Alejandra Caraballo posted a video of a powerful testimony by Lola Smith, a 12-year-old nonbinary person forced to beg for their rights in front of the Florida Medical Board. This video is both terrifying and empowering. Indeed, everyone should see it.
But transphobes transphobing and trans people being forced to defend their dignity is just a part of the struggle. Another one is how our “allies” are pretending to ally…
You'd think that if a nonbinary person says they're nonbinary within the first few seconds of a video, if they literally introduce themselves with name, age and gender, then people watching the video and commenting on it would get the message that the person is nonbinary. And yet, there's comments underneath the tweet calling Lola a “brave young lady”, “inspiring young woman”, she/her-ing them1…
Just because transphobic politicians are setting the bar for treating trans people with dignity as terrifyingly low as letting them exist in public spaces, it doesn't mean that's where your allyship should stop.
Real allyship starts with actually respecting a person's identity. If you look at a person who says they're nonbinary and you see a girl2, you're missing the entire point. Lola is very likely to see this tweet and see the comments where “allies” purposefully misgender them. How will they feel, after having to defend themselves in front of a panel full of transphobes, seeing that even self-proclaimed allies don't really respect them?
Yes, purposefully misgender. If you make a mistake, if something slips your mind – it's perfectly fine, we all do that; but you need to take effort to correct that mistake! As an analogy, say you reposted an information about a celebrity dying, but it turns out it was all a hoax, they're very much alive, and you were made aware of that. You would edit or remove your post, so that the fake news doesn't circulate anymore, right?
Yet here the “allies” in question, after getting politely corrected (and interacting with the replies), still as of time of writing this post (13h after) have neither apologised nor removed their tweets. So how on Earth is it not a purposeful misgendering of a child?
And apparently, according to some other user in the replies, politely correcting a factual error that actively harms a trans kid is what makes us “insufferable”, “small-minded”, “pedantic”, “counter-productive”, and a self-designated “pronoun police” 🤦🤦🤦
Holy fuck, that's absurd… The video we’re commenting under is about Lola demanding respect for their identity, and the “ally” in question not only didn’t do that but keeps refusing to do that by not removing the tweet (well, it got 38 likes, you could see how big of a sacrifice it would be to lose those imaginary internet points!). How is it “counter-productive” to correct someone’s mistake, especially in this context?
But most importantly… “Pronoun police”? Seriously?! Police are a tool of power, authority, and often oppression. Calling a minoritised group’s effort to protect each other from mistreatment by simply pointing out that someone is hurting us a “pronoun police” is misguided at best, malicious at worst…
You're trying to flip the reality. You're literally calling the oppresed oppressors, you're comparing care for a kid's identity to state-sanctioned violence.
How insufferable of you.
1 Lola doesn't mention their pronouns in this short video, it could also be some neopronouns or even indeed “she/her” – but outright assuming it's “she/her” just because of their AGAB is a bad assumption to make; English has a normative pronoun used to describe people whose gender and/or pronouns we don't know (eg. “someone left their umbrella in the hallway”), so that's what I'll be using here.
2 Calling them a “woman”, even if preceded with “young”, is also kinda cringe… They're a kid. A 12-year-old who should be enjoying their childhood and not be put in the situation where they have to advocate for their rights in front of adults filled with hatered…
]]>DWH Delft organised a letter writing campaign to advocate for the passage of the trans ID bill in the Netherlands.
As much as I'd personally prefer to remove gender markers from official documents entirely, I believe that if it has to be there, it should at least be reasonably easy for trans people to make it reflect their real gender. So here's my letter:
Dear representative,
When most people think about trans folks, they focus only on the gender incongruence of our bodies – the aspect in which we do indeed require and appreciate the expertise of medical professionals. There are, however, so many other aspects of life where all that’s needed for our happiness and wellbeing is just understanding and acceptance. Human gender is not defined by our bodies – we all express it through things like clothes, makeup, language, name, etc.; we all care how other people see us; we care if our official documents properly describe facts about us.
Being trans is not just a medical issue. For many of us the social and legal aspects of transition might actually be more important than the medical side. What we need first and foremost is respect for our identity. That’s why I’m voicing my support for the proposed self-ID bill (wijziging vermelding geslacht in geborteakte).
Each person knows best what gender they are, it’s as simple as that. The very same way that you know which gender you are, trans people do too. It might take a while to figure out, gender is a complex concept after all, but eventually we arrive at a conclusion that’s as obvious to us as the air we breathe.
But there’s an important difference between the transgender and cisgender experience: nobody requires a doctor’s opinion to confirm that a cis person is really the gender they say they are. Our society and our government just take it for granted that if someone’s declared gender matches the genitals they were observed to have at birth, then they must be telling the truth. All the trans community is asking for is for the same respect and trust to be extended to us. We know who we are – and we need the government to acknowledge that.
It's been confirmed by multiple studies that gender affirmation improves mental health and saves lives. The government has the moral responsibility to listen to the voice of science. Requiring expert assessments not only is an unnecessary hurdle for trans people, but also isn’t supported by the experts themselves. Simplifying the procedure of changing the gender marker on the birth certificate is going to make it easier for trans people to participate in public life and government services. It costs nothing to respect someone’s identity, and it costs next to nothing to make one’s official documents reflect that reality.
Allowing an “X” marker would be an amazing step towards affirming people like myself, whose gender doesn’t fit neatly in the categories of “man” and “woman”. Making the public life inclusive for intersex and nonbinary people is an important part of the Netherlands staying a progressive and diverse country – which are some of the most important qualities that made me fall in love with this place and call it my new home.
Opponents of this bill make a lot of arguments that aren’t reflected in the reality of what the actual effects of such self-ID legislation would be. They claim that fairness in sports would be negatively affected, even though most associations already have their own rules and don’t rely on a gender marker in documents. They claim that bathrooms would become less safe, even though there’s no evidence that being trans inclusive had increased sexual violence in bathrooms anywhere in the world, and even though this legislation doesn’t even affect the rules regarding access to gendered bathrooms – it’s still just as legal to enter a bathroom regardless of one’s gender, and it’s still just as illegal to harass and rape people. Painting the entire community of trans people as potential rapists is just despicable, and arguing that the only thing stopping actual rapists from harassing people in bathrooms is somehow the gender marker in their documents, that’s simply ridiculous.
There’s no evidence of potential systemic abuse of a self-ID system, and the bill has safeguards in place to ensure that people don’t change their marker on a whim. It also addresses the rare situations of detransition. Essentially – there’s no reason to believe that simplifying the way that trans people can adjust their gender marker to better reflect reality would in any way be a systemic issue or otherwise harmful to the society. What is harmful, though, is all the disinformation and unethical attacks targeting minoritised groups, such as trans people.
We just want to live our lives in peace, being true to ourselves. We just want our identity respected and the reality reflected in our documents. We just want the government to simply believe us that we know who we are. Because no one knows our identity better than we do ourselves.
— Andrea Vos
]]>But arriving at that name was quite a journey, so I figured I might write the story down.
Trans people use the word “deadname” for what they used to be called before they transitioned socially. It's a basic sign of respect not to call them that anymore and not to mention it to anyone. Using someone's deadname might cause gender dysphoria, and in some cases it might even lead to dangerous situations when a trans person is outed.
But personally I'm not bothered much with someone knowing my deadname or by having to use it in official situations. So I usually refer to it as my “legal name”, at least until I'll legally change it. But that's just me.
So my parents named me “Andrzej”. It comes from Ancient Greek ἀνδρός, which ironically means “a man”, “manly”. That I am not.
It's pronounced /ˈãnḍʒɛj/ – which is obvious for people who speak Polish, but turned out to be quite problematic as soon as I moved to Berlin. Foreigners have no idea how to write /ʒ/ in Polish or how to pronounce the “rz”.
So I decided to simplify it into “Andre”. It's nice, short and unambiguous. Cool!
But when I discovered that I'm nonbinary, it started bothering me, how gendered it is. Even ethymology aside, it's a very masculine name.
I speak some Italian and I've always really liked how my name sounds in this language: Andrea. It has an added enby bonus as well: in Italy it's considered masculine, but basically everywhere else it's a feminine name. Just check out this Wikipedia list full of people of all genders with that name or my analysis of most “unisex” names in Poland's database. That's the level of genderfuck I really enjoy.
Andrea it is.
I had one, but literally never really used it. I don't see a point in me having a middle name anymore.
This one I really, really hated. First of all, it's a family name and I'm… well, not on the best terms with other people who use it. There's tons of childhood trauma coming up whenever I need to use that name.
And second of all, it's terribly gendered. It's one of those that are technically adjectives in Polish grammar and they need to end with -ski for men, -ska for women, -scy for plural…
I want to have the same surname as my husband. He's my family so having a common family name would be… appropriate.
When we got married in Germany either one of us could take another's name or we could use both names with a hyphen. The problem is, though, that Poland does not recognise that marriage. Poland claims we're both still bachelors and it wouldn't just officially change our names because of some foreign marriage. We're not German citizens, so Germany wouldn't issue us new documents either. A friend of ours was in a similar situation and decided to take his husband's name – and now he needs to carry around both his Polish ID and his German marriage certificate just to prove his surname.
So we kept our names and started thinking of a brand new one we could use.
We made a list of hundreds of last names we liked, turned it into a shortlist of a few dozen. Discussed them all, disagreed and vetoed a lot of the proposals, voted on them in a few different ways – not because we had such vastly different tastes, but cause so many names were too cool to just dismiss.
Eventually we landed on one: Vos.
It's a common Dutch name, so we can honour the country we've decided to build our live in, but it's not too in–your–face Dutch (no „van der” or „Gogh” etc.). It means “fox”, which has some nice connotations in culture (cleverness, good luck, charm, curiosity, mischief). It's short, simple, has a very obvious pronunciation. I'm so glad with that choice.
I'd very much love to have all my documents reflect my chosen name. But it's a bureaucratic hassle. We could do it after we get a Dutch citizenship, but it's quite a costly and long procedure, and our justification for a change might not be enough. We could do it before, using the Polish system which actually allows changing one's name to “the acutally used name” – and I have more than enough evidence of having used it for a while. But it would still depend on a good will of a random official – and we'd have to get new IDs, passports and driver's licences just to exchange them for Dutch ones next year (if all goes well with the naturalisation).
A bit anxious about this step and unsure which way to go. But I'll figure it out 😉
]]>Slurs are verbal violence against people's identity and immutable characteristics. They're not just “mean words”. Not every word you don't like is automatically a slur.
Slurs attack a person. That mean word you're crying about on twitter merely (and rightly so) attacked your views.
A minoritised community calling you racist, homophobic, terf or whatever isn't “oppressing you”. They're calling you out. They aren't “hating you”, they're shaming you.
Shaming you into changing your hateful views. Cause you can do that. You can simply stop being an asshole towards trans people, queer people, people of colour, or whichever other minoritised group you've decided to bash today. Nothing bad is gonna happen to you if you just start being a decent human being.
So no, TERF is not a slur. It's an accurate description of your disgusting, hurtful, hateful views.
Stop playing a victim, you bigoted asshole.
]]>Here's why:
(Note: If you're trans and not yet ready to come out, don't feel pressured! This post is for the cis allies 😉)
You wouldn't call Ashley “Samantha” just because you like that name more or because “she looks like a Samantha to you”. And even if it does say “Samantha” on her birth certificate, but she absolutely hates that name and prefers “Ashley”, you'd respect that, right?
And it's the exact same story with pronouns – if you don't want to be rude towards someone, please address them properly. The only difference is that we usually know each other's names – but not pronouns. We introduce ourselves with a name, but not with pronouns. Let's change that 😉
There are people who look manly while being women (either cis on trans), there are he/him lesbians, there are nonbinary people using binary pronouns for different reasons, etc. etc. Seing a picture of someone's face doesn't automatically mean you'll be right when you assume their pronouns.
In English, “Carol” is a feminine name, while Polish the name “Karol” is given to boys. In many languages “Alex” can be short for both “Alexandra” and “Alexander”. A person who doesn't speak Arabic probably won't know what gender “Farrah” is associated with. If you introduce yourself with just a name (eg. in an email), for many people it might still not be clear how to address you, because they have no cultural knowledge about what pronouns usually go with that name. It's easier to just be explicit and not expect them to guess.
Sharing their pronouns is very important for trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people. Alas, it also exposes us and singles us out. But if cis people do the same, it means the world for us. It makes us feel more confortable, safe and welcome.
Even if your friends or fans know very well that you're a cis man, adding that “he/him” to your profile still gives them a very important information – that you support the trans community.
Your support is important. Especially if you're well known and influential.
Are you talking to someone who looks androgynous and you don't know how to address them without offending them? Normalisation of giving pronouns and asking about pronous comes to rescue!
Seriously, there are only upsides 😉
]]>Oto dlaczego:
(Uwaga: Jeśli jesteś osobą trans i nie jesteś jeszcze gotowx na coming out, nie czuj presji. Ten artykuł jest skierowany do cis sojuszników 😉)
Nie nazywałxbyś Moniki “Martą” tylko dlatego, że bardziej ci się podoba to imię, albo dlatego, że “dla ciebie ona wygląda jak Marta”. Nawet jeśli miałaby “Marta” w papierach, ale szczerze nienawidziła tego imienia i zamiast niego wybrała sobie “Monika”.
Z zaimkami jest podobnie – jeśli nie chcesz być wobec kogoś niegrzecznx, zwracaj się do ludzi tak, jak sobie tego życzą. Jedyną różnicą jest to, że przeważnie znamy imię, lecz nie zaimki. Przestawiamy się iminiem, ale nie zaimkami. Czas to zmienić 😉
Isnieją ludzie wyglądający męsko mimo bycia kobietami (czy to cis czy trans), istnieją he lesbians, istnieją osoby niebinarne używające binarnych zaimków ( zwłaszcza w językach jak polski), itp. itd. To, że widzisz zdjęcie czyjejś twarzy, nie znaczy że będzie w stanie poprawnie zgadnąć ich zaimki.
„Karol” jest imieniem męskim, ale osoba anglojęzyczna nosząca imię „Carol” najprawdopodobniej będzie kobietą. W wielu językach imię „Alex” może być skróconą formą zarówno imienia “Alexandra”, jak i “Alexander”. Osoba nieznająca arabskiej zapewne nie będzie wiedziała, z którą płcią jest kojarzone imię „Farrah”. Jeśli przedstawiasz się wyłącznie imieniem (np. w emailu), wiele osób nie będzie w stanie zgadnąć, jakie zaimki przeważnie idą z tym imieniem w parze w Twoim języku i Twojej kulturze. Prościej jest po prostu przekazać tę informację wprost, zamiast zmuszać rozmówców do zgadywania.
Dzielenie się swoimi zaimkami jest niezmiernie istotne dla osób transpłciowych, niebinarnych i gender nonconforming. Niestety, to również nas eksponuje i wystawia na widok. Lecz jeśli ludzie cis robią to samo, jest to dla nas niezmiernie ważne. Sprawia, że czujemy się bardziej komfortowo i bezpiecznie.
Nawet jeśli twoi znajomi i fani świetnie wiedzą, że jesteś cis facetem, to dodanie “on/jego” w profilu i tak daje im bardzo ważną informację – że wspierasz osoby trans oraz tych, którzy nie są pewni swojej płci.
Twoje wsparcie jest ważne. Zwłaszcza, jeśli jesteś sławnx i wpływowx.
Rozmawiasz z kimś wyglądającym androgynicznie i nie wiesz, jak się do nix zwrócić, by jex nie obrazić? Normalizacja podawania zaimków i pytania o zaimki na pewno w takich sytuacjach pomoże!
Serio, same zalety bez wad. 😉
]]>LGBTQ+ does work. We go together, hand in hand. We fight for each other's rights. It's the “T” who threw the first bricks in Stonewall.
Blabbing about “separate issues” is just you trying to mask that you're EMBARRASSED to be associated with trans people.
It's transphobia 🙄
All letters in LGBTQ+ are about gender. About who society thinks you're allowed to be, to do, to wear, whom to love – all depending on the gender of people involved.
Some people get discriminated against because of the gender of their partners, but some – because of their own.
It's all about human rights. It's all about the same principles and values. It's all about letting people live the life they want, need and deserve. It's all about being a decent human being to each other.
]]>