Can You Hit A Moving Target?

When I give a workshop on trans-culture I start off with definitions and I add,

Some of the more common definitions (At least for today) are…

I also say that if you get a hundred trans-people in a room you’ll have a hundred different definitions.

When we were developing a survey on AIDS in the trans-community the professionals who write surveys said we just list all the ways that trans-people with a series of boxes… yeah right! We said take the term “Transgender” it can mean so many different things that you will never know what they mean if they check transgender. We ended up asking a series of questions so we would understand what they meant when they filled in the box with the word of how they identified.

I define Transgender as,

• broad term for people whose gender identity or expression falls outside cultural norms associated with their assigned sex
• not directly related to sexual orientation
• includes transsexuals, cross-dressers, androgynous people, and many other categories
• not everyone who is gender-nonconforming identifies as transgender

and GLAAD defines it as,

Transgender An umbrella term (adj.) for people whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. The term may include but is not limited to: transsexuals, cross-dressers and other gender-variant people. Transgender people may identify as female-to-male (FTM) or male-to-female (MTF). Use the descriptive term (transgender, transsexual, cross-dresser, FTM or MTF) preferred by the individual. Transgender people may or may not decide to alter their bodies hormonally and/or surgically.

The only thing that I agree with is, “An umbrella term (adj.)”

Which leads me up to the Boston Globe article,

The quickly shifting language of the transgender community
He, she, ze, and how to navigate a new landscape
By Britt Peterson Globe Correspondent 
March 09, 2014

When Facebook announced in mid-February that users would be able to display 56 gender options beyond “male” and “female” in their profiles, the response was largely positive, outside of a few skeptical Fox News anchors. But there was also head-scratching. What exactly did words like “neutrois” and “two-spirit” mean? And why were quite so many words necessary? Various media sites, including Time, the Daily Beast, and Slate, published translation guides for those who might never have encountered “cisgender,” “androgyne,” or “genderqueer” before. “Confused by Facebook’s new gender options?” a Washington Post headline asked, helpfully.

Not long ago, two genders were seen as sufficient for pretty much any form or sign-up page. But as trans or transgender people—umbrella terms encompassing both people who feel at home as members of the opposite sex of their birth, and people who feel their gender can’t be reduced to male or female—have become more prominent and more vocal in America, the language is bending to accommodate more possibilities.

YIKES!!!! Another definition for transgender!

Although trans people have shown up in print for hundreds of years, they haven’t had much control over the words used to describe them until very recently. Jen Manion, a historian at Connecticut College who has studied news accounts of “female-husbands” and other gender-nonconformers in the 18th century, says that gendered language like doubled pronouns—“she (he)”—was used to shame or mock. The practice of “misgendering,” or identifying people by other gender terms than they themselves would use, continues today: The Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Los Angeles Times have both in recent years referred to African-American transwomen murder victims with male pronouns and male names, which to critics seemed an uncomfortable reflection of the same lack of acceptance that has led to a high rate of violence against that population.

One of the ironic things about being misgendered is that if the media got it right, we would never know it was a trans-woman or trans-man that was murdered. We would go back to being invisible again.

I always felt that it was a personal thing on how a person identifies. I know many trans-women who just consider themselves to be women. I identify as female, use female pronouns and say that I am trans. Sometimes when I am in a classroom I say that I am a trans-woman who lived as a man and now I am a trans-woman who lives as a woman.

Just a last word; we use acronym all the time and a lot times we know what they mean but no one else does. When I was an intern I went to a wellness convention at the Hartford Convention Center that was open to the public and when I was asked what the organization did I said we are a LGBT youth and family service agency. Most of the time I got blank stares and asked what does “LGBT” mean.