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What's in a Name?
Mar. 30th, 2019 11:45 pmTransgender or Genderqueer?
-- American Psychological Association
-- Wikipedia
Of the two terms "transgender" and "genderqueer", "transgender" is definitely more established at this point and is more familiar to a wider segment of society. And with the modern "umbrella" definition of what it means to be transgender, it's hard to specify and explain circumstances under which a person would be queerly gendered but not fall under the auspices of what it means to be transgender.
The meaning of a phrase or term comes from our politics. The meaning isn't just there, embedded intrinsically in the phrase itself. In the era when I came out (1980, to be precise), almost no one had ever heard the word "transgender", and so they used the older well-established term "transsexual". Nowadays there are a lot of offensive implications associated with the term "transsexual", but the people who said "transsexual" in 1980 weren't for the most part trying to imply any of those things. Similarly, someone transported from that timeframe to now might say "hermaphrodite" instead of "intersex" without intending to offend, not knowing the other term and not having heard any objections to the one they did know.
In this graph, you can see that "transsexual" was a term in widespread use long before the more modern alternatives. "Transgender" came into significant use between 1985 and 1990; the term "genderqueer" came along a bit later, establishing itself between 1990 and 1995.
Why do we differentiate between terms when an existing established term is "close enough"? Mostly because we like specificity. And we like to clarify.
And sometimes because we wish to reject some of the implications tied to an existing term. Activists in America in the 1960s rejected "negro" in favor of "black" because of cultural associations that had become embedded in "negro" that they wanted to break away from.
It's often easiest to explain what we're talking about when there's something that people are already familiar with. If your audience already knows about the color aqua or the color turquoise, that can make it easier to describe the color teal.
It can be hard to differentiate from people who use a term that you don't wish to go by without making them feel like you're planting your foot in their face. I want to apologize in advance to the transgender community for that. You are not the enemy. I hope you don't experience this blog post as an act of hostility; I don't intend it as such!
Anyway, yes, we have a very inclusive definition of transgender. It does seem to cover people like me. What does it mean to be covered? Sometimes it's like insurance: "don't worry, we've got you covered". Or it can be a cozy blanket, keeping you warm, protecting you from the cold elements. To be covered can also be like wearing a chador, which can be worn with pride but can also be experienced as negating and confining when it is imposed without consent. It can be like a mask, disguising identity. And it can simply mean that one is covered up, kept hidden, obscured from being seen.
The previous graph superimposed the rise of the three terms "transsexual", "transgender", and "genderqueer", showing each term's proliferation in our society. But that graph isn't normalized; it artificially pretends that the rate of use for each term is comparable. It's not. Here's a true graph of the deployment of the three terms:
It may come as a shock to transgender people to think of themselves as "more mainstream" than anyone else, culturally speaking. But from a genderqueer perspective, yes, you're the prevailing story against which we're hidden in the margins.
To be "covered" can elicit the attitude that "Since we've already covered what it is like to be transgender, people don't need to hear about your story, since it's included in the transgender story". Jacob Tobia, in Sissy, details the conventional stereotyped (binary) transgender story arc:
This is the narrative presented (quite excellently) in Meredith Russo's If I Was Your Girl, and classically narrated by Jan Morris in Conundrum, or as testified by by Chaz Bono in Transition. Including other people who also have gender identities that "do not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth" doesn't change the fact that this is what transgender means to most people.
What are the primary concerns of the transgender movement? The rights of transgender people in the military; the right of people to use the bathroom appropriate to their identity without hostile interference; medical insurance coverage for and uncomplicated access to medical transitional procedures; protection from hostile misgendering in the workplace, and raising people's consciousness about microagressions around expressions that gender people, etc; violence against transgender people; and public education.
Public education? The content being promoted is still pretty much the mainstream narrative discussed above. And as part and parcel of it, the agenda includes the establishment of a party line about acceptable attitudes and verbal expressions thereof about sex and gender: that the state of being transgender involves a discrepancy between the gender to which one was assigned at birth ("assigned female at birth" -- AFAB -- or "assigned male at birth" -- AMAB) and one's actual gender identity. That one's physical morphology is not relevant: "What's in my pants is none of your business"; and that social acceptance means that transgender people smoothly blend in with one's identified gender, being "women" and "men", not "transwomen" or "transmen". That except for being out in the political name of being Exhibit A for this phenomenon, there should be no difference between transgender womem and women in general, or between transgender men and men in general. That's the party line. That's what transgender activists would like us all -- transgender and cisgender alike -- to embrace and acknowledge. And in promoting this while opting to include all of us gender-variant people, they're establishing this as our agenda as well, since we're all in this together as transgender people -- ??
In actuality, most genderqueer people who aren't also transitioners in the binary transgender sense aren't directly affected by the military ban question, nor would the right to enter either of the designated binary segregated bathrooms as we saw fit fix much of anything for us; we aren't affected by medical issues related to transitioning; and no one has effectively stated what it would even mean for us to be correctly gendered in the workplace or, for that matter, anywhere else. There's a complete lack of public education about our existence, let alone our specific concerns! The mainstream transgender message discusses gender assignment "at birth", as if we didn't continue to live in a world that altercasts each and every one of us into a gender category; it does not challenge the "sex means gender" established mainsteam perspective -- the "what's in my pants is none of your business" attitude discourages us from claiming as part of our identities the morphological sex of our bodies and the fact that we've been perceived in those terms all our lives, that that is part of our experience. The transgender narrative treats the transitioning person as a model; it now extends a nonjudgmental inclusiveness to people who can't afford to transition or don't choose to for other reasons but it's an inclusiveness that's still based on the notion that "you should treat me as if my sex is in accordance with the gender that I identify as"; that's what "the contents of my pants is none of your business" really means. But that erases the identities of people who wish to identify as people born in a specific body whose gender is other than the gender normally associated with that body. It blocks us from establishing an identity that does not blend in as men or women; it assumes that transgender people all wish to do that blending in, that transgender people consist of men who wish to blend in with men in general and women who wish to blend in with women in general. When in actuality some of us wish to be recognized and understood as something different, as members of new categories: perhaps a fluid person whose gender identity varies, perhaps a person who is both genders, or neither gender, or perhaps as a person who has one sex but a gender that doesn't conventionally correspond to it.
There was once a time, I think, when transgender women in the gay/lesbian scene were accepted as "us" and yet "not us" at the same time. When the voice of the movement was mainly that of gay men, and effeminate males were considered stereotye-reinforcing embarrassments. Well, the need to explain transgender to the world did not make transgender activists homophobes. It did not mean they were antigay. But they had to push off as something different in order to explain.
We, too, are entitled to a voice and an agenda. We have butch women who still identify as women, not as transgender men. We have sissy males who don't wish to be perceived as female people.
There's a reason the argument was made in favor of expanding the LGBT acronym. Q was included. Q means a lot of things, including what we call genderqueer. Something not already covered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Otherwise we would not have needed a separate letter. The Q implies that we have a story of our own.
(I actually prefer MOGII to the increasingly sprawling acronym LGBTQIA++ -- "marginalized orientation, gender identity, and intersex" -- but we do all need our voices to be heard)
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Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.
-- American Psychological Association
Transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex
-- Wikipedia
Of the two terms "transgender" and "genderqueer", "transgender" is definitely more established at this point and is more familiar to a wider segment of society. And with the modern "umbrella" definition of what it means to be transgender, it's hard to specify and explain circumstances under which a person would be queerly gendered but not fall under the auspices of what it means to be transgender.
The meaning of a phrase or term comes from our politics. The meaning isn't just there, embedded intrinsically in the phrase itself. In the era when I came out (1980, to be precise), almost no one had ever heard the word "transgender", and so they used the older well-established term "transsexual". Nowadays there are a lot of offensive implications associated with the term "transsexual", but the people who said "transsexual" in 1980 weren't for the most part trying to imply any of those things. Similarly, someone transported from that timeframe to now might say "hermaphrodite" instead of "intersex" without intending to offend, not knowing the other term and not having heard any objections to the one they did know.
In this graph, you can see that "transsexual" was a term in widespread use long before the more modern alternatives. "Transgender" came into significant use between 1985 and 1990; the term "genderqueer" came along a bit later, establishing itself between 1990 and 1995.
Why do we differentiate between terms when an existing established term is "close enough"? Mostly because we like specificity. And we like to clarify.
And sometimes because we wish to reject some of the implications tied to an existing term. Activists in America in the 1960s rejected "negro" in favor of "black" because of cultural associations that had become embedded in "negro" that they wanted to break away from.
It's often easiest to explain what we're talking about when there's something that people are already familiar with. If your audience already knows about the color aqua or the color turquoise, that can make it easier to describe the color teal.
It can be hard to differentiate from people who use a term that you don't wish to go by without making them feel like you're planting your foot in their face. I want to apologize in advance to the transgender community for that. You are not the enemy. I hope you don't experience this blog post as an act of hostility; I don't intend it as such!
Anyway, yes, we have a very inclusive definition of transgender. It does seem to cover people like me. What does it mean to be covered? Sometimes it's like insurance: "don't worry, we've got you covered". Or it can be a cozy blanket, keeping you warm, protecting you from the cold elements. To be covered can also be like wearing a chador, which can be worn with pride but can also be experienced as negating and confining when it is imposed without consent. It can be like a mask, disguising identity. And it can simply mean that one is covered up, kept hidden, obscured from being seen.
The previous graph superimposed the rise of the three terms "transsexual", "transgender", and "genderqueer", showing each term's proliferation in our society. But that graph isn't normalized; it artificially pretends that the rate of use for each term is comparable. It's not. Here's a true graph of the deployment of the three terms:
It may come as a shock to transgender people to think of themselves as "more mainstream" than anyone else, culturally speaking. But from a genderqueer perspective, yes, you're the prevailing story against which we're hidden in the margins.
To be "covered" can elicit the attitude that "Since we've already covered what it is like to be transgender, people don't need to hear about your story, since it's included in the transgender story". Jacob Tobia, in Sissy, details the conventional stereotyped (binary) transgender story arc:
I was born in the wrong body. the doctors told my parents that I was a _____ [boy or girl], but I always knew that I was the opposite of that... I spent years hating myself, thinking something was wrong with me... That's when I decided I needed to transition. I started hormones and had a ___ [breast augmentation / reduction]. Then I did the really hard thing and got "the surgery" to make sure that my genitals aligned with my identity.
This is the narrative presented (quite excellently) in Meredith Russo's If I Was Your Girl, and classically narrated by Jan Morris in Conundrum, or as testified by by Chaz Bono in Transition. Including other people who also have gender identities that "do not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth" doesn't change the fact that this is what transgender means to most people.
What are the primary concerns of the transgender movement? The rights of transgender people in the military; the right of people to use the bathroom appropriate to their identity without hostile interference; medical insurance coverage for and uncomplicated access to medical transitional procedures; protection from hostile misgendering in the workplace, and raising people's consciousness about microagressions around expressions that gender people, etc; violence against transgender people; and public education.
Public education? The content being promoted is still pretty much the mainstream narrative discussed above. And as part and parcel of it, the agenda includes the establishment of a party line about acceptable attitudes and verbal expressions thereof about sex and gender: that the state of being transgender involves a discrepancy between the gender to which one was assigned at birth ("assigned female at birth" -- AFAB -- or "assigned male at birth" -- AMAB) and one's actual gender identity. That one's physical morphology is not relevant: "What's in my pants is none of your business"; and that social acceptance means that transgender people smoothly blend in with one's identified gender, being "women" and "men", not "transwomen" or "transmen". That except for being out in the political name of being Exhibit A for this phenomenon, there should be no difference between transgender womem and women in general, or between transgender men and men in general. That's the party line. That's what transgender activists would like us all -- transgender and cisgender alike -- to embrace and acknowledge. And in promoting this while opting to include all of us gender-variant people, they're establishing this as our agenda as well, since we're all in this together as transgender people -- ??
In actuality, most genderqueer people who aren't also transitioners in the binary transgender sense aren't directly affected by the military ban question, nor would the right to enter either of the designated binary segregated bathrooms as we saw fit fix much of anything for us; we aren't affected by medical issues related to transitioning; and no one has effectively stated what it would even mean for us to be correctly gendered in the workplace or, for that matter, anywhere else. There's a complete lack of public education about our existence, let alone our specific concerns! The mainstream transgender message discusses gender assignment "at birth", as if we didn't continue to live in a world that altercasts each and every one of us into a gender category; it does not challenge the "sex means gender" established mainsteam perspective -- the "what's in my pants is none of your business" attitude discourages us from claiming as part of our identities the morphological sex of our bodies and the fact that we've been perceived in those terms all our lives, that that is part of our experience. The transgender narrative treats the transitioning person as a model; it now extends a nonjudgmental inclusiveness to people who can't afford to transition or don't choose to for other reasons but it's an inclusiveness that's still based on the notion that "you should treat me as if my sex is in accordance with the gender that I identify as"; that's what "the contents of my pants is none of your business" really means. But that erases the identities of people who wish to identify as people born in a specific body whose gender is other than the gender normally associated with that body. It blocks us from establishing an identity that does not blend in as men or women; it assumes that transgender people all wish to do that blending in, that transgender people consist of men who wish to blend in with men in general and women who wish to blend in with women in general. When in actuality some of us wish to be recognized and understood as something different, as members of new categories: perhaps a fluid person whose gender identity varies, perhaps a person who is both genders, or neither gender, or perhaps as a person who has one sex but a gender that doesn't conventionally correspond to it.
There was once a time, I think, when transgender women in the gay/lesbian scene were accepted as "us" and yet "not us" at the same time. When the voice of the movement was mainly that of gay men, and effeminate males were considered stereotye-reinforcing embarrassments. Well, the need to explain transgender to the world did not make transgender activists homophobes. It did not mean they were antigay. But they had to push off as something different in order to explain.
We, too, are entitled to a voice and an agenda. We have butch women who still identify as women, not as transgender men. We have sissy males who don't wish to be perceived as female people.
There's a reason the argument was made in favor of expanding the LGBT acronym. Q was included. Q means a lot of things, including what we call genderqueer. Something not already covered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Otherwise we would not have needed a separate letter. The Q implies that we have a story of our own.
(I actually prefer MOGII to the increasingly sprawling acronym LGBTQIA++ -- "marginalized orientation, gender identity, and intersex" -- but we do all need our voices to be heard)
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
