Humor

"without hrt christmas is just cismas"

Trans terminology

There have been some fairly recent (5-10 years?) changes in preferred terminology for trans folks. It would be possible to just try to remember each of these changes and adjust one's speech, but it's more useful to try to explain the ways in which the newer terminology is a technological improvement.

First, note that these are not an instance of "the euphemism treadmill" (e.g. "disabled" replacing "handicap" replacing "crippled"), in which the preferred term for somebody in a stigmatized category changes repeatedly because as each new term is coined and promulgated, the still-existing stigma is attached to the new term as well as older terms. In this case, none of these terms are by themselves stigmatizing (well, maybe one), but instead the old terms convey more incorrect assumptions than the new terms convey. So, why in particular is each of the right-hand terms an improvement on the left-hand term? "Transgendered" -> "Transgender" This one is subtle and not entirely agreed upon within the community. Roughly, it is trying address the same problem that motivated replacing "the disabled" with "people with disabilities", which is that people in the marginalized category are just people. Trans people are not a different species than cis people, and saying "the transgendered" rather than "people who are transgender" seems to make them so. And on that, the trans community is pretty solidly agreed. The point of disagreement is whether that preference for "people-first language" is really successfully supported by the grammatical choice to avoid "transgendered". The argument against placing people in a special bucket definitely applies to "the transgendered", but does it really apply to "transgendered" as an adjective? It would be a bit weird to talk about "the near-sighted", but we all say "Joe is near-sighted.". Personally, I think the practice of saying "transgender" is an over-correction, and is not grammatically motivated. But it's trying for a thing that's not bad, and it's pretty easy to cooperate with, and there are now a lot of people who see "transgendered" as a micro-aggression. So, grammatical uniformity is a lost cause here; use "transgender". (On the other hand, I individually will continue to say: I'm transgendered.) "A transgender" -> "Transgender(ed)" This one is, as far as I know, the only item on this list that's ever used like a slur. It basically makes explicit the othering of trans people. I don't think this was ever preferred terminology, and it's included here to make clear that it's a different (and worse) construction than "transgender". "F/M to M/F" > "Trans man/woman" The newer terms assert "Trans men are men; trans women are women.", rather than placing trans people in a different category than the existing binary genders. It also avoids the suggestion that trans people's gender changes. In the vast majority of cases, trans people's perception of their gender is stable over time, while the social handling of that stable gender is what changes. Similarly, "trans men/women" should be preferred over "transmen/transwomen"; there's two categories here, not four. (Ahem, there aren't two either; not everybody is a binary gender, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.) "Biologically male/female" -> "Assigned male/female at birth" The newer terms recognize that the labelling of a person as having a particular gender is an externally imposed event, based on zero data about the person's actual gender. Assignment happens shortly after birth on the basis of external genitals, which is completely irrelevant to gender, which is a mental experience. (There is room for questions about when a child's mental experience becomes complete enough to have a gender, and how the categories are formed for the child to experience being. But no possible answers to those questions make genitals-at-birth relevant.) It's also worth noting that another new choice of term is "designated male/female at birth". This term is better than "assigned" because it makes even more clear than there is not some underlying reality that is being created by the assignment, only a choice by others in labelling. "Gender Identity Disorder" -> "Gender dysphoria" The old term designates a situation as a disorder, but being trans doesn't by itself do any harm. Instead, the new term describes the fact of recognizing the mismatch between experienced gender and assigned social role, without assessing the mismatch as disordered. "Preferred pronouns" -> "Personal pronouns" It's worth pointing out than this isn't usually articulated as "personal pronouns" because that seems to be talking about a grammatical category; more often this update is explained as "I don't have pronouns that I *prefer*, I have pronouns that *are mine".". The point is that using a particular set of pronouns for somebody is a matter of *accuracy* in labelling the gender that they do actually have, not a matter of taste on the part of the person whose pronouns are being used. Using gendered pronouns is a social behavior, not a brute fact, so there's a sense in which people make choices about using pronouns. But the the thing being chosen there is how to navigate the use of language in context; there is no choice in what gender identity a person experiences. "Sex reassignment surgery" -> "Gender confirmation surgery" Again, the old term makes the mistake of implying that a trans person's gender (or sex) changes. The point of the surgery is to change a person's body to match their existing gender. Also as part of this update is the change from using "sex" to using "gender". This is because there has always been a need to describe the difference between bodily anatomy and mental experience. The term "gender" was adopted to describe categories of mental experience, and that usage is now well-established as generally not pertaining to anatomy. (And this fits well with the metaphorical extension from "gender" as a grammatical term, where it has always been about categorization rather than being tied to biological dimorphism.) The term "sex" on the other hand, has not, as far as I know, come to have a clear consensus as to its precise meaning as to whether anatomy or experience is described. To some extent, it does seem to now be used more for anatomy, but that's I think due mostly to being contrasted with gender. So, "sex" is now vague, and to the extent that it means anything, it means the wrong thing for what's happening in trans-therapeutic surgeries. "Transman/Transwoman" > "Trans man/woman" Again trans men/women are just a particular kind of man/woman; there's no separate category "transwoman".

Facebook sucks

 I don't trust Facebook to keep my post accessible, and sometimes I write things I want other people to be able to see in the future.

I can made Google docs when really necessary (such as for http://bit.ly/manthd-faq), but I'm going to try to copy important things to this site too, for redundancy.