(This post is going around. Since I pretty much like the post, I’m making my own post rather than introducing this in the responses there, but I do want to link to it for context.)
A really cool and classy trans lady I corresponded with for a while on a different social site used words like “transsexual” and “transgendered.” She spoke of herself as being born in the wrong body, and she spoke of herself as being biologically male, MTF.
She was in her late 60s.
I did not correct her. I would not in a hundred years have dared.
Given the social climate and hostility she had endured, I was fortunate to be speaking to her at all.
I have occasionally seen younger people criticizing older people quite harshly for that sort of thing. That hurts.
The use of language changes, my friends.
It is so, so very important to help people outside the community understand what language is most appropriate, and it’s important to discuss this stuff within the community so that we can reach some kind of consensus (however messy) moving forward.
It is also very, very important to respect the elders among us, and to understand that their experiences and the wisdom they have to share with us are of tremendous importance and incalculable value. And the language they use? Is part of their history, and our history, and respecting that fact in all its complexity is part of respecting them . . . and respecting ourselves as a community.
Language is so important, but in thirty years I guarantee you some of the language we defend so vigorously now will be woefully outdated, and many of us will still be clinging to it, much to the consternation of the younger generation.
I’m not saying it isn’t important to strive to create the most respectful, helpful language possible, and educate others when it is right to do so. It is vitally necessary that we do so. But we have to remember that this is a process that, thank heavens, never, ever ends.
Language cannot, and should not, stop evolving. Look at us. Look at all of us. So beautiful, so many. We are a dynamic community, a vivid community, full of art and history and passion and pathos and great, great power. Something so lively is always surrounded by change. That is so beautiful, and should be welcomed going forward … and it should be respected looking back.
There are words not yet invented that will apply to those not yet born. Those people should be respected when they join us. And the words we use now, they are good for now, and we should be respected. And our elders should be respected. Letting language take that from us is a horrifying prospect.
So. Let us not forget that language is primarily meant to be what helps bind us together. Let us remember not to let it set us apart, to squeeze us like a fist.
Please remember your history when discussing language. You will eventually be part of our history. You already are. Please. Go with open hands.
Yes. This.
This goes for other marginalized communities as well. I have a teacher who (in his words) “suffers from” depression. I am a strong proponent of the idea that everyone should have the right to define their own existence in their own words. So while I personally favor the neurodiversity model and I much prefer the neutral “has [x condition]” over “suffers from [x condition]”, I am not going to correct my teacher’s language because it’s his choice to define his depression for himself.
Thank you for bringing mental illness into this, because it didn’t occur to me, but there are many parallels, and as I myself am mentally ill and disabled because of it, I feel like I can actually talk about this with some authority.
Speaking as someone with an anxiety disorder and depression-dominant bipolar, I heavily identify with the “suffers from” narrative. Not everyone does. But if I said “I suffer from depression” and someone tried to “correct” my language to be more in line with what genuinely should be the default when you don’t know how the other person relates to their issue, they would get a gentle earful.
When someone tells you how they relate to some part of their core being, you believe them. If they use the “trapped in the wrong body” framework for themselves, respect it, don’t correct it. If they describe themselves as “suffering from X”, respect it, don’t correct it.
Some conditions do not inherently cause much suffering and while some people may indeed be miserable with these conditions, for the most part it’s society’s lack of accommodation that makes those conditions painful to live with. (From my understanding, autism, many forms of physical disability, blindness, Deafness, etc., would all reliably fall into this category.) (This is the social model of disability in a nutshell. The idea that if people were afforded necessary accommodations, these issues wouldn’t be too much of a problem.)
Some conditions absolutely tend to cause inherent suffering simply because that is what they do. What I have is, IMO, one of those things. While I personally know people who have the same exact illness I have and actively enjoy it (mania is apparently enjoyable for a friend of mine), most people who are bipolar, in my experience, do not. That is simply the nature of what bipolar is. Likewise, my anxiety disorder: if it did not cause suffering, it would not exist. That’s what it is. It causes discomfort, sometimes so acute I cry or feel like I’m going to throw up. You can’t accommodate me out of it, though you can damn sure make it worse by not allowing me to take care of it.
It’s a fact that if we accommodated these things better, the suffering would be less. For instance, if I were afforded enough money to live on each month, adequate medical care by competent professionals willing to treat me as the authority in my illness, and appropriate medication, I would be a lot happier. I do not have those things. I am absolutely made more miserable because of it. But no level of accommodation will stop my neurotransmitters – or lack thereof – from making me miserable from time to time.
The language that it is appropriate to apply to someone else may very well differ from what they use to describe themselves. There are some things it is not okay to impose on other people, even as it is perfectly okay to be those things.
Language develops and grows, and we are always seeking good terms to use that describe people without assigning them characteristics or narratives with which they may not identify. That’s a good thing. I get very frustrated when I see people complain about changing language, or “made-up terms”. That attitude is an active resistance to positive change.
I also get very frustrated when I see people trying to stamp out words without knowing their history, or respecting people who use those word, and have used them for decades (e.g.: “queer”, which you will pry from my cold dead fingers).
We need a better understanding of the necessary divide between personal experience and group descriptors.
This is a big thing in the autistic community. Older folks (I’m talking the >35 set by and large) lean more towards person-first language. Younger folks (like me I admit) lean more towards identity-first.
And there’s a good reason for that in both cases. Folks who grew up in the 70s and earlier were around for the early disability rights movements – they remember the time when identity-first was used to dehumanize and other. Person-first is their way of fighting back: I am a person, you will not forget that.
Younger folks were around for Autism Speaks and its co-opting of person-first language for its own bigoted ends. For the era of forced normalization, of passing, of “I Am Autism” and “Autism Every Day,” of being portrayed as demon-children while your abusers and the killers of people like you get fawning attention because it’s ever-so-difficult to be around people like you, and of personhood and autism being considered mutually exclusive and personhood being conditional on passing – so if you pass, you’re not autistic and don’t have a right to an opinion because you’re not severe enough, and if you don’t pass, you’re too severely affected to really understand how wretched you are, and therefore you don’t have the right to an opinion. For us, identity-first is a way of claiming our voice – it’s an extension of nothing about us without us. I am autistic, and I am a person, and you don’t get to choose which of those you respect. You will listen to me, because of both, not in spite of one.
What I’m pointing out here is that sometimes generations can have mutually-exclusive language preferences for what amounts to the same underlying reason, owing to differences in culture at the time of the generation’s coming-of-age. Person-first and identity-first are in fact mutually exclusive – someone cannot simultaneously respect my wish to be called autistic and another person’s wish to not hear autistic people referred to as autistic. But they’re both rooted in a demand for respect, a demand to be recognized as a full person.
The autistic community has mostly settled this issue by saying you have the final call in how you are referred to, but you don’t have the right to push others into identifying differently. The wishes that get respected in an instance are the wishes of the person being referred to. So you would refer to me as autistic, and you might refer to someone else as a person with autism, and both are okay as long as you’re respecting the identity of the person in question.
I think the QUILTBAG community could really benefit from taking that sort of attitude, too. Case in point: For me, I would never refer to myself as dyke and would get really fucking angry with anyone who did refer to me as dyke- I lived in a very old-fashioned community. Dyke was a tool of dehumanization and a threat. I hear someone call me a dyke and I’m 8 on the playground having my face smashed open on a chunk of ice to the tune of “Dyke bitch! Dyke bitch!” again. No amount of reclamation is going to lessen that association for me. But other people want to reclaim it as a sense of defiance – I’m a dyke, what of it? I respect their defiance, and I respect their right to choose the language with which they identify.
This is such a cool addition to my post. Thank you.
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