lizardtitties:

pervocracy:

lb-lee:

pervocracy:

(re: “transgendered”)

I don’t know.  The events of the last few weeks are starting to make me really feel like I’d much rather have “I support the transgenders!  Transgendereds are just people trying to live their lives!” over the sort of people who use absolutely perfect up-to-the-minute gender studies terminology but don’t actually like anyone.

(I mean, not that those are the only two groups, obviously someone can use correct terminology and be supportive and that’s great, but if they’re not willfully misgendering an individual, terminology is like 0.5% of someone’s Trans-Friendliness Score in my book.)

Maybe the difference is whether someone’s just unfamiliar, or whether they’ve been told “transgender is an adjective” and doubled down on “I’ll call you what I want to call you!”  But I see the mere-unfamiliarity more often, and I don’t have a problem with that–it means they’re a new supporter, and new supporters are good and valuable to have.

“During their youth”?  You mean… within the past ten years?

Look, I after hearing this shit, I smelled bullshit, so I checked the dates and terminology of some of my trans books (as in, by trans creators).  And it’s a pretty mixed bag; I see no consensus at all.

Charlie Jane Anders, in The Lazy Crossdresser (from 2002) uses the word ‘transgender’, as does Tristan Crane for self-bio in How Loathsome (2004).  But Alicia Goranson’s Supervillainz, from 2006, uses “transman” and “transchick” in the book itself, and both ‘transgender’ and ‘transgendered’ are on the back cover. (If you want to split hairs, Patrick Califia, uses the term “transgendered” in his back cover review, while “transgender” is used on the blurb itself.)

Kate Bornstein in Hello Cruel World uses “transgressively gendered” and “transgender” and that’s also from 2006. But in her earlier book, My Gender Workbook, from 1998, she uses “transgendered.” (Pg. 74, my edition.)

Joey Alison Sayers uses the word ‘transgendered’ for herself in August 2007, in her comic strip Freaking Out the Parents.  The Princess comic used the word ‘transgender’ but it seems to have come from later down the line, in 2011.  Ditto Take Me There, from the same year, but it mostly “trans.”

As personal experience, when I first started exploring the trans circles online around 2008,
“transgendered” was the polite term, and “transgender” was the one
clueless cis people used. (Because transgender was perceived as a noun or something, while transgendered was perceived as an adjective.  I’m not saying this makes sense, but let’s be real, all of this is horseshit anyway.)

If you don’t like the word, fine, but let’s not pretend that this was something everyone agreed was offensive long ago, and that this was a term only used by jerks.  Ten years ago is not long, and it was being used by the activists on the front lines.

This is some really good context for the whole discussion.

I don’t know how many people remember the whole “trans” vs “trans*” arguments on this hellsite but back in the day, I had a callout post about me because I didn’t use the star on a post and a callout post because I did use the star on a different post circulating at the same time. As in two different callout posts by two different people, created within days of each other, about how transphobic I was, for opposite reasons.