and is therefore transmisogynistic erasure.
Ultimately, I think this is a case where “most” people don’t really have consensus. I think “transgender” is probably winning at this point, but I think it’s a worse word, and I think it’s winning because people didn’t stop to fact-check assertions handed to them about what it means and why.
No, the best one was that the word “transphobia” is in itself transphobic, because you’re supposed to use “transmisogyny” instead, as transphobia implies the existence of transmisandry, which is impossible because trans men gain privilege and not lose it.
This makes sense and critical theory should be legal.
Not to suggest that anyone around here, or indeed anyone at all is interested in transitioning only because of internalized gender self-hatred, but…
I heard about groups on Tumblr arguing that men should transition because men are horrible oppressors and could stop by choosing to become women, which would also be the kind of group to argue that transmen are making out like privilege bandits with their ill-gotten man-gains.
Honestly, “transmisandry doesn’t exist because they gain privilege” is a sketchy af sentiment.
