Trans language for the future
Things I hope will disappear from trans language soon:
– ‘AFAB/AMAB’ (I mean seriously, it is not a good tool to understand non-binary experiences and publicly declaring what gender a trans person was assigned at birth without their consent is violence.)
– ‘Deadname’ (We do not die in transition. We do not kill our past selves. We are not a different person. Let’s stop reproducing the narrative of shitty parents who ‘mourn’ their transitioned children. We can find a better word for this. )
– Using the word ‘genderdysphoria’ in a way that erases how much of it is caused by lack of access to transition, by transphobic people and by a transphobic society, which are feelings society creates in us. (We may at some point want an entire new word to describe the pain transphobia causes)
There’s a lot more I’d like to see disappear from trans-activism (racism, neocolonialism, truscum, respectability politics, etc etc) but if we’re just talking language, these are some things I hope we can get rid of.
And I hope we can get rid of them with kindness, in a way that acknowledges that people who grow older will often continue to use old language because that was what their community used when they found a home there and as such those words feel like home.
Just like we need space for trans elders who continue to say ‘transsexual’ and ‘sex change’ and ‘MtF/FtM’ after these words fell out of use, we need space for the trans elders of the future to use the language they grew into.
A lot of people have responded to this post arguing that ‘deadname’ only means that the name is ‘dead’ to the person that rejected it. I think that’s too simple an explanation that avoids the rest of the context.
A lot of alternatives are possible. Rejected-name, discarded-name, falsename, fakename, errorname, pastname, notmyname, assigned-name, replaced-name, notmyfuckingname, etc. So why is ‘deadname’ the one we use?
The reason is probably our history:
We have historically used a metaphore of death and rebirth to describe transition.* This narrative evolved in a time when transition for many people meant leaving behind everything and everyone you knew. A time when most of us would isolate ourselves from everyone until we could ‘pass’ (be perceived as cisgender) and then moved to a new city with a new name and go ‘stealth’ (tell no one that we were transgender). Often we’d leave behind our family, job, all our friends, and never look back.
This process, the loss and mourning and the experience of living a new self, was described through the narrative of death and rebirth. This narrative was born out of pain and necessity but it was also easier to sell to cis people: it told cisgender people that they only needed to learn to call us ‘she’ or ‘he’ after we looked completely like cisgender women and men. It promised cis people that they wouldn’t notice our presense in a public bathroom. It meant they didn’t have to deal with the fact that we had been trans the whole time.
Cisgender parents took this and made it into a whole bad thing of their own, creating their own narrative in which it was said that a parent needed to ‘mourn’ their original child first before embracing their ‘new’ child. “You’ve lost a son and gained a daughter” became a common phrase in texts for parents. The far more obvious truth, that their child had never been a son and was the exact same woman now that she had always been, was replaced with an easily digestable story of mourning and rebirth.
Transgender communities also build cultures around the story of death and rebirth. 80s, 90s and early 00s trans narratives (and probably older ones) are full of this. We’ve held baby-showers for our post-surgical selves, send each other ‘it’s a girl!’ postcards, spoken of killing our past selves. It was normal, almost expected in some trans communities to have a moment in transition where you would burn all your old clothes and any photo’s of yourself pre-transition, literally destroying physical evidence of your past, which became a secret to be hidden.
In the 00′s transgender people have challenged this narrative. A lot of people no longer wanted to ‘go stealth’, wanted to keep the same job and the same friends, and wanted an understanding of their life in which their transition is just a facet. Which meant holding on to their past as a part of themselves. Transgender people who had gone stealth for decades started ‘coming out’ and claiming their past as a part of who they are and talking about the damage to their mental health of trying to completely hide a part of their life. In this process away from the death-and-rebirth idea we also replaces parts of our language that no longer suited our needs.
Which is why it’s so strange for me to see the word ‘deadname’ becoming more popular in the past few years. I’m not sure if that word was even a part of our original language of death and rebirth but it just feels like part of a narrative that most transgender people don’t actually subscribe to anymore.
*caution, this history is a quite US-eurocentric and white-centric simplification of more complex events.
I’d be really cautious of ‘trashing’ any narrative that has held relevance & meaning for a large number of trans people and assuming that any narrative doesn’t apply to people anymore, unless of course, you have met every trans person on the planet and have a very large spreadsheet calculating the percentage of trans people that do or don’t relate to that narrative.
I went through a ‘death/rebirth’ narrative purely because I grew up in a place where I couldn’t ‘socially’ transition safely. When I was ready to come out, I essentially left behind all of my friends except one group (and even then, I eventually left that because of some transphobic folks in the group). I’ve had very few ‘hey I know I went by that name but I now go by this name’ conversations because I can’t really afford to.
There will still be *thousands* of people like me. Just because the narrative in popular media & on social media sites like this tends to present the world as slowly waking up, there are still thousands and thousands of people living in transphobic environments and that’s not going to change within the near future. Trashing a narrative that relates to the most vulnerable & marginalised sections of our communities risk drowning out those voices, and I already feel like my complicated feelings about queerness are being shouted over by middle class queers a lot of the time.
Also, the death/rebirth narrative is just kind of nice? Considering that for most of us, the life we lived before we came out is fraught with trauma & bad memories, it’s nice to be able to have a ‘clean slate’. Also, some mentally ill queers (like me) use this narrative because their dissociation/repressed memories makes it reaaaaaally hard to connect with who they were before they found a safe environment in which they could come out.
Overall, I think this very much assumes that the majority of queers are now somehow living in a world without transphobia- or will live in a world without transphobia- and that narrative skews towards the more privileged section of the community.
I’m asking this completely without judgement but when you say you don’t feel like trans people ascribe to that narrative anymore, who are you basing that on? Your social circle? Your local community? People online? What kind of people are they and what kind of privilege (or disprivileges, even) do they have that could contribute to that relationship?
No one knows the experience of every single trans person but there are clear trends that can be noticed if you participate in transgender communities and social media spaces and look at how transgender organisations are voices their narratives. It’s pretty obvious that in the early 00s the words ‘transsexual, female-to-male and male-to-female were all widely used by transgender people. Now, transgender, trans man and trans woman are far more common. Because a lot of us looked at the implications and impact of the words and decided they weren’t good enough.
Of course we should do so with gentleness and consideration and without telling people that they ‘can’t’ use words that feel good to them. But we should have the space to discuss why some words and narratives feel wrong, express our frustration about the ones that feel harmful, propose new ones and hope that people will start using them.
In this case, this narrative wasn’t being challenged by people in a more privileged position, it was challenged by;
- Transgender people upset by the way cisgender parents started using the narrative.
- Transgender activists who felt that the narrative didn’t fit and who were no longer content just making cis people comfortable and going stealth.
- Transgender people for whom ‘passing’ and ‘going stealth’ had never been an option. (often the least privileged of us)
- Probably most importantly: Transgender people who had lived stealth for decades and had discovered how damaging it was for their mental health.
A lot of us discovered that ‘going stealth’ brings with it the constant fear of one day being exposed, the difficulty of maintaining a fake past, and a disconnect from every new person in our lives because there is something we need to hide from them. A lot of us also discovered that running away from our traumas and pretending they didn’t happen doesn’t work. Repressed traumas just come crashing back into our lives when we’re at our most fragile and knock us off our feet when we’re least prepared for it.
Some of these transgender people who had lived stealth for years described how it eventually felt like a second suffocating closet that they eventually had to break out of all over again.
So the narrative was challenged because a lot of us felt from personal experience that it was harming us, and in many ways it preceded, fueled and interacted with the changes in society.
QueerAnarchism 