The conversation was really interesting, and I’ll get to the meat of it later in this post. First, I want to talk about an interesting and thorny topic that came up during the discussion section of the evening. I claimed that, to truly integrate and embrace the LGBT community, Judaism needs to move away from inherently gendered ceremonies such as Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. That, even if the ceremonies are ‘equal’ (which is effectively true in liberal Judaism today, even if that wasn’t always the case) the idea of ‘separate but equal’ for boys and girls is a bad precedent to set at the threshold to adulthood.

I know this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for many Jews, and I said as much at the panel discussion. The idea of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah is ingrained in the idea of those ceremonies. But it’s flawed, problematic, and oppressive, particularly for trans Jews.

I hadn’t realized I felt this strongly until I was sitting on the panel, and responding to a question about how I felt about my own Bar Mitzvah. I said that, at the very least, children should be asked, “What would seem better? A Bar Mitzvah, or a Bat Mitzvah?” This is part of the larger discussion that should be happening around gender in all of society, of giving children (and people of all ages) the ability to stake a claim on their own idea of their gender, rather than what their “real” gender means to others.

Trans Jewish pride flag. Apparently pink and blue are "trans" colors, now?

I don’t know if I would have been able to respond to that question by saying, “I want a Bat Mitzvah,” particularly at the age of twelve. But I sure as hell know I wasn’t presented with that option. There’s the cliche anti-gay slogan of “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” But as stupid as it is, it raises two important points. First, that being LGBT means you will find no explicit support for your identity in your holy book (if you’re in an Abrahamic religion; can’t speak for anything else). Second, it means that gender will be so assumed as to be invisible. What if Eve said, “Actually, I’d rather go by Ethan.” Or Adam looked up to God and asked, “Instead of removing a rib, could you remove what’s between my legs?”

Those questions are almost absurd, when looking at gender and sexuality as it’s presented or discussed in most synagogues, regardless of how liberal. Being tolerated versus being embraced came up at the panel discussion, and I think this is a good example of the difference between the two. I have no doubt that I could go back to the congregation in which I grew up, and I’d be accepted. They are a tolerant congregation in that they wouldn’t have a problem with my being trans; I’d be tolerated. But to be embraced, to be accommodated and made to feel fully welcome, they’d need to do more than simply not kicking me out or being polite to me when I’m there. They’d need to adjust their language. In some cases, adjust the very structure of the religion. (I’m sorry, I’m not going to feel comfortable in a religion that uses exclusively male pronouns to refer to its deity, regardless of how genderless “He” is or how convenient it is to use masculine pronouns.)

I’m not sure how – or if – Judaism can change to accommodate my admittedly-large requests. But I do think that this discussion has helped solidify some of my feelings around my religiously Jewish identity: I’m not looking to have a Bat Mitzvah. (Something I’ve toyed around with.) I’m looking for ceremonies and structures that are only beginning to be created (if they exist at all).

I would like to go back to Or Chadash and try to find a time to speak with its Rabbi, but I’m glad this speaking opportunity made me feel more confident about my concerns with Judaism, or claiming “Jew” as a large part of my identity.

(The rest of the discussion focused a lot on the idea of being a Jew and being LGBT both being identities that can involve the experience of being othered. That is, of being viewed as so different than “normal” that you become wholly apart from humanity – an “other.” A large part of theories surrounding oppression involves the idea that othering a person – be it based on religion, sexuality, gender identity, race, height, sex, etc, etc, etc, – inevitably leads to oppression and poor treatment. For some classic examples, see treatment of blacks in the Western World, particularly when slavery was legal, treatment of Jews in Europe, particularly leading up to WWII, and treatment of Muslims in the US, particularly right after September 11.

The position that Lisa took – and that I agree with – is that oppressed groups (in this case, Jews and LGBT folk) should be natural allies in the fight against oppression and subjugation.)

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:

Pick either the male dot or the female dot. Okay, that doesn’t really fit me at all. I certainly don’t fall exactly on one of those dots. How about another picture, where there’s a continuum between male and female?

Hmm. Still not all that great — in this model the extent to which I am female is exactly the extent to which I am not male. I don’t think there’s actually a single coordinate that describes my place on a line for this — what if I am some amount of both? So then you can imagine this picture, an orthonormal basis for gender:

This is better, but I still think it is more complicated than that — “male” and “female” are culturally understood as at least somewhat opposed — being male does have something to do with not being female. So this picture is somewhat more accurate:

But that’s just my identity put in terms of binary gender. Binary gender isn’t a good system for capturing a whole lot of parts of my identity (or anyone’s, I am guessing). There are whole dimensions of identity that have nothing to do with concepts of masculinity or femininity, and exist off the male/female plane, like this (The disc is there to help you picture the three dimensions. In my head there are more than three dimensions involved here, but I don’t think I can draw that.):

In most modern culture, asking about someone’s gender limits your question to the male/female plane, but it’s not evident to me why that particular plane has to be that special. For example, in a lot of situations my geekiness is a lot more important than my projection on to the male/female plane. I’ve even answered the question of “what gender are you” with “I’m a geek” before. And some people’s genders might be completely orthogonal to the male/female plane, which makes answering the gender question in a societally understandable way even harder.

I’m surprised I can do more than just stand and stammer when people ask me the “male or female” question. Those are useful labels to have around, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I find it important to keep in mind that those categories are not mutually exclusive, and they completely miss some dimensions of gender identity. The same goes for any other set of labels you care to pick.

Do you Agree or Disagree with the following statements:

Recently, I spoke with some other trans women about the pros and cons of labels. I was saying that labels can be a very powerful force for personal identification: by labeling myself, and choosing what labels to apply and how, I can forge my own identity out of its many disparate parts. I choose the labels ‘woman,’ ‘trans,’ ‘Chicagoan,’ ‘Jewish,’ ‘geek,’ and so on, and I get to decide what those labels mean for me.

Another woman in the group countered, “But what about when someone else places a label on you?” She said part of her problem identifying as ‘trans’ is all of the negative baggage associated with the word. Her feelings of discomfort were exacerbated by a generational gap: I was probably half her age, and the labels ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ meant very different things to her than they do for me.

Our different ideas of the emotional weight of those labels got me thinking about the semantics of the word label, and what other words might better describe how we create our identities.

How is label defined? Well…

a short word or phrase descriptive of a person, group, intellectual movement, etc.

But that doesn’t leave much room for flexibility, as this other woman noted. I felt freed by being able to pick and choose my labels, whereas she felt confined by their imposed-by-others meanings. What other words could we use to get to that feeling of freedom?

I sort of love the idea of co-opting the Internet search concept of ‘keywords‘:

a word that serves as a key, as to the meaning of another word, a sentence, passage, or the like: Search the database for the keyword “Ireland.”

That definition makes it really clear that a keyword is part of the explanation or meaning of the whole concept, but certainly not the entirety of the concept. Applying it to people, my ‘keywords’ – trans, woman, Jewish, etc – serve as ‘keys’ to understanding my larger identity. They become “something that affords a means of access” to understanding me as a whole, integrated individual who is made up of a complicated history and a wide variety of interests and passions.

I particularly like this because, as I was forming my understanding of myself as a trans person, the words ‘trans,’ ‘transgender,’ and ‘transsexual’ were keywords that I used to discover websites about other people like myself. They literally figuratively became keys that opened the horizons of my nascent queer identity.

I don’t see ‘keyword’ catching on as a replacement for ‘label’ when it comes to individual identification. Unless you’re a computer geek, ‘keyword’ probably isn’t associated with positive connotations, and may have no connotations at all. (Unless you’re a library geek, in which case you may find yourself with the same warm fuzzies the word gives me, as a computer geek.) Nevertheless, I think it’s really important to consider how we define our identities, and to use every tool and trick in the book – including re-purposing other words as needed – to be able to label or keyword or define or whatever-the-word-is ourselves, and not let other people do it for us.

I was pleasantly surprised to be (mostly) wrong.

The movie is about a married couple, Ben and Anna, whose life is interrupted by Andrew, a college friend of Ben’s who drops in unannounced after not having seen him for many years. Andrew encourages Ben to come out with him and, while at a party, Ben and Andrew learn about an amateur porn festival some of the other party-goers hold every year. They complain that all the good porn ideas must have been taken by now, until they (drunkenly) stumble upon the possibility of two straight men engaging in gay porn. Of course, they both agree to go ahead with it.

The first thing that surprised me about Humpday was the cinematography. It’s shot in a somewhat ‘home movie’ style, with relatively close zooms and a willingness to have oddly-framed shots. The film quality isn’t a home movie, but the general shooting and editing style gives that impression. Coupled with that, I thought the dialogue was pretty realistic, particularly between Ben and his wife, Anna. She was really unhappy about A) Andrew showing up at 1AM and B) her husband agreeing to shoot porn with Andrew, but her unhappiness was presented as being legitimate and not merely shrew-ish. Humpday doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, but it also doesn’t cast the wife as an emasculating bitch playing against the beleaguered husband/hero.

The “sex commune” from the Netflix description was also a pleasant surprise. It was actually a house (possibly a co-op) with a lot of people who were either in open relationships, somehow polyamorous, or just generally sexual. I was surprised, however, because they weren’t presented as freakish or immoral. Ben was definitely uncomfortable (at least, until he got drunk) but it was because he was outside his comfort zone, not because his hosts were shown as particularly outlandish. I found the scene where Andrew goes to sleep with two women at the party hilarious, because they have dildos in their bed and he freaks out about it. One of them replies, “Why should we get rid of one of our penises just because there’s a new one in the bed?” Amazing. (He ends up leaving, to which they kind of shrug.)

But what about the ‘gay porn’?

Here, too, the movie continues its trend of realistic – and funny – dialogue, with neither of the two men willing to back down or wimp out. When Ben and Andrew finally arrive at the hotel, they decide to just “do it,” but…

Andrew: That’s the tricky thing. It’s the difference between this and bungee jumping, is that bungee jumping, you just walk to the edge and jump…
Ben: …and the whole thing takes care of you…
Andrew: …and you don’t have to have a hard-on to bungee jump.

I won’t ruin whether or not they go through with it, though.

So what didn’t I like about this movie? Well, I wanted someone to say, “Hey! Putzes! You know enjoying anal penetration doesn’t make you gay, right?” As much as this movie ultimately wasn’t about homosexuality, it did further the idea that A) being penetrated is an inherently bad thing for men, B) “real men” can’t like being penetrated, and C) that two men being sexual is icky.

For all that, I do think the movie is worth watching. The interactions between the characters are honest, and it (mostly) doesn’t resort to cheap laughs. But definitely don’t watch it expecting some amazing deconstruction of heterosexuality and homophobia. Cuz this movie aint it.

Hey friends!

This is kind of an uncomfortable email for me to write, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about and need to address:

Please don’t out me. That is, please don’t tell people I’m trans.

I love you all. I’ve said this over and over again: I’m privileged, blessed, and really fucking lucky to be surrounded by friends like you. In a world that isn’t too kind to people outside the norm, you all pretty much shrugged your shoulders when I came out. Not because it wasn’t important to me, but because it didn’t change our friendships.  I really value that. I love being able to have conversations and debates, to share joy and sorrow, with people who I’ve known for years, and who have known me.

But staying in Chicago after high school and college has also made transitioning occasionally more work than I’d like. To pick a really easy example, I went to the bank yesterday and the teller was the mom of someone I went to elementary school with (and not someone I particularly cared for, at that). She knew she sort of recognized me, but totally didn’t know how to respond to my presentation as Rebecca. It wasn’t a problem, and she was respectful, but it kind of threw me out of my stride to have to say, “Yeah, I’m going by Rebecca now…”  Even though I love Chicago, and am glad I’ve stuck around, having to be reminded of that pre- and post-transition disconnect takes its toll.

That’s a big part of the reason I’m asking you not to out me: while I’m working on being proud of my identity as a trans woman, I don’t always want to have to deal with it. It’s part of who I am – a big part of who I am – but it’s not the only part that’s important.  And I’m 100% confident that all of you feel the same way. But (as I said) you’ve known me for a bazillion years, and see who I am as one continual person. For a lot of people, though, when they’re told someone is trans, that part ‘wins’ against all the other parts of their identity.  People have this tendency to totally shift their mental perception of a person when they learn that person is trans. I’ve seen it happen: pronouns immediately switch, awkward and rude questions start to get asked, and (in extreme cases) the trans person gets beaten, raped, or killed.

I want to emphasize that those less violent reactions – incorrect pronouns, rude questions – don’t come from bigotry. I’m not accusing everyone who uses the wrong names or pronouns with me of intolerance. They can learn – like I’ve had to, like you all have done brilliantly and in a way that really makes me proud – that being trans doesn’t have to be that big of a deal. But while they’re learning that, they may call me by the wrong pronoun. They may ask awkward questions. They may end up treating me differently. And all of those things hurt, even though I wish they didn’t and even though I’m working on not letting them get to me. I don’t like how easy it is for me to go from happy to miserable by being referred to as ‘he,’ but that’s where I am right now.

I’m also asking this of you for more than my emotional comfort. I’m asking you for my safety. I am absolutely confident that none of you would ever out me to anyone who would give me any reason to feel unsafe. But I don’t know who their friends are. Or the friends of their friends. I’ve led something of a charmed life when compared to the rest of the trans community, and ask your help in keeping me safe from potential violence and harassment.

I also want to make it really clear that I am not mad at any of you. I’ve never given this issue much thought, and haven’t really talked about it with anyone before this week. I’m open to talking about it more, and would love to chat over drinks or a game of Mario Kart. Thank you all so much for respecting this decision.

Much love,
-Rebecca

The first draft was much snarkier and less diplomatic, but a friend (hi Jess) convinced me that leading with a carrot (reminding my friends that I love them and enlisting their help) would be better than a stick (letting my friends know I’d be angry with them if they ignored this request).

This email also glosses over the more ideological issue that they don’t have the right to out me; it focuses entirely on the safety and comfort of not outing me. That was a conscious choice, even if it’s one that was difficult for me to make. Ultimately, I thought this version of the email had more of a chance of working with less of a chance of annoying any of my friends. That doesn’t sit well with me – I always prefer diving into the nitty-gritty of a discussion or argument, particularly when it’s about something so close to me – but I sort of decided to take one for the team.

If any of my friends bring this topic up with me, I’ll definitely explain my more nuanced position, but I don’t think I needed to get into it for the purposes of this email, even if I did really want to.

But I have to admit, I was (and am) a little confused by the question Morgan is asking. It seems self evident – even in the links within her post, not to mention those in the comments – that there is trans literature being generated. (Morgan seems to define ‘trans lit’ as ‘fiction,’ a definition I don’t have any problems with.) More broadly, she seems to be creating divisions where none need be:

Yet what would “trans literature” be like? When we talk about the literature of an identity group we mean that members of the group want to read about people like themselves. African-Americans want books with African-American protagonists; lesbians want books with lesbian protagonists; and so on. But the trans community is very diverse, and different parts of it have very different needs. Cross-dressers, for example, often read, and write, erotic fantasies about cross-dressing. Pre-transition transsexuals reportedly read memoirs and theory voraciously in order to find out if transition is right for them, and how to survive it. Post transition, however, they often settle happily into their preferred gender and have no further need for trans books. They are often content identifying with characters of their preferred gender and don’t want to be reminded of what they see as a painful past life.

Those who regard themselves as in a third gender, as gender-free or gender-fluid, and those who are intersex, will probably want books about people like themselves. Obviously there is a real need for a literature for them. However, they are only a part of the trans community (and apologies to any of them who do not want to be regarded as part of it), so the market is even smaller.

It’s true: “trans” is very broad term, which catches potentially disparate groups under its net. But so does “people of color” or “lesbian” or “young adult.” A protagonist who is in the midst of transitioning with full familial support may have a different audience than a protagonist who identifies as genderqueer and has been kicked out of hir home. But I can imagine books being listed under ‘African American fiction’ that nevertheless share little in common beyond the protagonist’s skin color. (I was hoping to use the the books listed in African American fiction at Amazon for examples, but it looks like most/all of those are specifically romance novels aimed at women. Odd.)

And I think the thing that does bind different trans* identities together – somehow feeling outside one’s assigned gender roles – could allow those interested in trans fiction to enjoy a wide variety of trans protagonists, even if not every protagonist matches every reader’s lived experience.

I’m also concerned by how Morgan divides the trans community:

• Cross-dressers: “often read, and write, erotic fantasies about cross-dressing”
• Pre-transition transsexuals: “reportedly read memoirs and theory voraciously in order to find out if transition is right for them, and how to survive it.”
• Post-transition transsexuals: “often content identifying with characters of their preferred gender and don’t want to be reminded of what they see as a painful past life”
• Genderqueer: “probably want books about people like themselves”

First, as I said, I think someone who identifies as genderqueer might still be able to identify with a cross-dressing protagonist in a way that someone who is cis might not. But I also feel like Morgan is reinforcing really stereotypical ideas about what those identities mean.

I attempted to bring this up in the comments section of the post, saying

I think [the way you present post-transition life in your post is] an overly simplistic view of transitioning, or of post-transition life. Without getting into the ‘are you still trans after transitioning’ debate, I think there’s even more value in depicting successful, empowered post-transition characters to remind both trans and cis individuals that it is possible to transition and be a whole and complete person.

I’m not sure Morgan understood where I was coming from, though. Her reply:

I used the word “often” in that section you quote very deliberately. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that such attitudes were true of everyone who transitions. What I have tried to do here is give readers an overview of the great diversity of the trans community, and that means trying to give space to as many different viewpoints as possible.

But I don’t think Morgan got in multiple viewpoints, I think she got in multiple stereotypes.

I’m curious how self-identified cross-dessers, drag queens/kings, pre- mid- and post-transition transsexuals, and genderqueer individuals would react to Morgan’s assessment of what they are looking for. To be clear, I think members of all those groups share a desire for protagonists in which they can find themselves. I think all humans, period, share a desire for art which reflects their own experiences.

I just don’t think anyone should decide for another group what their reflection looks like.

Most of the chat was pretty expected, with me going over my (abridged) life story and transition, talking about how hormones have changed my experience of emotions and sex, and so on. I did have one student ask, “So, if you did get…the surgery, and you like women…how would you have sex after?”

One of the other students waved her fingers in front of his face, which made me laugh. I also directed them to Early to Bed, which is actually only a few blocks away from their school. I hope, for the sake of his current and future partner(s), that he learns about the options available beyond penis/vagina.

It did make me think a lot about how topics of sex and gender are handled in school, if they’re handled at all. For example, none of them had the guts to directly ask me about sex, even though it was in the list of questions they emailed me. I brought it up anyway, since it’s pretty much guaranteed to be a question people have, and I’m willing to discuss it. I spoke very frankly about my differing sexual experiences pre- and post-hormones, and the students were a bit awkward. But then I said “…but I know none of you care about this, because none of you have ever had sex, or masturbated, or had an orgasm.” They all laughed, and it felt like the rest of the hour or so I was there went a lot more smoothly; I had established the classroom we were in as a space where I was going to be open with them, and they were allowed to be open with me.

And they took me up on it! I was asked I still get boners, whether I want surgery, and what it was like to grow breasts.  (In order: I do, although not as frequently as I used to; maybe? I want to have had successful, sensation-retaining surgery, but getting surgery is a different matter; awesome.)

That’s part of the reason I volunteered to go to this class, and why I went to a class at Loyola the day before: someone needs to tell these kids (well, not really ‘kids’ at Loyola) things they probably won’t hear elsewhere. Oh, I won’t lie: I also do it because I really enjoy it, and find my own catharsis in sharing my story. Cedar wasn’t totally off the mark in calling out my confessional style of performance. But I also think there’s an aspect of trying to share the information I wish someone had told me at 15. Or my therapist when I was 15. Someone to say, “It is 100% OK to be straight, to be cis. But it’s also 100% OK to not be those things. Or to not know. Or to experiment and postpone a firm identity.” And to offer some sort of possibility for what that future might look like, if you do take the road less traveled.

There’s an essay in Yes Means Yes about sex education, Real Sex Education. It talks about the importance of including a discussion of pleasure in sex ed:

Sex education that does not involve discussions of pleasure is innately sexist. Why? Because one can discuss pregnancy, STDs, and prevention in relation to heterosexual sex without a single mention of the clitoris. Educators definitely should not do this, but the fact is that it’s entirely possible to give a scientifically accurate and even practical description of birth control, condom use, vaginal intercourse, and other sex education staples without ever acknowledging the clitoris’s existence. And the same holds true for the female orgasm.

The importance of including trans(whatever) education in health/sex ed may be slightly more obvious than the importance of including pleasure in health/sex ed, but I think they’re on similar grounds. If we want to move away from a model of sex education that’s about as informative (and exciting) as an instruction manual for changing your car’s oil, we need to do a better job of including everyone in the discussion. I was really glad to have two opportunities this week to try and help at least a few dozen students – many of whom were future therapists and social workers – push their own education in that direction.

Of course, I’m not the first or only one to comment on Avatar’s racial dynamic. Sci-fi site io9 says it best:

[Movies like Avatar and District 9] are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Meanwhile, Avatar is yet another story of a male knight in shining armor running to the rescue of oppressed “savages.” Sure, they do much of the work themselves, and there are strong female supporting characters, but the movie is very clear that without Jack, the Na’vi would have been screwed. Likewise, from GlobalShift:

As preferred as the Na’vi culture obviously is, they still need the help of Jake to decide on allowing their women to have any say in marital arrangements. And, given that Neytiri is precise in addressing the final step of a warrior is to choose “his woman,” it becomes abundantly clear the film is likewise heterosexist. Cameron bragging about slapping prosthetic breasts on non-mammal females doesn’t help, either.

To be clear, I’m not trying to pretend I didn’t enjoy the movie. I liked watching it a lot, and would recommend it to anyone looking for an escapist fantasy. (And seeing it in 3D, for which we had to wait another hour past the non-3D showtime we intended to see, was worth it. This is a very pretty movie.) But I do think it’s unfortunate that a movie with such revolutionary technological storytelling power was a rehash of the same white-man-saves-noble-savage trope.

Finally, for some delightful fridge logic, isn’t the ‘victory’ at the end of the movie incredibly hollow? Sure, they kick the humans – “except for a special few” off-planet. But there must be another mining ship on its way, and sooner or later (within about 10 years, if the ~5 year transit time indicated in the movie is accurate) the humans will be back with much heavier firepower.

What, you didn’t think conquering the colonialists actually works, did you?

(Bonus links: Avatar at TVTropes and Cameron saying (paraphrased) “Yeah, it’s Dances with Wolves in space.”)

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”?

My default is to use “transgender” as an adjective: “Transgender individuals polled at the Health Center…” My retroactive justification for this is because I think of being trans as huge part of my identity, but using “transgender” as an adjective conveys that it is only one part of a larger individual. At the same time, that concept could be expanded to any identity that can function as a noun and an adjective, but I don’t have the same emotional reaction to hearing some identities as nouns (Jews, gays and lesbians, etc) as I do to others (transgenders, blacks).

Making things more complicated, I’m realizing that I’m more OK with “transsexual” as a noun than “transgender.” I’m not thrilled with either, but saying , “Transsexuals polled (etc)” doesn’t bother me as much as using “transgenders.”

I’m just not sure why, or what (if anything) to do about it. Is it the type of issue that’s worth bringing up? I feel hesitant correcting people when there is no reason I can identify beyond my own linguistic discomfort, and I’m not even sure if anyone else feels the same way.