Archives for 2012

It’s steam engine time when it’s time for steam engines and right now it seems to be “being creepy around transgendered people” time. This time it’s a Canadian gay and lesbian magazine ignoring one person’s request to address they with the pronoun of their choice:

It started in November when Xtra refused to honour artist Elisha Lim’s request to be referred to by the pronoun “they.” Although the magazine did run a story quoting Lim saying these words, it would not honour the pronoun switch. A few weeks later Xtra interviewed Lexi Tronic, a trans and sex worker’s rights activists. Edmontonians may remember her for the time she spent hosting weekly drag shows here and others might have caught her as one of the original stars of Showcase’s breakthrough sex series KinK. The story’s editor, Danny Glenwright, decided to share the story on his personal Facebook wall and when he did so he added Tronic’s birth name. Tronic was naturally uncomfortable with this, especially since it turned out the two had known each other since childhood in Winnipeg and shared many acquaintances. Glenwright, an editor at an LGBTQ paper, claimed he didn’t know sharing the birth name of a trans person was a faux pas, which would mostly be OK if he had just removed it after Tronic asked. Instead he defended himself profusely, used the creepy “some of my best friends are trans!” argument and basically reacted in a variety of transphobic ways.

Among the excuses offered for this faux pas has been the argument that singular they isn’t good English, an ugly neologism that’ll confuse readers. Something that, as the Wikipedia article on singular they shows, would be news to some of the greatest English language writers:

Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy. — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)
Arise; one knocks. / … / Hark, how they knock! — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)
‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech. — Shakespeare, Hamlet
I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
That’s always your way, Maim—always sailing in to help somebody before they’re hurt. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Caesar: “No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.” / Cleopatra: “But they do get killed”. — Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)

Even if this argument did hold merit, surely a basic politeness should trump a rigid adherence to inadequate grammar rules? If it is all that confusing, just explain it up front. There seems to be a certain mulish willingness here to cause offence, an anger at people being so awkward as to insist to want their identity represented a certain way, something a bit surprising in a magazine for people who quite likely have some experience at being misrepresented… It’s not active malice perhaps, but more the sort of stupidity you get when you do something dumb and insensitive, get called upon and get angry about being shown your errors. It’s a trap progressive people especially can fall in when we do say something unwittingly racist/sexist/othering, because it’s obvious we’re not bigots and how dare people assume we are!

It shouldn’t be hard to be polite and respect the wishes of others about how they would like to be addressed, but we can get right nowty when we do get it wrong and are corrected, something I still struggle with myself.

It’s been somewhat depressing to see how fast a Metafilter post on the obstacles put in the way of (young) transgendered people wanting to start transition can dissolve into a food fight about the use of “cisgendered” as the opposite of “transgendered” and how unreasonably angry it makes some people. I expected different from MeFi, which is both fairly liberal and hip and open to all kinds of people.

It all started with a post paying attention to a problem many young transgendered people face: continuous societal pressure not to start transition, to start living life as a member of the gender they feel themselves to be. As one commenter put it, “the entire foundation of transsexual health care is to protect cis people from making a terrible mistake, rather than to help trans people transition with as little added pain as possible”. It is a huge problem, because it means many more trans people are stuck with the wrong gender for longer than necessary, all to avoid the much rare false positives, those cases where somebody believes they are trans, but are wrong, before they’ve made an “irrevocable mistake”. It’s not necessarily done out of malice, more out of a sort of twisted interpretation of the Hippocratic oath of first do no harm.

A nice meaty and important subject for Metafilter, but within a few posts it was disrupted by people annoyed at the use of the terms “cisgendered” and “cis” to mean non-transgendered people. Some just objected because it was supposedly bad English, or because they disliked neologisms, others because they disliked having politicalised language forced on them, or because it “othered” them or they didn’t recognise themselves in the label. It really was derailing 101 in action.

Truth of the matter is that yes, while but “cis” and “trans” are imperfect labels (for starters, they imply a binary opposition between themselves, rather than a spectrum of possibilities between being fully trans or fully cis gendered), they are the closest we have to non judgmental, neutral terms for these conditions. Anything else is either a slur, or unwieldy to use, or both. And of course we’re all special little snowflakes unable to be caught by any label, but it can be very handy in political debates to have these kinds of easy to understand, easy to use, non-insulting terms to use to groups of people that have something in common important in the context of the debate. Nobody should feel insulted by being called cis.

I certainly don’t.