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Labels.. do we need them, should we have common definitions?
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Quote:On the other hand for people who are looking to find support and friendship via the Internet all they can do is put in a label/description to help themselves find others. It’s how I found TR and this website has changed my life, so the labels are like training wheels once you know what you’re doing you just get rid of them.
This is an excellent point to find something on the internet we need a word to search and without the labels what do we search for? This is how I also found TR and it has changed my life also. In my previous post I transistioned through the labels as I sought who I was but now I have left them behind as I came to accept myself as a woman.
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Stephanie, I don’t want to be a pedant ( but I am one all the same!!) but “woman” is a label just like any other. As long as we have language we will have labels, it is the meaning when using them ( good or bad ) that makes them problematic. Try calling a macho man a woman or a girl!
“Woman” and” man “are social constructs used to indicate the socially acceptable roles and range of activities of males and females , it’s just that in dualistic societies like those in the West , there is little space for those who are somewhere inbetween ( US!) except by using derogatory terms as well as medical and psychological terms ( labels).
Remember the old saying ” Sticks and stones may break my bones but labels
probably won’t. Hopefully!” -
Two articles published this year by The Gender Centre, in their magazine Polarie, warrant inclusion in this discussion.
http://www.gendercentre.org.au/83article9.htm
http://www.gendercentre.org.au/82article5.htm
I believe both articles are relevant for all of us, regardless of where we currently sit on the gender spectrum
I hope you enjoy the read
Blessings
Christina -
labels … schmabels …
here is sara palien’s take on the subject … and a pithy response (warning, contains language that may be offensive to some people):
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I came across this today from the Guardian and thought it might add to this discussion of lables. If Ive posted this in the wrong spot please move it.
Why trans is in but tranny is out
To outsiders, debates over the language of transgender may seem trivial. In fact, says Roz Kaveney, linguistics is a vital battlefield
As a trans man or woman, you soon notice how many people have what Daffy Duck called ‘pronoun trouble’.
No matter how supportive of your transition they claim to be, and how much well-intentioned advice they give you about your new hairstyle, or the name you always used in your head but only just told them about, they misgender you every other time they open their mouths, and get quite upset if you call them on it.
You’re being too sensitive, they say, or it’s too soon. Families, in particular, think it’s too soon even after years. Getting your name right is a minimum requirement of respect – referring to you in the third person by the wrong pronoun means that respect is only superficial politeness.
I used to think that straight men particularly tended to misgender me if they were losing an argument; now I’ve seen them do it to trans men too. Misgendering is sometimes cluelessness, but more often it’s quiet, hostile aggression, especially if we aren’t gratefully deferential for whatever crumbs of acceptance we are thrown – if we speak up as freely as if we were actual, you know, human beings.
Oh, and a word to far too many columnists and pub philosophers: the only time ‘it’ is acceptable is with neutrois-identified people, some of whom regard it as mandatory. And if that’s one rule too many to keep in your social vocabulary, well, tough.
The trans community’s internal debates about language, and our preparedness to be fussy about what people call us in public, have grown ever more intense, even acrimonious. One way of looking at this is to say that when trans people are being murdered all over the planet, arguing about words is staggeringly trivial-minded. Another way is to say that when people are dying, you can’t let any slur go unremarked. Trans people’s battle for language is no different from the struggle against other sexist language; we’re not just being picky.
It’s mostly working-class trans women and men of colour in the developing world that are actually being killed, but no matter how middle class and white one is, almost every trans person sooner or later realises we walk on thin ice. You can be a famous astrophysicist and still find people campaigning for you to lose your job. More often, we have to worry about groups of drunks guessing our past on the tube. It starts with name-calling, but it doesn’t always end there.
Some terms were always insulting. ‘She-male’ has the interesting distinction of being simultaneously used by the pornography industry and radical feminists such as Janice Raymond. ‘He-she’ is unpronounceable when sober. Raymond’s terms, like ‘male-to-constructed-female’, were always so unwieldy that they disappeared even from the language of abuse.
The tabloid-beloved ‘sex change’ lacks a sense of nuance – not everyone wants, or can get or afford, surgery that is seen as putting us where we should always have been, not somewhere new. Yet we use words that involve the notion of crossing over – language is all about paradox.
There are words used in the community that almost no one else wants or needs. People ‘pass’, and some of those who pass decide to ‘go into stealth’ and sever all ties with the trans community. Some stealthers snipe on the internet at everyone else for making their lives more difficult, for being inferior failures; others are just getting on with their lives in privacy. Yet all stealthers, just like those of us who want social acceptance on our own terms, are at risk of being ‘read’ and outed.
Most trans people can agree on ‘transition’ at least – for the moment. On the other hand, MTF and FTM were for a while standard, then got into the personal ads and disappeared from respectable usage. ‘Transexual’ is too medicalised for a lot of people’s taste, and ‘gender dysphoric’ plays the pity card. ‘Transgender’ is a useful portmanteau term for a coalition of almost everybody unhappy with rigid unalterable binary gender roles, but rapidly became too vague to be entirely useful.
Right now, trans is just about universally acceptable – though in recent years there was a fight over whether it should be an adjective or a prefix. A trans woman, the argument goes, is a woman who happens to be trans as she might be, say, blonde, but a transman is some special and distinct order of being.
For a while, it seemed as if some younger trans men were going to successfully reclaim ‘tranny’, at least as a ‘smile when you say that’ epithet, or a ‘we can say that about ourselves; you can’t’ in-group word like ‘queer’. It didn’t take, though, partly because it had never stopped being used by would-be hip lad journalists to abuse not only actual trans people, but a list of ‘weird’ people seen as non-gender-conforming.
Unwieldiness is always going to be the thing that stops some of the currently modish terminology catching on. Once you start using self-descriptions like ‘male-identified, female-assigned-at-birth, female-bodied (currently), non-operative’, you are getting into a place where the map is as big as the territory and you hand out a CV every time you have a conversation. The thing about just saying you’re trans is that it tells people we’re here, get used to it.
That’s why, particularly for younger trans people, writing and activism are one. Old-school language such as ‘trapped in the wrong body’ was always sentimental twaddle, but spoke to how life felt. Now young trans poets are trying to make new language for their situations. As a recent play about trans male life and genitals put it, “There is no word for it.”
There is, however, now a word for people who are not trans. Amazingly, there has recently been a controversy in feminist blogs about the term ‘cis’, popularised by Julia Serano, which is about as value-free and non-derogatory as you can get – it’s a standard Latin prefix, as in ‘Cisalpine Gaul’.
This exemplifies the fact that language is a battlefield for trans people: we can find ourselves in a row just for having our own word for everyone else.
• Roz Kaveney is a British writer and editor.
Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/30/trans-language-transgender
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that’s a great article, anthea. thanks.
it makes a lot of sense, and a vote for use of the umbrella term, *trans*.
i think that this has strong links to the why do people think of us as perverted freaks thread. and i am not saying that that is what the general public thinks (where is the proof?). it may be more correct to say that trans people do not generally have a positive image in the perception of the general public.
if we deny that we need labels, and we can’t express what it is that we are, then how are we going to begin to educate the general public about who and what we are? and i can’t say i have proof of the logic, but my gut instinct tells me that the misconception about us by the general public can be well founded on ignorance. if we argue about who and what we are, then we will never be able to start the education process (imho).
oh, and the author, roz kaveney, she is an interesting person. see her website:
http://glamourousrags.dymphna.net/index.html
and wikipedia entry:
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well, i don’t know if this thread is controversial or not. i have certainly found it pretty interesting, and is something that goes to the core of our (tr’s) existence. ironically, here is someone who can’t decide whether labels are a good thing or not. and she comes up with some very interesting thoughts based on research, not just feelings and hearsay. most importantly, she is not a cross dresser or a transsexual, so there is a good basis for independent, unbiased thought.
admittedly, some of the surveys she mentions have very low sample numbers, which may raise questions about their validity, and some of them seem to have been based on samples which may not have been fully randomly chosen, again a basis for possibly questioning the validity of the results:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bW61MYk970
still, she has a phd, and is a former director of the kinsey institute, so there’s a lot that you are not going to be able to argue against, and maybe this is the full extent of scientific understanding of cross dressing, although it is dated 2007, so there may be additional insights available. oh, and the use or not of labels!
http://loveandhealth.ifriends.net/Experts_Detail.cfm?Expert=27
amanda – maybe she should be invited to become a member of tr …
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well … labels, like them or not, they obviously instill some impassioned thoughts and sentiments. it appears that to some, the term “transgender” as an umbrella term is an insult and does not take into consideraiton those who have not transitioned, but are neverhteless, somewhere on the gender diverse spectrum. read on. some interesting comments are made on this article too.
http://www.thescavenger.net/glbsgdq/dont-call-me-transgender.html
Quote:Don’t call me transgenderAcademics and equal rights campaigners are stealing many people’s identities by using ‘transgender’ as an umbrella term for sex and gender diverse people, says Tracie O’Keefe.
Sex and/or gender diverse people come in many forms: intersex, transexed, transsexual, transgendered, crossdressers, androgynous and people who abdicate all forms of sex and/or gender identification (sinandrogen).
Each of these identities are genuine, have their own validity, physical, psychological, social and legal dynamics, and are quite different from each other.
It’s amazing however how many people confuse sex with gender – even doctors, academics, professors and equal rights campaigners, but the two are quite different.
Sex, gender and GOD
Your physical sex is made up of your primary and secondary physical characteristics such as ovaries, testicles, penis vagina, mammary glands and a plethora of physical attributes. Some people are largely male and some largely female but no one is absolutely either, just as no one is absolutely black or absolutely white, nature likes to give itself options.
The clown fish can change its sex from male to female and mate with its brother if they are low on females. Genetic Optional Diversity (GOD) ensures the development, evolution and proliferation of species and always wants options, not necessarily binary or prison like the concept of absolute male or female. GOD also produces the lesbian lizards that are self-fertilizing, have no males in the species, but requires the dance of the beast with two backs by two females to create offspring. Isn’t GOD clever?
Gender is the game of interpretation of the sexes or for some the absence of stereotypical sex characteristic behaviors. You can change your gender performance without changing any of your physical characteristics, it just a pantomime. These are basic sexological definitions that have been set down for many years. If you were a sexologist you would not be able to miss this even if you had your thumbs in your ears and fingers over your eyes.
‘Experts’ adopt ‘transgender’ in health association’s name change
This is why it was confusing and embarrassing to me and many others as a members of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA – which proclaimed to be experts on transsexualism) when it changed its name to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Didn’t the board members take sexology 101?
The association asked for suggestions for a new name that did not have pathology in its title and it received many suggestions. Strangely enough though, the board decided to give only three options on the ballot papers, none of which as a member I voted for.
The intention may have been good but the execution was wholly undemocratic and left many members deeply unhappy with the board’s attempt to rule from the top down. It begs the question: How many board members authored books or wrote papers with the word ‘transgender’ in the title when they decided to make the vote Hobson’s choice?
Needless to say I did not change from being intersex, transexed or transsexual to become transgendered overnight. Nothing happened except the violation of my identity.
You may think I’m paranoid but in 2009 there was a discussion about this very issue on the WPATH discussion board and the moderator censored members’ points of view. Some members’ views, who did not tow the party line, were sanctioned from publishing.
I accused the board of pushing its own agenda without taking on members’ concerns and of censorship. I was informed that the notice board was only for posting events and then received further emails of discussion only about topics of which the moderator approved. The board did not put the full range of suggestions up for voting and one has to question why.
I know the board did not make this decision in ignorance because I gave a paper on this very matter to the then president so ignorance is no defence. It seems the transsexual mafia of HBIGDA has turned into the transgender fascista of WPATH, and some transgendered members are among them.
Many of us are not transgendered
From now on I shall use the phrase transexed instead of transsexual because many people assumed that being transsexual was about sexuality but for many it was about being a form of intersex, namely transexed.
I never changed my gender identity it was always female. I had my body altered at 15 to reflect my correct sex characteristics and my gender has never been ‘transed’. If you look at picture of me at 12, I’m practically wearing the same thing then that I am now. I don’t do fashion – I’m too busy.
I don’t wish to be described as transgendered because I am not. To try and describe me as transgendered is inaccurate, uneducated and steals my identity. I have no objection to people describing themselves as transgendered if that reflects their experience but mine is not the same.
In the 1990s I wrote books advocating hormones and civil rights for transgender people but I was never one of them. Since then I have published books and wrote papers advocating for the rights of all sex and gender diverse people. My sex is female and I have lived as female for 40 years, even though I was registered as male at birth. I don’t have a third sex or gender like transgendered.
Many of my transexed patients and friends have not become transgendered since the HBIGDA board members demonstrated their lack of respect. Nor did they become a third sex or gender that is other than male or female. They go about their business enjoying their identities as males or females for which they have often fought very hard to establish.
Not everyone is out and waving flags like me and those people are entitled to pass and enjoy their privacy no matter how unfashionable some campaigners may find that.
For many trans people who do not pass as their desired sex and gender the transgender label has allowed them to be accepted as this special category that takes them out of the binary male or female system. Instead of being failed as males or females they now get respect as being transgendered, but it is ‘other’, no mistaking.
For the many the transgendered label has allowed them to have a mixed identity in a place where sex and gender is a game of fluency. I get it. I support it. I understand it. I think it is a great thing for them, but not for me or some of my patients who have a strong identification of being male or female.
Who are the people gaining from transgendering us all?
There are academics that make a cushy living by constructing transgender theory out of groups of people who are really very different and need to be identified as separate groups with separate needs. It is nothing less than profiteering from social construction theory that has little basis in crosscultural realities. It is not science but branding, merchandising and profiteering.
There is also a group of clinician/academics who are still trying to indentify many trans people as having a mental illness. They are blind to the natural occurrence of sex, gender and sexuality diversity. For them transgenderism is often just as pathological as transsexualism was and a chance to improve their kudos by extending their pathological range.
Coincidentally the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V) has had its launch cancelled for a year because of arguments between psychiatrists about over-pathologising human behaviour.
Sadly there are also transgender civil rights campaigners who show profound lack of respect for sex and gender diverse people who do not identify as transgendered and insist on calling us all transgendered. If you resist, you are labeled a dissident, betrayer of the cause, maladjusted or not being intelligent enough to see the big picture.
Then there are clinicians with little knowledge in sex and gender diversity who wish to make their money from transgender clients without really understanding the different sex and gender diverse groups. By confusing transgender people with transexed people the clinicians are setting up many of those patients for suicide later in life when the patient fails to get the outcome they needed.
The violation of identity continues with the gay rights movement tagging T onto the end of its GLBT acronymn to bump up the numbers and get more funding. But if you ask them what the T is for and what the issues are that pertain to each particular T group, they go blank. ‘Transgender’ they say as if it’s a password, not really knowing what transgender actually means or how mislabelling people steals their civil rights and their rights to privacy.
When Pakistan declared a third category to include transgender people in 2009 it was a disaster for many transexed people who identified as solely male or female. They could now be denied their right to be soley identified as male or female after transition.
It is fantastic for those who identify a third gender but not for sex and/or gender diverse people who only indentify as male or female. Transexed people could misindentified as transgender people and forced into a third gender with which they have never identified.
Sex and gender diversity: The new black
Salvation is, however, on the horizon for both the transexed (transsexuals) and for sex and/or gender diverse people in general.
The Australian Human Rights Commission adopted a new approach in its 2009 review of the legal rights of people who are sex and/or gender diverse. Its then Commissioner was blind so he was a gifted listener when people spoke to him.
The Commission was very sensible and used the phrase Sex and Gender Diverse People as an umbrella term to include all the people who may not be the average John or Josephine including intersexed people.
It is what is linguistically called open language and allows each group of people to consider their own identity as they so wish both by group and by individualism. Transgender is closed language and when used as an umbrella description it suffers from linguistic generalisation, distortion and deletion. It does not work. It’s like calling all non-Caucasians black. It steals experience and it misdescribes.
The Organization Internationale des Intersexes (Oii) also now accepts transexed (transsexual) people as members and sees them as part of the sex diversity spectrum, not necessarily asking them to categorically state a pathologised classification. It sees transexed people as intersexed. This means their treatment should be funded under sexual health programs and not under psychiatry.
We are not all the same. Many of us who are sex and gender diverse are not transgendered. I’ve signed on for one more year with WPATH as a clinician. It has no legal standing in any country, it’s just a trade organisation for those involved in a specialist section of the field of sex and/or gender identity.
WPATH does not encourage criticism, but as I once heard physicist Stephen Hawking say: ‘There is no science without criticism.’ One more year to be censored? I don’t think so.
Maybe one day the transgender fascista will be ousted just as the transsexual mafia were and all sex and/or gender diverse people’s identities will be respected equally.
Dr Tracie O’Keefe DCH, ND is a naturopath, psychotherapist and sexologist, originally from London, UK, who has been based in Sydney, Australia since 2001, where she is the director of the Australian Health & Education Centre. Tracie is the author of the books Trans-X-U-All: The Naked Difference and Sex, Gender & Sexuality: 21st Century Transformations and the co-editor of Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex & Gender Diversity and Trans People in Love.
i must say, there is some validity in what she says – intersex or transex people seem to get lost in the alphabet spaghetti of LGBTQI – often the Q and I get left off, and in the minds of many, the LG and B leave off the T often enough, not to mention the T, Q and I, so the Q and I have some justification to feel marginalised.
but at the end of the day, unlike the eskimo who have many words for white, there seems to be some inadequacy in our language to cover off the broad variety of “whites” that we are dealing with, or if not an inadequacy, then a level of comfort by those concerned that our current language gives them sufficient acjknowledgement.
i’m still a fan of having an unmbrella term, however, irrespective of what that term may be. i guess it’s a matter of finding one that everyone is happy with and that can be easily understood by the general populace. langauge is and always has been and will always be, fluid in nature (try reading the bible or shakespeare and see how many times the word “dude” is used). for the ultimate in umbrella terms for gender diversity, perhaps we should make one up or invent one – maybe that’s what the eskimos did (apologies to all subsets of the eskimo people – the upik. intuit and aleut – no offence intended).
virginia xo
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Quote:i’m still a fan of having an unmbrella term, however, irrespective of what that term may be.Well – count me in the fan club too V – if we can get a few more members perhaps we can start monthly meetings!
No – seriously – I read the article you posted as just being another emotionally charged rant – which are sadly too common in the community. I find it fascinating how much hate Tracie can outpour onto the TransGender label without telling us what she actually thinks it means. And more importantly she doesn’t tell us what the one umbrella term she would adopt that embraces all without controversy.
Well luckily on TR we have defined what the labels mean…
http://forum.tgr.net.au/cms/forum/F319/3670-670
and so it would be clear on TR that Tracie is not transgender and should be referred to as transsexual.As to that one label – I’m sticking with “Gender Diverse” as a way of avoiding the T Q and I issues. hence the rebranding of TR 6 months ago.
Moderator
Quote:A warning to new members who see this thread for the first time. It is a long running thread with lots of opinions that have already been voiced and discussed. Please read ALL the thread before posting. -
I agree with your last posting Amanda, more importantly the two quotes that you have there and the last paragraph in normal print. This is a discussion that I for one am sick and tired of hearing about. Let’s get back to basics and move on with life sensibly, not just here on TR but anywhere hey people? Regardless of what you think and feel, these are the basics:
If you are FtM then you were quite simply born as a female and you have changed your life and body etc. to male.
If you are MtF then you were born male (as in most, if not all members of this site I think) and you have changed to being female.
If you were born with both sets of genitalia then you were born as a Hermaphrodite (well that’s what it was when I was at school).
The medical profession does allow for psychological issues as we all know but regardless of what you may well think and feel you were born with one set of physical genitalia or both, nothing more and nothing less. This is what the lawmakers (if you will) are taking into consideration. In their minds, even though you feel that you were someone of the opposite sex throughout your whole life, the physical facts of your birth don’t lie as to who you once were. What we need to have is the ability to sort ourselves mentally and then move on and change our gender and not have to be persecuted because we have.
Having a whole lot of people that say that they didn’t have that type of surgery but this one instead (even though it’s the same actual knife work)because they always felt that they were something else is only confusing the lawmakers, just as much as the general public. Telling them what you have always felt during your life is fine but the terminology needs to be the same, both at medical and/or legal level and in general conversation.
I know that I have ruffled a bucketload of feathers here but for crying out loud, let’s get back to being a united voice with a united understanding because even I’m confused a hell of lot of the time, let alone the people that we are trying to educate.
Peta A.
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I , too agree that we need some form of umbrella ” labels” in order to simplify our status to others. My thinking is that it is fine to consider onesself what ever mix of labels that one wishes but a more precise language is needed in order to communicate with others and an umbrella term enables a wide range of possibilities to exist within that term ( I was happy enough with trans but verboten is verboten- fair enough!)
Tracie’s article has many valid points IMO but the point regarding communication stands and Amanda, you are right, she fails to offer an alternative to transgender and so we go round the point again and again trying to fit such a diverse group into some form of united body in order to get our message about our lives to other people.Perhaps my favourite term, “Poof” can get a guernsey????Surely such a cuddley word would not offend anyone???
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well, here’s an interesting take – as you all know, our language is fluid (and not generally amber in colour unless used in licensed premises). what chaucer or shakespeare meant is a little hard to decipher if you are not a learned academic (which cuts out about all of us). this is a recent google labs publication on usage of words – “transgender” is on the ascent, whereas use of “transsexual” and “transvestite” is on the decline. some of you may have picked that the graph is neither a pareto nor a parteo graph (the latter usually used to illustrate the incidence of answers to the question, “was that hot chip you just ate made out of corn starch or potato”? … kidding … no offence intended).
so, without further ado …
http://networkedblogs.com/dbakj
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labels are names.
They are part of symbolic language, it is what makes us human. We are creatures of language.
We use symbolic language, we use names to enable us to to think and mentally manipulate ideas and thoughts. To think without language is extremely difficult. people who came to language late in life will not even talk about the time they did not have language, it is so difficult and painful.
Don’t dismiss labels they are important to our thinking processes.
Keep an open mind. A mind closed cannot receive new ideas or concepts.
just a thought
vicki -
OK, I’ve read a large percentage of the posts in this forum and I believe that labels do have some validity in this gender dysphoric world we all live in.
However useful these labels are though, I believe that they are really only of any value to medical or psychological people to help them determine the extent of our dysphoria. These people need labels so that they can pigeon-hole their patients (or guinea pigs), into convenient little boxes and use pre-determined treatment plans for our continuing desire to transition or not. I am sure that some of these professionals still believe that they can cure some of us and rescue us from our horrific world.
After watching the show on 4 Corners that someone kindly provided a link to, I wouldn’t be surprised if we aren’t labelled Genetic Girls in the future. Oh wait a minute that one is being used already. But as they think they have discovered that the chromosomes don’t determine our Brain Sex only our Physical appearance, and that our Genes determine our Brain Sex, doesn’t that make us eligible for the GG label.
Lets face it I think that Christina had it right in the first place, we are who we are we don’t need labels. Leave the labelling to people who don’t know us, and feel the need to pigeon-hole everything they encounter in their lives. I have two labels John in everyday life and Pamela to everyone here, maybe one day, with any luck, everyone will be able to just call me Pamela.
Hugs to you all Pamela!
