Comments on Whipping Girl: Regarding Trans* and Transgenderism

Thank you for this enlightening post. Recently a r...

2015-09-22T09:57:36.773-07:00

Thank you for this enlightening post. Recently a reader educated me on why many TS revile the TG term, which I have employed nearly exclusively in both my blog, and my language when describing my daughter's condition. In recent years, I do not employ either word in referring to my daughter because she is simply the young woman who is my daughter. Yet, for clarification purposes, I occasionally employ the TG term, only to find very recently, that it is offensive to much of the TS community. That knowledge had me clutching because I used the term in my blog, which is meant to target the parents of TS children, namely teenagers. So, for weeks, I've been at a loss-do I educate the parents of my faux pas? Will that confuse them, frighten them, overwhelm them? As it is, when a child first comes out to her parents, the parents, if they're good parents, are reeling out of worry about how to keep their child safe and to promote her happiness and well being. They start searching for information to help their child...the last thing they need to know is that other people who share their daughter's reality are basically in-fighting among themselves about terminology. Perhaps I will put a link to this post on my blog. Parents will be able to educate themselves via a non-threatening explanation. Thank you-you're the answer to the question I put out to the universe :)

yes, I wrote about this (plus our differences) her...

2015-09-09T20:47:56.608-07:00

yes, I wrote about this (plus our differences) here:
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-activist-language-merry-go-round.html

I think your concept of the merry-go-round is clos...

2015-09-09T20:25:18.577-07:00

I think your concept of the merry-go-round is closely related to the concept coined by Steven Pinker of the "euphemism treadmill"

http://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadmill-replacing-r-word.html

Pinker talks about the movement into new and shiny terms, as older terms come to be colored by their association with something society doesn't like. Even though when the terms were coined they were intended as a polite way of mentioning something they were inevitably 'dirtied' by the association and needed to be replaced.

We get things like
moron -> retarded -> special needs -> developmentally delayed

and
ghetto -> projects -> assisted housing

and somewhat more amusingly
privy house -> house of office -> toilet / lavatory -> bathroom -> restroom

The German language community has this term "...

2015-09-02T11:48:05.213-07:00

The German language community has this term "Frauen*" ("women*"), which gained popularity to mean something like "everyone except cis men" as a thing for such spaces.

As a result people favor "Frauen*" as opposed to "Frauen" for female spaces, because according to them trans women would feel excluded if the space was for "Frauen" and not "Frauen*", Yes, with *that* very terrible implication.

The community is only now starting to catch up to that.

Thank you for this post. I am currently in the thi...

2015-08-30T19:01:38.125-07:00

Thank you for this post. I am currently in the third year of PhD on independent trans cinema and respectful of whatever terms individuals and organisations prefer to use, being mindful of historical accuracy in self-identification. I have personally found trans* to be a difficult (or awkward) word to use, because of a long connection in writing of an asterisk seeming to suggest there is a comment to be looked for elsewhere (like a footnote) and I actually think the way the word looks when written with the asterisk is visually distracting, even seeming to suggest something is missing (that needs to be looked for wherever the asterisk is pointing). This of course, is a personal and subjective experience of the word and I respect that a younger generation of activists may prefer the word spelt this way. Thanks again for the posting. Cheers, Akkadia.

Bi+ is helping us stop internal battles and end th...

2015-08-29T08:28:05.566-07:00

Bi+ is helping us stop internal battles and end the Bi/pan war. It has been suggested in many corners that maybe trans+ replace trans*.

The issue really is that there is a whole range of...

2015-08-29T03:25:50.270-07:00

The issue really is that there is a whole range of behavior and self identification which defies description which is why I have favoured using the term gender variance. In the past we would even argue amongst ourselves as to who was and wasn't a real woman but its really not about that either.

Being "trans" is something you are likely born with and how you go about addressing that varies from person to person. The more specific we try to be with our use of language the more some inviduals will complain it does not describe them.

The general public, which knows little about what to make of us must be even more confused. However I am not surprised that many of us defy description because gender is a graded spectrum and what we see within our community clearly demonstrates that.

But I do agree that language can be important to many and if advancing it helps our cause then I'm all for its refinement

Joanna

I just wish 'Trans+' or 'Trans (plus)&...

2015-08-28T16:08:44.109-07:00

I just wish 'Trans+' or 'Trans (plus)' or something lke that had been chosen instead, because "*" causes all sorts of practical problems in searches (etc)

yes, I think of it this way: in word-elimination...

2015-08-28T05:34:51.048-07:00

yes, I think of it this way:

in word-elimination, the primary goal is to get people to stop using a certain word because it is supposedly bad (as seen with tranny, and more recently transgenderism).

in word-sabotage, the primary goal is to champion some new term (e.g., trans*, pansexual), but the arguments made on behalf of this term (which are often subversivist) insinuate that other terms (e.g., trans, bisexual) are conservative or exclusionary.

I agree with a lot of what Natalie Reed says in the post you linked to - I don't think that falls so much into word-elimination or sabotage, it is more of a thoughtful questioning of why do we need to add the asterisk at all when trans (sans asterisk) can be used in the same way. Her critique is more about (what she calls) "inclusion theater" than about championing or condemning particular words. But there are other posts out there talking about how trans* is trans-misogynistic, and which state or imply that it should not be used for that reason. That is what I am referring to here.

This is a really good post, Julia, especially as I...

2015-08-27T19:02:25.803-07:00

This is a really good post, Julia, especially as I happily use both of these terms and seek to use them to mean things that are important to me, and hope that general usage will notice my obvious wisdom and treat my usage as being the obvious first choice of what goes in the dictionary. The major problems here are that the words are polysemic and as another blogger has just insightfully pointed out, the map never agrees up completely with the territory – the labels are the insufficient structures we are trying to impose on the unruliness of nature.
The trans asterisk has been derided as ‘inclusion theatre’ rather than real inclusiveness, but I’m aware it applied early on in the 70s where there was apparently an inclusive definition of gay* (which might have included via the asterisk lesbians or bisexual people – I’m not certain how it was used in practice). There’s been computer science people in transgenderism for a very long time, so the Unix wildcard metaphor for trans* being inclusive of a whole lot of identities that aren’t cis is of a similar vintage, possibly 70s, definitely 80s. So I’m wholly in favour of inclusion, yet being trans-feminine and using trans* in the umbrella sense, I immediately saw another trans woman on social media saying that apparently the use of trans* is misogynistic and dated (“At this point if you're using "trans*" you're clearly a transmisogynist & I'm just gonna laugh in your face. The * shit was over yesterday.”). I didn’t get the memo from the hivemind, obviously.

The definition of transgenderism is an interesting one, too. You’re right about the misappropriation by bigots like Jeffries, so that some trans people have explicitly wanted to surrender the word as well as pretend that there’s no ideology associated with being trans*. My own little contribution to that debate is to fight fire with fire and reclaim the word by giving it an obvious political definition or ‘agenda’ — Transgenderism: the proposition that transgender and gender diverse people are fully human, and deserving of the full panoply of human rights, but notably including the rights to legal and social recognition of their asserted genders. — and see if that gets any traction. It might go nowhere, or it might end up being one of the possible meanings of the word. Where the activist language merry-go-round stops, nobody knows!

The distinction between word elimination and word ...

2015-08-27T13:01:24.475-07:00

The distinction between word elimination and word sabotage is interesting, although given a particular word removal campaign I'm not sure I could identify which type it is. It sounds like you're saying that word sabotage occurs when it's motivated by subversivism, or perhaps word sabotage means there's an effort to change the meaning of the word in question?

Tangentially, that doesn't sound like the reasons I've heard most for rejecting "trans-asterisk" (e.g. see here).