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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, September 6, 2009 5:11 pm

Daisy and Mattie chimed in on the discussion of this recent post about about the best way to describe an individual’s gender, gender identity, status as cis/transsexual, and a few other related concepts. Following some discussion at Daisy’s blog, Dear Diaspora, I came up with three spectra:

1. Gender Identity as it relates to Self Presentation
2. Gender Identity as it relates to Assigned Sex
3. Subconscious Sex as it relates to Assigned Sex

Spectrum 1 was coming from Daisy’s use of cis/transgender at her above-linked post, Spectrum 2 is the commonly-used definition of cis/transgender, and Spectrum 3 is the commonly used definition of cis/transsexual. (If that doesn’t make sense, please take a look at my previous post for a more in-depth explanation of these concepts.)

Basically, Daisy got me thinking about how the commonly-used definition of cis/transgender and cis/transsexual are based off of a a person’s identity as it related to their assigned sex, whereas the definition she was using for cis/transgender was based off a person’s perception of itself as it related to their gender identity. That’s the long-story-short of where the three spectra came from.

With that background out of the way, I have a few more things I’d like to clarify before moving on with this post:

• After hearing Mattie’s thoughts, and thinking things over more myself, I agree that trying to change the definition of cis/transgender is ultimately tilting at windmills
• Perhaps more importantly, it would force people who do identify as transgender to have to massively rethink their own self-identification in a way I’m not comfortable with
• As such, I’ll continue to use the Spectrum 2 (commonly-used) definition of cis/transgender rather than caveating it all the time with phrases like “commonly-used.” Starting….now!

But I still do think there are two big issues which came up in this discussion that are worth examination by anyone at all interested in gender politics and identity issues, and the transgender and transsexual populations in particular:

1. The value of having something along the lines of Spectrum 1 as a more widely-understood concept.
2. The sloppy and problematic nature of the standing definitions of cis/transgender and cis/transsexual

Continue reading 'Linguistic troubles with cis/transgender'»

Comments (2)

By Rebecca, August 18, 2009 11:24 pm

Think B4 You Speak is a recently launched campaign aiming to eradicate the use of ‘gay’ as a slur or an insult:

Penny Arcade makes a counter-argument (click for the original):

Continue reading 'That’s So Gay'»

Comments (6)

By Rebecca, August 16, 2009 4:44 pm

Cedar over at Taking Up Too Much Space just weighed in on the whole cis debate, and summed things up pretty well:

I think it’s high time we admitted it: “Cis” IS an insult.

That’s right. Because by calling you cis, we’re calling you no better than a fucking tranny*, and THAT, my friends, is one of the worst insults we’ve got in US culture. We’re calling you no more real than us, and we’re not real. We’re calling you no more a woman than us, that you deserve no more respect than us, and in your eyes, that means tranny-alert.com, that means Ann Coulter jokes, that means it’s fine for the general public to post videos of your genitals all over the internet with big purple arrows and random fetishizing speculations, and fire you unless you show us photos of your genitals. It’s saying you can’t apply makeup. It’s insulting your penis size and your manhood. It’s saying that the only difference between us is that you think you’re better than us.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to have a conversation with Carolyn Ann at CaroLINES about the same topic. (Edit: Carolyn Ann told me to use masculine pronouns, so that’s been changed.)

Continue reading 'InCISting on labels'»

Comments (6)

By Rebecca, April 11, 2009 12:36 am

I admit it – I’ve used the word “tranny” both online and off, and even a few times on this blog. But, as I’ve been thinking more about the issue (and about how I feel about ‘fag,’ and the-N-word) I’ve come to the realization that I don’t like what it communicates.

At first, I wasn’t even sure what was making me uneasy. The idea of word reclamation is very attractive as a member of an opressed group, and there is something extremely powerful about turning a word on oppressors. Because, lets face it, “tranny” is not generally used in mainstream media as a positive term. With the exception of an Urban Dictionary link*, most of the top search results for “tranny” are sex sites, as good an example as any of the societal fetishization and objectification of trans women. Searching for “lesbian,” in comparison, brings up links to Wikipedia, Lesbian.com, resources about being gay, etc. That sends a very specific message about what being a “tranny” means, and could actually strengthen the argument that “tranny” should be reclaimed, or needs to be reclaimed. Which is what I used to think.

I’ve changed my mind.

Continue reading 'Using “Tranny”'»

Comments (4)

By Rebecca, March 25, 2009 8:01 pm

I was recently talking with my mom about a woman she’s become friendly with as part of a group she goes to for parents with trans kids. We’ll call her Susan. (I have no idea what her real name is, but I get tired of saying “this woman” over and over again.) Susan has two children: a son – lets say Ben – and a child – lets go with the gender-neutral Casey – who keeps insisting that she’s a girl, even though she was assigned ‘boy’ at birth. Both of her kids are pretty young, definitely not yet in highschool, and Susan has been trying to understand Casey but having a hard time. She was apparently retelling a conversation she’d had recently with her children, in which she had asked Casey, “But why do you like the color pink, playing with dolls, wearing dresses, and don’t want to be called a boy?”

Casey replied, “I just think I want to be a girl.”

Now, from what I’ve heard from my mom, Susan has been trying hard to help Casey be happy, but she is still having a hard time accepting that the child she thought was a son might really be a daughter. Indeed,  Susan was holding this response, and specifically the words “I think I want,” as evidence to my mom that Casey wasn’t sure what she wanted. That there was still hope Casey would change her mind and realize she was really a boy.

My mom, in turn, was asking me what I thought.

Obviously I’m not inside Casey’s head. And, as someone who is a decade and a half older than Casey, it’s hard for me to say that anyone can know what they want when they’re 10. But I distinctly remember using the same language in my mind, and even when I came out to my parents. And the use of “I think I want” wasn’t because of any uncertainty of my desire, it was because of my fear of failure.

Continue reading '“I think I want to be a girl”'»