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By Rebecca, May 25, 2010 9:21 pm

Hi all! This guest post is from Violet, a regular commenter at The Thang Blog and all-around awesome gal. Enjoy!

Hi. I’m Violet. Rebecca has been kind enough to let me have some of her blog space for a guest post, and let me dip my toe carefully into the world of writing for a wider internet audience. Identity-wise, I am a twenty-something white currently-abled trans-female-spectrum genderqueer and sexuality-queer tomboy geek engineer. Except to the extent I’m not. But this post is about identity labels, so bear with me. Rebecca has previously posted about identity labels as keywords here, which I think is awesome, and I wanted to add another different (and geeky) way of looking at them to the discussion. This post is adapted from something I wrote more personally last year.

By “identity labels”, what I mean are nouns and adjectives that you use to describe people — “woman”, “man”, “goth”, “punk”, “masculine”, “feminine”, “trans”, “queer”. These things are useful for communication. Labels can function as a shorthand to tell people about what your life is like. They allow people with attributes in common to find each other and compare notes. I use them a lot.

The problem is that they’re wrong. Or, rather, not quite right. Any time you have an identity, it comes with a pile of stereotyped behaviors that any given claimant of the identity might or might not share, and it tends to reduce the perception of the claimant down to those stereotypes. Oops. (Rebecca, in her keyword post, also got into the possible confining nature of labels imposed by others.)

Now for the geeking out. Don’t worry — if you don’t speak math, I’ll give an example in pictures below.

I often view labels as vectors in some huge or infinite-dimensional vector space. Given a set of labels — say, {male, female} or {straight, queer} or {gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer, questioning, ally} or whatever — finding out how you identify is a process akin to estimating the projection of your personal self-vector onto the subspace covered by the basis of labels in the set. Of course, that basis is never orthonormal; that would be too clean. It’s not orthogonal or normal at all. It’s just a mess of huge-dimensional vectors that you have to try to match yourself up against, throwing away all those components of yourself that aren’t in directions available to you in that basis. Worse, the self-vector is a function of time. The way you project on to a certain set of labels changes over the course of your life, sometimes even non-continuously. Even the identity labels change over time. Does being a goth mean the same thing now as it did fifteen years ago?

For an example of how my thinking about labels works, people sometimes ask me “are you male or female?” What they mean is usually something like this:

Continue reading 'Vector Identity Theory'»

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By Rebecca, November 12, 2009 2:32 pm

I was reading an article recently – well written and respectful – about transgender issues, and couldn’t help but notice the use of transgender as “transgenders” (as a noun) rather than “transgender people” (as an adjective).

Many identity labels can be used as nouns or adjectives, but others can’t. A hypothetical article that said, “Lesbians polled at the Health Center said XYZ,” wouldn’t raise my eyebrows, nor would “Lesbian women polled at the Health Center said XYZ.” (Other than being a little awkward, since ‘lesbian’ implies ‘woman.’) (But lets not get into that again!)

At the same time, saying, “Blacks polled at the Health Center said XYZ” seems awkward and dated. Using “Jews” or “Italians,” though, doesn’t seem problematic. (I’m picking examples pretty much at random, here.)

What about “transgenders” versus “transgender people”?

Continue reading '“Transgenders” versus “Transgender people”'»

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By Rebecca, October 18, 2009 3:38 pm

I was having a conversation with a friend last night about sex, and gender identity versus physical body. It got me thinking about how easy it is to get into circular reasoning, especially when it comes to something so emotional and sensitive as all that. The circular reasoning we were talking about goes like this:

1. I like sex, and being sexual
2. I identify as a woman
3. I was assigned “boy” at birth, and still have ‘boy bits’
4. Women can’t have ‘boy bits’
5. But I like sex…

(Rinse and repeat…)

Basically, is it OK to enjoy sex, even if your body isn’t what you really want it to be? Or, you have issues using your body in the socially/culturally expected way?

Continue reading 'Sexular Reasoning'»

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By Rebecca, November 30, 2008 1:47 pm

There was just a thread over at The Bilerico Project discussing how to answer questions about being GLBTQ. The replies to the post turned to the use of ‘trans’ as an identifier, and thought I’d share what I posted in reply to a question about “the slugfest going on over the use of “transgender.”"

My understanding is that there’s a disagreement in the trans community over whether individuals who have transitioned can/should still be labeled as ‘trans.’ (Of necessity, I’m using the term ‘trans community’ to include men and women who do not believe ‘trans’ is an appropriate identifier for themselves.)

Continue reading 'Identifying as trans'»

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By Rebecca, May 4, 2008 2:50 pm

I just finished reading She’s Not the Man I Married, by Helen Boyd (who blogs at en|Gender). It’s sort of a thinking-out-loud kind of book – it’s not quite a memoir, not quite a book on theory, not quite a manifesto, but with tastes of all of those things, and more. It’s written by the partner of someone who identifies as trans (not transgender or transsexual or transvestite, but specifically trans, which I kind of love) and explores how the author has dealt with that and the conclusions she has come to. I really enjoyed reading it, and am looking forward to making G read it and getting her thoughts on Boyd’s experiences. Obviously, just as no two trans  individuals have the exact same experiences, no two partners of trans individuals would, either. But Boyd is one of the few voices (the only voice?) of trans partners, so I’ll take what I can get. (It also helps that she’s a good writer.)

One of the common refrains throughout the book (paraphrased) “I don’t understand it [being transsexual] but I accept it.” For exapmle, from page 243: “Like a lot of feminists, I’m generally suspicious of what people mean when they say they have ‘a woman’s brain’ or ‘feel like a woman,’ but transsexual people are content after they transition, feel they’ve fixed something, and while I’ll never understand it, I’ve met too many people now who have given up too much to transition to doubt what is going on is legitimate.” I have a huge amount of respect from anyone else who is able to see something outside their own personal experience of the world and not say “No, no one can feel that way because I don’t feel that way.”

That said, one passage from close to the end of the book jumped out at me and I did want to ruminate on it.. From page 251:

The feeling that I am supportive of Betty’s transness only for the sake of the man I met creeps up on my now and again. Betty worries that out of love for him I “put up” with her. If she gets to the point where she has no male left for me to connect t, there is a chance I will wake up one day and realize I am not in love with and feel no loyalty toward her. This is why when a trans person uses that “but I’m the same person” argument, I want to say, “Well, I sure as hell hope not,” because we had better not be dealing with all this crap without its effecting any real change. That’s the point, that the trans person’s change will be enough to make living in the world easier and more comfortable for him, whether that’s done through crossdressing or transition.

Continue reading '“But I’m the same person!” “Well, I sure as hell hope not”'»