“She always knew who she was.”

77 thoughts on “She always knew who she was.”

1. Ack. There’s a lot of framing here that I, as a cis person who cares about trans rights, am really uncomfortable with. She was not “born male,” she was assigned male at birth, wrongly, as it turns out. I don’t know how she describes her own body, but lots of trans folks reject the “one sex on the outside, other sex on the inside” thing. She doesn’t need to develop a woman’s body, she has one of those whether she chooses to use hormones or not (either of which would be a valid choice for her to make).

   But most troubling to me is that there is NO REASON to use Nicole’s coerced male name! That is not her name. It has no place here and most certainly neither do male pronouns. Has she specifically requested that people use male pronouns to refer to her in the past tense? If not, she is ALWAYS she.

2. “she was assigned male at birth, wrongly”

   if you mean this literally I’m having a hard time finding any reference to it in the article. Maybe you read something I didn’t?

   1. Martine Votvik, I don’t know if you’re being a transphobic troll or you genuinely don’t understand.

      Nicole is a girl, not a boy. That’s what the whole article is about. Clearly some people think that she is/was a boy because she was born with a penis. That’s the shitty system we have in place now. Babies with penises are called “boys” whether they are or not. Not all people born with penises are boys. Some are girls. (Some are neither boys or girls.) Trans girls are just as much girls as cis girls. She was given a boy name, she was given male pronouns, but she’s a girl. So clearly she was assigned her sex wrongly. Because she’s a girl who was wrongly labeled a boy.

      If you’d like to learn more about trans issues, there’s all kinds of resources all over the internet.

3. I also found the use of “he” when referring to her in the past tense kind of troubling…

   Cara:
   Ack.There’salotofframingherethatI,asacispersonwhocaresabouttransrights,amreallyuncomfortablewith.Shewasnot“bornmale,”shewasassignedmaleatbirth,wrongly,asitturnsout.Idon’tknowhowshedescribesherownbody,butlotsoftransfolksrejectthe“onesexontheoutside,othersexontheinside”thing.Shedoesn’tneedtodevelopawoman’sbody,shehasoneofthosewhethershechoosestousehormonesornot(eitherofwhichwouldbeavalidchoiceforhertomake).

   ButmosttroublingtomeisthatthereisNOREASONtouseNicole’scoercedmalename!Thatisnothername.Ithasnoplacehereandmostcertainlyneitherdomalepronouns.Hasshespecificallyrequestedthatpeopleusemalepronounstorefertoherinthepasttense?Ifnot,sheisALWAYSshe.

4. Cara, I found some aspects of how the original article was written really discomforting as well. I’d note that Nicole’s parents universally use feminine pronouns for her.

5. Cara, I’ll certainly look into the pronoun/name situation and see if Nicole has expressed any preference there. Her mother refers to her using female pronouns in the past tense, her father refers to her using male pronouns in the past tense, and she herself referred to herself as a “girl-boy” and as “Wyatt” as a child. I was trying to be conscious of pronouns there, but I understand if I was wrong, and I’m sorry if I offended anyone. I’ll do more research there.

   As for the body, she says in the article:

   “I think what I’m aiming for is to undergo surgery to get a physical female body that matches up to my image of myself.’’

   And it can certainly be argued that a prepubescent body, male or female, isn’t a “woman’s body.”

   1. Caperton, it seems that you’re trying to split hairs here. Which is a common tactic by cis people to avoid giving respect to trans folks’ wishes — “but TECHNICALLY.” Would you argue with me if I said she had “a girl’s body”? The point is not how old she is. The point is that you implied that her body is not/will not be a woman’s body without the aid of hormones. But it is/will be a woman’s body, period, because she is/will be a woman and the body belongs to her.

      If you want to quote her, quote her. What she said is that she wants to get a body that matches up to her image of herself. That’s great! There’s no need to talk about her getting a “woman’s body” with hormones as though she would not get a woman’s body without hormones. I mean, her hormones are her own damn business anyway, and I don’t see why they have any place here to begin with.

      What her father calls her doens’t matter. What SHE CALLS HERSELF is what matters. She calls herself “she” right now. Unless she has EXPLICITLY EXPRESSED a different preference for referring to the past, that means you always use she. It’s a simple sign of basic respect. There’s nothing to look into. “He” never should have been used, including by her father. Trans’ folks parents fuck shit up all the time, too.

6. “From the beginning, Nicole Maines liked Barbies, mermaids, and princess dresses, wanted to know when she would “get to be a girl,” and cried hating her boy’s body.”

   There – fixed it for you. Seriously, how hard is it to get this shit straight these days?

7. Cara, I’m going through and changing the names and pronouns. As I said, I wanted to look into it further and see which pronouns she prefers in that context, and I have, and I’ve found no data there, so I’m going to make the changes. I certainly didn’t mean to offend anyone and apologize for my ignorance in this area. And I appreciate everyone who’s corrected that ignorance. I do hardly think it’s “splitting hairs” to respect her preference by describing her body using the terms she herself uses.

   1. What I’m saying is that there are lots of ways that you could have described her body using the terms she uses — though I’m not sure why describing her body is necessarily important at all. (Really, do we normally make a point of describing girls’ bodies around here? The idea that her body is “relevant’ specifically because she’s trans is cissexist.) You could have quoted her. You could have said that she wanted to use hormones to help her body match her image of herself — which is closer to the quote you just pulled than what you originally said. Instead you chose to talk about her as having a “boy’s body.” That’s telling.

8. I agree with some of the framing issues people have mentioned. That said, I want to comment on Nicole and how her life seems to be to me. I’m really inspired that stories like this are becoming more and more common. More and more young trans people are seeming to get outside support from parents, doctors, etc. from a early age. I’m a cisgendered man, but my best friend is a trans woman, and I know she didn’t get any of this sort of support growing up and it was very traumatic. Trans people have been so brutally repressed throughout most of modern history. So while Nicole’s life is not perfect, I think stories like hers are part of a very welcome trend. Even though I’m just 27 years old, it amazes me that just in my lifetime I’ve seen trans rights move from something very much on the fringe of mainstream consciousness to a pretty common concern among people with liberal-ish inclinations.

9. Cara – And I made those corrections. One of the reasons Nicole’s body comes into play is that a significant part of the story is her physician’s willingness to use a puberty-suppressing drug that is somewhat controversial because it’s traditionally only used in cissexual children with precocious puberty. The purpose is to keep her body from developing secondary sexual characteristics until she’s ready to proceed with puberty using the hormones that will make her body look the way she wants to look. Most other physicians would make her wait until adulthood, at which point her physical transition would be a lot more traumatic.

   Nicole is, at fourteen, being supported not just in having the name that fits her self-image and the clothes that fit her self-image but also the physical body that fits her self-image. It’s rare enough that a transgender teenager would get the first two, much less the third.

10. “From the beginning, Nicole liked Barbies, mermaids, and princess dresses…”

    Why is that relevant to her gender?

11. “Why is that relevant to her gender?”

    Dunno, probably has something to do with framing.

12. On the whole, I think it’s a truly lovely story, and I’m very happy that Nicole’s parents have been so supportive. If only all young trans people’s parents could be that way, the world would be an infinitely better place.

    Cara and dk, I have to say I disagree with one aspect of what you’ve been saying. I agree that it really all does depend on what language the trans person prefers in referring to their pre-transition self, physically and otherwise. But there are certainly a great many trans people who believe that the kind of rhetoric you’re insisting on with respect to physical references plays right into the hands of those who are anti-trans, constitutes a semantic argument that perhaps makes sense in theory but doesn’t reflect the reality of the lives and feelings of many trans people I know, and elevates the interests of those with primarily social dysphoria over those with intense body dysphoria (and of non-binary trans people over binary trans people). Particularly with respect to the necessity of medical intervention.

    In other words, the obvious anti-trans response to this kind of “always had a girl’s body” framework is to say, well, if you were always a girl (on the “outside” as well as the “inside”) and always had a girl’s body, and would have a woman’s body after growing up with or without medical intervention, then why the need to transition physically? Why not just be a “woman” in your original body, instead of having dangerous hormone treatments and surgeries, etc., etc.? Just learn to live with the body you were given, and so on. Arguably, by changing “she hated her boy’s body” to “she hated her body,” you take away what was, in all likelihood, the very reason she “hated” her body — the fact that it *was* (in her own eyes and those of the world) a male body, a boy’s body, and *would* become a “man’s” body someday if nothing were done.

    I know why I was unhappy with my body as a child from a very early age (my early memories include spending quite a lot of time by myself trying to conceal that part of my anatomy), and grew to hate it quite ferociously as I finally entered male puberty (albeit only at 14 after medical intervention with testosterone therapy, ironically enough). And I know how intensely worse it would have made me feel if someone had told me that I already had a girl’s body, or, later, a woman’s body. (Wholly apart from my own personal belief, applicable only to myself, that even with medical transition, which in my case largely preceded social transition, it didn’t seem right to call myself a woman until I actually started living as one and being treated as one in the world.)

    By the way, I do believe I was “wrongly” and/or coercively assigned male at birth, but only in theory; as a practical matter it isn’t as if I blame anyone for it. It’s not as if there was a magic test that would have told anyone how I would turn out. Although it does become harder and harder for me, as the years go by, to think of myself as *ever* having been a boy. And I never did really identify as a “man”; I used to turn my head if someone referred to me that way to see if they were talking about someone else. The “woman in male body” paradigm may be a very old-fashioned and simplistic way of trying to verbalize something that’s almost impossible to articulate to those who aren’t trans, but it can be as accurate as anything else in conveying the feelings so many trans women have prior to transition.

    In terms of use of male pronouns to refer to Nicole’s past — and, even more so, her former name, which really should be nobody’s business — I understand that it’s done so as not to confuse the reader as to what time period is being referred to, but I think a careful explanation should take care of that, because it doesn’t feel right to me. Especially for someone who doesn’t have years or decades of living in the world as a man and being perceived as one. Even I, who lived a guy for a long time, dislike the idea at this point of people using male pronouns for me even in referring to my pre-transition past, or finding out (let alone using) my former name. In the one rather lengthy newspaper feature that was written (partly) about me shortly after the time I transitioned, contrasting what my life had been like with the life of a young trans man attending the same college I’d gone to, I had a dispute with the journalist about both these issues. She ended up insisting on using “he” to refer to me prior to my transition, but at least I got her to agree to use a pseudonym for my prior name rather than the actual one. (She tried very hard to talk me into agreeing to use my actual former name, but I’m happy to say I didn’t give in.) At this point, I regret agreeing to do the article at all — especially the fact that I agreed to let the paper print the dreaded “before and after” photos; ugh! — but at least the newspaper that published it doesn’t have an online archive going back that far.

    I just hope that Nicole doesn’t regret someday her decision to go public. At least she was old enough (I think) to make that decision herself, rather than her parents doing so for her, which has happened with younger trans children and makes me very uncomfortable. I know of some who now wish their parents hadn’t made that decision for them; if their actual names were used it makes it difficult ever to avoid disclosing that aspect of their history if they decide to do so.

    PS to Martine: if you’re going to post on this thread, I do hope you do some basic research first. And by that, I most definitely do not mean that you should go read the collected works of Janice Raymond, Sheila Jeffreys, and Julie Bindel, whom you actually tried to defend on that other thread against accusations of transphobia, saying that they were merely “investigating” the subject. Given that it’s entirely impossible to be intellectually honest and at the same time truly believe something like that about three of the five most prominent exponents of truly vile anti-trans vilification in the last 35 years or so (along with Germaine Greer and Mary Daly), I prefer to believe that you were speaking from sheer ignorance. Which makes me quite nervous about anything else you might jump in to say on this subject.

13. Donna –

    Well I’ve been known to be snarky from time to time. I think I simply misunderstood what Cara meant in her first comment. I thought she was referencing an actual mention of wrongly assigned gender at birth, as happens sometimes. Then I went back to the article and confirmed what I remembered, that Nicole had a identical twin brother, and coupled with no further mention of any actual confusion about the sex at birth I concluded that there hadn’t even been a question about when the kid was born. This is what brought on my honest and puzzled question. And I like to think I was respectful when asking, so I was a bit taken aback with the hostility towards me.

    Just as I have a responsibility to educate myself, I think we all have a responsibility to be a bit generous towards each other in discussions, especially on the net, where we don’t have tone of voice and body language to help us interpret peoples actual attitudes.

14. Donna L: In terms of use of male pronouns to refer to Nicole’s past — and, even more so, her former name, which really should be nobody’s business — I understand that it’s done so as not to confuse the reader as to what time period is being referred to, but I think a careful explanation should take care of that, because it doesn’t feel right to me. Especially for someone who doesn’t have years or decades of living in the world as a man and being perceived as one. Even I, who lived a guy for a long time, dislike the idea at this point of people using male pronouns for me even in referring to my pre-transition past, or finding out (let alone using) my former name.

    Yes yes. This. Don’t refer to me, or other trans folks, by our former names and pronouns.

    I also share your concerns, Donna, about any child who goes public with a story about transition. I appreciate the courage it takes, and acknowledge the educational benefits for others, but also worry about the impact later, which a child may not be able to anticipate. Which is not to say I somehow disapprove of her choice, just that I very much hope it does not become something she later regrets.

15. Glove: “From the beginning, Nicole liked Barbies, mermaids, and princess dresses…”

    Why is that relevant to her gender?

    I see this type of criticism a lot (both with and without accompanying nastiness about trans girls and women reinforcing the gender binary, being a tool of the patriarchy, blah blah blah). In and of itself and without the hate speech that it often goes with, it’s a legitimate question that I do understand.

    And it’s hard to explain, but I’ll try to articulate how I feel about this.

    Of course liking Barbies and mermaids and princess dresses and pots and pans and vacuum cleaners doesn’t make someone a girl, any more than liking toy soldiers and trucks makes someone a boy. And of course gender expression and toy preferences and clothing preferences and liking blue or pink (which used to signify the opposite, after all) are, largely or entirely, cultural constructs.

    But, at least the way I see things, there is, for many people — although cis people are often unaware of it the same way they aren’t necessarily aware of the air they breathe, as long as they aren’t deprived of it — a fundamental gender identity that, whatever it’s cause, whether genetic, resulting from pre-natal hormones, or something else, is not a construct, any more than handedness. Being left-handed doesn’t mean your interests or talents or attributes or the things you do with your hands are necessarily any different from those of a right-handed person, but it’s still a reality. Especially if someone attempts to deprive you of that handedness! (I was born both trans and left-handed, and for whatever reason the percentage of left-handers among women assigned male at birth and raised as male appears to be about twice that of cis men.)

    So try to exercise your imagination and put yourself in the place of a small child, a trans child, beginning at a far younger age than Nicole is now. It’s often possible, now and even in the past, at least up to a certain age and depending on parental acceptance, for someone assigned female at birth who isn’t trans to be tomboy, to scoff at Barbies and princess dresses, without having your family not believe that you’re a girl nonetheless. But if someone is assigned male at birth, and their parents try to raise them as male, but they know with a certainty that it shouldn’t have been that way, and this isn’t really who they are, is it really so surprising that there should be this kind of external manifestation of their inner feelings? How else is a 2 or 3 or 4 your old supposed to express those feelings in a way that their parents can possibly understand? Are they supposed to just keep those feelings inside, because they’re sophisticated enough to know that gender expression is a cultural construct? (At least in the beginning, before their parents, if they’re unlucky to have that kind of parents, succeed through shaming, ridicule, and/or violence in teaching them to keep those feelings hidden, or to suppress them entirely.) And why shouldn’t they instinctively choose, as concrete symbols of their internal feelings, things and activities to desire that they see other children who *are* treated and perceived as girls having and doing? And express such desires? Do you think saying they want to be a tomboy, even if that’s what they would have been if they’d been assigned female, is something a small child is likely to come up with, and, if they did, to be heard?

    Despite what some alarmists among the religious right and so-called radical feminists (who aren’t really the least bit radical in this respect) would have one believe, no children — none — have their gender reassigned, socially or otherwise, whether by parents or doctors, merely because they express a preference, even a consistent preference, for a particular kind of toy or clothing. It doesn’t work that way, at all. There has to be a great deal more than that; there has to be a single-minded insistence on being or wanting to be a different gender than the one assigned at birth, persisting for a very, very long time, before anything like that happens. Given that, it’s rather obvious that only the “girliest” of trans girls, and the most boyish of trans boys, are ever given that option, at least the way things are now. I certainly wouldn’t have been; I far preferred stuffed animals to dolls, and even played with toy soldiers on occasion, both during my own childhood and my son’s! But that didn’t mean I didn’t have feelings very similar to Nicole’s, if not as consistently as intense. Besides, my mother knew I wanted to be a girl, and told me, yes, I should have been, that was clear, but it just wasn’t possible. And I believe her, and assumed it was something that could never come true. So that even at 5 or 6, when I read The Land of Oz and was overwhelmed emotionally by the Tip-Ozma transformation scene at the end, I understood all too well the difference between fairy tales and reality. At least, I thought I did. Who knew?

16. Martine Votvik: I like to think I was respectful when asking, so I was a bit taken aback with the hostility towards me.

    I made clear where the hostility — or, more accurately, apprehension — came from. Not really from anything you said here, but from your defense on the other thread of the persons I named. It’s quite unrealistic to think I wouldn’t have reacted negatively to that.

17. Pardon all the typos in the long comment before this last one. Unbelievable. I really wish there were an editing feature!

18. Donna L: Despite what some alarmists among the religious right and so-called radical feminists (who aren’t really the least bit radical in this respect) would have one believe, no children — none — have their gender reassigned, socially or otherwise, whether by parents or doctors, merely because they express a preference, even a consistent preference, for a particular kind of toy or clothing. It doesn’t work that way, at all. There has to be a great deal more than that; there has to be a single-minded insistence on being or wanting to be a different gender than the one assigned at birth, persisting for a very, very long time, before anything like that happens.

    It’s not just the religious right and Radical Feminists. Kenneth Zucker, who was quoted in the article for a couple of sentences in which he misgendered trans* girls, advocates reparative therapies that include forcing trans* kids to engage in supposedly appropriately gendered play, as if the play itself is causal. I mean, a lot of what’s positive about this story is trans kids getting access to what seems to be pretty good medical care even when so many medical institutions (including the American Psychological Association) hold deeply cissexist views of trans* people and their needs.

19. It’s also a matter of people often identifying with the cultures of groups they feel they belong to even when those cultures are obviously constructed. I mean, there’s nothing essential in my sexuality that says I should identify with aspects of queer culture, but I do, and I have for almost as long as my sexuality has coherently manifested, and pointing out that that’s a fairly common kind of mechanic in the lives of queer youth doesn’t mean that I think all queer men just essentially love glitter.

    A trans* girl identifying with parts of girl cultures, be they play or iconography or fashion, and doing so from a very young age isn’t really evidence that those things are innate to being a girl. But it might be evidence of that girl’s strong identification with girls in general, and her need for cultural expression or validation.

20. Li: Kenneth Zucker,

    What an awful person. Who’s done so much harm. And, unfortunately, is involved with the DSM-V revisions. Some of his former patients (victims?) have come forward as adults, and confirmed what many suspect — they learned to hide their feelings. Nothing really changed.

21. Hopefully 20 or 30 years from now people like Kenneth Zucker will be popularly regarded in the same way the mainstream currently regards people like Michelle Bachman’s husband and people practicing “ex-gay” therapy.

22. Between Kenneth Zucker and J Michael Bailey I’ve pretty much lost all hope that the DSM-V will be anything but wildly offensive on the gender identity front.

23. My brother’s best friend Stacy was assigned male at birth and is an engineer who built a Tesla cannon when she was a teenager. Now, she didn’t come out as trans (in fact I’m not sure she really knew she was trans) until she was almost 30, and maybe the fact that her interests and skills were so stereotypically masculine had something to do with how long it took her to accept herself as a woman (or be willing to come out about it, but my understanding from what she’s told my mom is that it really did take her that long to figure it out), but it’s certainly not the case that a trans girl *has* to be into girly pursuits any more than a cis girl does; I do, however, think that the social barriers to accepting yourself as trans and maybe even understanding that that’s what you are might be higher for trans women or girls with stereotypically masculine interests, simply because people do equate “stereotypically masculine interests” with “maleness”.

    I’m a geek who builds her own computers, does data analysis for a living, and has always been into SF TV shows and comic books. But since I was born with a vagina no one has actually ever questioned my femaleness. I’m guessing that the only trans girls who figure out that they *are* girls very young and successfully convince their parents that that is true are the ones who are all pretty pretty princess, and the ones who spend their childhoods building mad scientist devices wouldn’t have a chance to convince any adult that they are girls, and probably might have a hard time recognizing it for themselves.

24. Donna L: In the one rather lengthy newspaper feature that was written (partly) about me shortly after the time I transitioned, contrasting what my life had been like with the life of a young trans man attending the same college I’d gone to, I had a dispute with the journalist about both these issues. She ended up insisting on using “he” to refer to me prior to my transition, but at least I got her to agree to use a pseudonym for my prior name rather than the actual one. (She tried very hard to talk me into agreeing to use my actual former name, but I’m happy to say I didn’t give in.)

    Still sounds pretty terrible of the journalist…I wonder what was so important to her about using the pronoun and name so that even a pseudonym wouldn’t suffice at first.

    I don’t have much to add, just that I’m happy to read your comments Donna. I’ve known there were these arguments/discussions within the trans communities and among it’s allies about binaries and the like, but to be honest, you’re right…the difference between the theory I read and the reality always got me topsy turvy (I guess it doesn’t help that I don’t know any trans people in real life), so I never feel safe discussing it myself in these conversations because I just don’t feel like I grasp it that well.

    My second big interest in this article was just how hard the dad seemed to take it (compared to the mom), and I wonder if he had a FtM son…would it have been easier? Because a lot of his problems seemed to be about the idea of what a Father/Son relationship would be and how much more ideal that would be for him than a Father/Daughter relationship.

25. Donna L – Thank you so much for your comments and your perspectives. I really appreciate it.

    Li – Nicole’s parents did, at one point, try to push her toward stereotypical “boy” expectations by buying her action figures and making her play sports and wear pants and other stereotypically “boy” things. Her mom said Nicole would just “strap on some heels and join in.” One of the most poignant quotes in the article, I think, is from her mom: “I know she was totally confused and felt like she had done something wrong.”

    Alara Rogers – You make a good point. I wonder how the situation might have differed if Nicole hadn’t strapped on those heels or worn a princess dress.

    konkonsn – Nicole’s dad actually wrote a blog post about his experiences as the father of a transgender daughter.

26. Cara:
    WhatI’msayingisthattherearelotsofwaysthatyoucouldhavedescribedherbodyusingthetermssheuses—thoughI’mnotsurewhydescribingherbodyisnecessarilyimportantatall.(Really,dowenormallymakeapointofdescribinggirls’bodiesaroundhere?Theideathatherbodyis“relevant’specificallybecauseshe’stransiscissexist.)Youcouldhavequotedher.Youcouldhavesaidthatshewantedtousehormonestohelpherbodymatchherimageofherself—whichisclosertothequoteyoujustpulledthanwhatyouoriginallysaid.Insteadyouchosetotalkaboutherashavinga“boy’sbody.”That’stelling.

    Her choice to change her body makes it about sexed bodies and the hormones that sex them. Bodies are at issue when medicine is involved. Bodies are at issue when you alter them. The way we describe them might be (well, is) inadequate, but the author is not the one who brought Nichole’s body into the conversation. If no change was needed (by Nichole’s own terms a change to the body she “hated” was needed), we would not be talking about her body at all.

    And perhaps to Nichole she was a he until those changes. We *don’t know* as the author states.

27. “Nicole liked Barbies, mermaids, and princess dresses…

    What? That doesn’t make a little boy a girl. That makes them a boy who likes princesses and barbies. Which is perfectly fine. Maybe it’s a just a little early to decide something like this? I’m not saying he or she isn’t trans*, but I and a lot of folks I know were definitely not completely sure about our sexual or gender identities when we were 14 years old. At that age, you are still exploring yourself and looking for you.

    This seems… a little quick is all. Maybe I’m wrong.

28. I was all set to read a sweet article about a girl and her family, and then I saw this:
    “The twin boys were identical in every way but one. Wyatt was a girl to the core, and now lives as one, with the help of a brave, loving family and a path-breaking doctor’s care.”
    At the TOP. Really? And then crap like, “…especially for Wyatt, who now goes by the name Nicole.”
    Are you F*ing KIDDING me, Boston Globe??? Like if I were to put on a cape and insist everyone call me Superwoman, and then they write and article like, “Xenu01 now goes by Superwoman, and she is happy.”

    Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME. NO.

    Here, I helped:
    “Nicole and her family had some problems in their old town because she is trans but in their new town, everything is great.”

    The end!

29. bleh: And perhaps to Nichole she was a he until those changes. We *don’t know* as the author states.

    Of course we don’t know, but the fact that we so often err on the side of cissexism is telling. General rule of thumb would be to use a person’s currently identified name and pronoun, unless one is in a position to ask and confirm otherwise. There’s certainly some first-hand confirmation in this thread that this approach would be the preference of some trans* people.

30. Donna L: Even I, who lived a guy for a long time, dislike the idea at this point of people using male pronouns for me even in referring to my pre-transition past, or finding out (let alone using) my former name.

    In your experience, is this something that varies greatly among different transpeople, or is it something on which there is a feeling more typical than others? I ask because a friend of mine to whom I was quite close for a while (we live very far apart now, so…harder) and who really opened my eyes and moved me out of the simplistic anti-trans paradigm I was in, does refer to herself as having been “a little boy,” when she was a kid. I wasn’t sure if it was OK for me to do the same, so I asked, she said yes, that’s how I should do it. Of course, when interacting with any individual, I would just ask or take care to avoid the gendered language, but in speaking about trans experiences generally, do you think she’s an outlier, or is there a generational component (she is significantly older than I am), or is it just a personal preference that doesn’t have a larger pattern?

    Please forgive me if any element of this question has been phrased poorly or in such a way as to cause unhappiness or offense; it is unintentional, and I would be happy to be corrected.

    Martine Votvik: I think we all have a responsibility to be a bit generous towards each other in discussions, especially on the net, where we don’t have tone of voice and body language to help us interpret peoples actual attitudes.

    Just as a note, I have always found Donna to be one of the most generous of all commenters, particularly when it comes to giving people the benefit of the doubt on infelicitous errors or offensive words.

    Donna L: But that didn’t mean I didn’t have feelings very similar to Nicole’s, if not as consistently as intense.

    Yes. And to add to your trenchant analysis of how very young children will use the gender signifiers available to them to express their feelings, there is also the issue that talking about childhood toy preferences is an easy way for a reporter to shorthand “she has consistently and passionately asserted her girlhood” in a way that most of the readers/viewers will be able to comprehend. There is also the issue that, until quite recently, as I have been told by older trans people, psychiatrists who acted as gatekeepers to the drugs and surgery necessary for bodily transition required transpeople to express as stereotypically feminine or masculine personalities/preferences as possible, or risk being denied what they needed. For example, the woman who first opened my eyes to trans issues told me about a friend of hers who, in the weeks before her surgery back in the day, showed up to an appointment with her psychiatrist wearing jeans. The psychiatrist decreed that obviously, wearing jeans instead of a skirt or dress demonstrated that she wasn’t truly committed to living as a woman–even though this was taking place well after the time that women regularly wore jeans and pants. Thus for many transpeople, the narrative of socially-recognizable femininity/masculinity has been a necessity.

    Li: reparative therapies that include forcing trans* kids to engage in supposedly appropriately gendered play, as if the play itself is causal

    Can I just say how horrifying I find things like this? Even if we leave gender out of it, is there anybody out there who seriously believes that you should force children to play things they do not want to play, and that doing so will somehow create a love of playing that thing? Seriously, you could have tried to force me to play basketball all you wanted, and all you would have found on your hands was an extremely angry, depressed, cranky kid who hated you and wanted to go read a book. When gender identity is also at stake, it becomes even crueller and more foolish.

31. But there are certainly a great many trans people who believe that the kind of rhetoric you’re insisting on with respect to physical references plays right into the hands of those who are anti-trans, constitutes a semantic argument that perhaps makes sense in theory but doesn’t reflect the reality of the lives and feelings of many trans people I know,

    Or the reality of those of us who are neither cis nor trans. Just sayin’.

32. Cara:
    ButmosttroublingtomeisthatthereisNOREASONtouseNicole’scoercedmalename!Thatisnothername.

    That’s what I had the most problems with. I mean, the article troies to come out as swupportive and all, but they insist on referring to Nicole as a boy. so while they do get points for good intentions, they fail in execution.

33. Donna –

    Yeah, I can see that. Later in the thread I wrote this:
    “As a young radfem who’s trying to be open to how other people experience of the world I wont hesitate to admit that there are times when I feel bothered by the discourse surrounding especially anti-BDSM and trans criticism. Maybe my own insecurity about this is contributing to me feeling a bit defensive about it. ”

    It’s not always easy being part of a movement where I agree with so much, but then there is a few things that just stab me in the eye. I know people that are both trans and SM’rs and I identify as queer myself, mostly because I’ve never really felt like a girl, but then I never really felt like a boy either. So yeah, when it comes to these issues I tend to be critical towards my allies, but since I respect them greatly and agree with so much of their general analysis of society I also can’ really reject what they are saying without trying to understand it.

    But being in a position where I feel undecided about this, basically means that I get no friends anywhere because everybody demands that I should be able to make up my mind and get with the program. I once naively imagined that it would be possible to listen to both sides and find an answer myself that didn’t reject either, I still believe in that, but not as easily as before.

    Ha ha, a radfem who still believe we could all be friends some day, what a joke right.

34. Li: It’s not just the religious right and Radical Feminists. Kenneth Zucker, who was quoted in the article for a couple of sentences in which he misgendered trans* girls, advocates reparative therapies that include forcing trans* kids to engage in supposedly appropriately gendered play, as if the play itself is causal. I mean, a lot of what’s positive about this story is trans kids getting access to what seems to be pretty good medical care even when so many medical institutions (including the American Psychological Association) hold deeply cissexist views of trans* people and their needs.

    Ugh. Zucker is an awful human being. As a Torontonian and a supporter of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (most of the time), I am really horrified at the influence he has in my community. Trans people in Toronto and throughout Canada have suffered because of his awful, backwards, transphobic views, and it’s sad to see that his influence extends south of the border as well.

35. Having said that, I’m really happy to see this posted here. There were definitely flaws in the article (and apparently in Caperton’s original post? I can’t say for sure since I didn’t see it) re: pronoun use and such, but it’s such an inspiring story. Nicole and her family sound like awesome people.

36. Alara Rogers: My brother’s best friend Stacy was assigned male at birth and is an engineer who built a Tesla cannon when she was a teenager. Now, she didn’t come out as trans (in fact I’m not sure she really knew she was trans) until she was almost 30, and maybe the fact that her interests and skills were so stereotypically masculine had something to do with how long it took her to accept herself as a woman (or be willing to come out about it, but my understanding from what she’s told my mom is that it really did take her that long to figure it out), but it’s certainly not the case that a trans girl *has* to be into girly pursuits any more than a cis girl does; I do, however, think that the social barriers to accepting yourself as trans and maybe even understanding that that’s what you are might be higher for trans women or girls with stereotypically masculine interests, simply because people do equate “stereotypically masculine interests” with “maleness”.

    I’m a geek who builds her own computers, does data analysis for a living, and has always been into SF TV shows and comic books. But since I was born with a vagina no one has actually ever questioned my femaleness. I’m guessing that the only trans girls who figure out that they *are* girls very young and successfully convince their parents that that is true are the ones who are all pretty pretty princess, and the ones who spend their childhoods building mad scientist devices wouldn’t have a chance to convince any adult that they are girls, and probably might have a hard time recognizing it for themselves.

    I agree with your point (and with those of the others who have posted on this issue so far) but I have to wonder how many of Nicole’s stereotypically “feminine” interests were exaggerated by the reporter? I mean, it was mentioned later on in the article (and in one case I think in a quote from Nicole herself?) that she was into martial arts and violent video games – stereotypically “masculine” interests, basically. I wouldn’t be surprised if the article had deliberately left out those things because they didn’t fit with the narrative the writer was trying to construct – that Nicole was *obviously* trans because look, she liked pink and purple and mermaids! Never mind that gender identity is much more complex than the colours one likes, and that Nicole is a girl no matter how much she likes tae kwon do.

    The article is flawed, basically, but I’m still glad that it exists. (And I’m sorry for writing three comments instead of one.)

37. Has it occurred to anyone that the reason the shift in pronouns and names occurs is because *otherwise most people wouldn’t understand the narrative?*

    This is an article in the Boston Globe, not a journal of gender studies or something. How are they going to explain how Nicole transitioned in her life without ever mentioning that, when she was born, she was assigned a different name and a different sex than the one she?
    Most people barely know anything about the whole phenomenon of trans*…they sort of need to be walked in slowly.

    If they just said twins Nicole and Jonas, the average reader would never get their head around the shift that everyone in the family, including the twin brother, had to make in re-imagining Nicole.

    And it’s not like Nicole is being ‘outed’ or something as a transwoman….obviously she consented to do all this interview on the record.

    I thought it was a pretty good treatment, TBH>

    1. @DP

       I think you might be confused as to where the original complaints were directed. They weren’t at the Boston Globe article, but about the original post here at Feministe. I can see how the mistake might have happened, since the post has been changed now without any note stating that such changes have been made.

       That said, they can certainly state that she was assigned a different sex and name at birth without treating that name and sex at birth as equally valid as her true gender. There’d be no reason to use male pronouns to say that she was assigned a male sex at birth (see, I just did it), nor any reason to use her original name. How does using or knowing that name help anyone’s understanding of the story? It doesn’t.

38. DonnaL, this is an issue on which I need to shut up and listen. Thank you for giving me such good things to listen to.

39. @DP

    Redefining someone’s experience to make it more understandable or palatable to the mass of others is a classic oppressive action.

40. DP: Has it occurred to anyone that the reason the shift in pronouns and names occurs is because *otherwise most people wouldn’t understand the narrative?*

    That’s the mistake I made initially, but it’s disrespectful and wrong. Nicole has always been a girl, with or without the name change and medical treatments. She wasn’t a boy before just because she her name was different, so using male pronouns would be reinforcing the way she’d been told to be rather than the way she actually was.

41. Brett K @36:

    Yeah, even with the cringe-inducing pronoun and framing issues at the top of the article, it was a pretty positive piece. It’s far better than the moral panic inflamed by the Toronto Star earlier this year around the family trying to avoid enforcing the gender binary upon their kids. Apparently, keeping their youngest’s physical sex confidential equals “they’re forcing a child to be genderless! Freaks! FREAKS!” The Star has been dead to me since that disgusting incident; I don’t look at it, and I try to avoid even following links to Star articles if at all possible. If I wanted gender policing and moral panics, I’d read the Toronto Sun or the National Post.

42. Kristen J.:
    @DP

    Redefining someone’s experience to make it more understandable or palatable to the mass of others is a classic oppressive action.

    I get what you mean. But…it’s hard for me to explain clearly, but there’s a certain kind of attitude, which I associate somewhat with places like Melissa McEwan’s blog, where it’s all “I expect more, and go find your own fucking Feminism 101.”

    Except this is a mainstream publication and it’s one of the most humanized and sympathetic portrayals of this particular issue I’ve seen in such a place. So to call it out for oppressive terminology and phrasing seems counterproductive – I mean, I guess you could email the author and be like, actually, the preferred method is…XYZ.

    But it’s a social and linguistic tangle that’s tricky for even experts to navigate without stepping on some toes, and I just think it’s kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face to dismiss the whole piece, which is pretty good IMO, over something that’s easy to get wrong.

    But I’m not trans* or any other marginalized orientation, so maybe I just ought to shut up…(genuinely not being passive-aggressive).

43. Brett K: I agree with your point (and with those of the others who have posted on this issue so far) but I have to wonder how many of Nicole’s stereotypically “feminine” interests were exaggerated by the reporter? I mean, it was mentioned later on in the article (and in one case I think in a quote from Nicole herself?) that she was into martial arts and violent video games – stereotypically “masculine” interests, basically. I wouldn’t be surprised if the article had deliberately left out those things because they didn’t fit with the narrative the writer was trying to construct – that Nicole was *obviously* trans because look, she liked pink and purple and mermaids! Never mind that gender identity is much more complex than the colours one likes, and that Nicole is a girl no matter how much she likes tae kwon do.

    I think it’s significant here not because it “made her” a girl but because it was part of the way she presented her feminine identity. It was what her parents were pushing to hide when they were struggling with it initially–even as they were accepting that she really was a girl, they were still hiding the princess dresses when other people were around and forcing her into “boy” activities in “boy” ways (which she then engaged in in “girl” ways).

    Donna L discusses it @18 in a way I wouldn’t be able to.

44. Brett K: Never mind that gender identity is much more complex than the colours one likes, and that Nicole is a girl no matter how much she likes tae kwon do.

    This calls to mind one of my favorite pictures from my childhood, taken during my “girly-girl” phase: At a rifle range, learning to shoot a .22, with my ever-present little pink purse on the sandbag beside me. I think I loaded it up with spent casings before we left. Neither the firearms nor the pink accessories were absolute gender indicators.

45. Cara: I can see how the mistake might have happened, since the post has been changed now without any note stating that such changes have been made.

    You’re right, I should have done that. Extensive fail on this one. I’ll add the note.

46. I don’t want to disagree with Donna L and others who have lived experiences in this area, and I would 100% be behind Nicole if she was upset with the article’s use of male pronouns and the name she was assigned at birth when describing her early childhood. But I’m willing to give the reporter some benefit of the doubt given how closely she clearly worked with the family and how good, overall, the article was at describing the Maines’ journey and the work being done by Dr. Spack. I’d like to think (and yes, maybe I’m being too naive) that given the otherwise positive nature of the piece, and in particular the fact that the reporter obviously understood and respected the family’s wishes regarding obscuring their current location and the mother’s employer, that the reporter would have allowed the family to read the piece before printing it and to make corrections to pronouns if they wished.

    And like DP, I can see the value in describing Nicole’s situation in this way — which is to say, describing it not as Nicole experienced it (as a girl, throughout) but from the perspective of her parents, who believed that they had a son named Wyatt and slowly came to realize that just wasn’t the case. A lot of the article was focused on Nicole’s parents’ journey to understand and then support their daughter, and Nicole’s father obviously still uses the name Wyatt and male pronouns to refer to the early years of Nicole’s life. For me, the article really seemed to mirror the transition that Nicole’s father made in how he knew his child, which is probably a change in thinking that most readers of the Boston Globe would also have to undergo.

    But as I said, I don’t want to overstep here, so sincere apologies if I have.

47. Esti: I’d like to think (and yes, maybe I’m being too naive) that given the otherwise positive nature of the piece, and in particular the fact that the reporter obviously understood and respected the family’s wishes regarding obscuring their current location and the mother’s employer, that the reporter would have allowed the family to read the piece before printing it and to make corrections to pronouns if they wished.

    Yes, this would be nice and, yes, you are being too naive. I’d like to think that journalists took this much care with their subjects, but that doesn’t resonate with my experiences, direct and vicarious, with journalism. Also, the *family’s* wishes are not necessarily the same as *Nicole’s* wishes. Also, if the goal was to obscure the family’s identity, why give any real name, much less more than one?

    Esti: A lot of the article was focused on Nicole’s parents’ journey to understand and then support their daughter, and Nicole’s father obviously still uses the name Wyatt and male pronouns to refer to the early years of Nicole’s life.

    Yeah, and a lot of adoption stories are told from the perspective of adoptive parents to the exclusion of the stories of adoptees themselves or parents/family of people with disabilities are told to the exclusion of the stories of people with disabilities. Privileging this viewpoint because it’s the one more accepted and more desired in the mainstream (i.e., what do “normal” people think about their “abnormal” family members) is still problematic, even if it’s rationally comprehensible. I understand the motivation, but I cannot condone it.

48. Alara Rogers: it’s certainly not the case that a trans girl *has* to be into girly pursuits any more than a cis girl does; I do, however, think that the social barriers to accepting yourself as trans and maybe even understanding that that’s what you are might be higher for trans women or girls with stereotypically masculine interests, simply because people do equate “stereotypically masculine interests” with “maleness”.

    I’m a geek who builds her own computers, does data analysis for a living, and has always been into SF TV shows and comic books. But since I was born with a vagina no one has actually ever questioned my femaleness. I’m guessing that the only trans girls who figure out that they *are* girls very young and successfully convince their parents that that is true are the ones who are all pretty pretty princess, and the ones who spend their childhoods building mad scientist devices wouldn’t have a chance to convince any adult that they are girls, and probably might have a hard time recognizing it for themselves.

    EG: There is also the issue that, until quite recently, as I have been told by older trans people, psychiatrists who acted as gatekeepers to the drugs and surgery necessary for bodily transition required transpeople to express as stereotypically feminine or masculine personalities/preferences as possible, or risk being denied what they needed. For example, the woman who first opened my eyes to trans issues told me about a friend of hers who, in the weeks before her surgery back in the day, showed up to an appointment with her psychiatrist wearing jeans. The psychiatrist decreed that obviously, wearing jeans instead of a skirt or dress demonstrated that she wasn’t truly committed to living as a woman–even though this was taking place well after the time that women regularly wore jeans and pants. Thus for many transpeople, the narrative of socially-recognizable femininity/masculinity has been a necessity.

    I wanted to respond to these two comments together, because I think they’re related. And because I agree entirely with them.

    Once upon a time, I assumed that all trans women — back then, I was barely aware of trans men — were, like me, aware of what was “different” about them, even if they later tried (like I did) to suppress their feelings and/or convince themselves that they were “wrong” (in every possible way), and that the world was right. But even though I never actually met a single other trans woman in real life until I was more than 40 years old, I can now say that I’ve gotten to know a lot of trans women, both in person, and as a participant and moderator
    for many years in a rather well-known trans forum. And there are, in fact, quite a few who may have known that “something” was different all along, but didn’t recognize what it was until they were teenagers, or young adults, or even later. And a lot of that probably does have to do with their not being stereotypically hyper-feminine (whether in appearance or affect or interests), and not matching the general conception of how trans women were supposed to be, whether in childhood or adolescence or adulthood, based on the very small number of examples that were then available.

    One of the problems is that if you were a trans woman with body dysphoria, whether or not you identified as transsexual (I’m not going to get into the Trans Terminology Wars here!), you needed the help of the medical profession at some point, unless you relied on “black market” hormones (the equivalent of offshore Internet pharmacies today) and a semi-underground network of shady no-questions-asked practitioners that probably existed only in large cities like New York back in the day. It’s a bit more complicated than acting on feelings of being gay or lesbian. And, as EG points out from her friend’s experience, one’s “story” had to conform to a very specific, very narrow narrative in order to meet was then considered the necessary medical paradigm to qualify for treatment. It went far beyond having to wear skirts or dresses at all times and being disqualified if you showed up to an appointment in pants, God forbid. People were disqualified not only if they were sexually oriented towards women, but if they admitted to ever having had sex with a woman (never mind ever having been married, or horror of horrors, being a parent). Because we certainly don’t want to create lesbians, do we? Only normal, heterosexual women. In fact, people were disqualified if they admitted to ever having masturbated, or having sexual thoughts, while dressed as a woman. Because a “true transsexual” (a phrase that was still around and often used until quite recently) hates their birth anatomy so much that they wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing; one was supposed to be attracted to men, but asexual in practice. People were also told that only certain narrowly defined “female” occupations were appropriate post-transition. Never mind what you’ve been trained as; after transition you have to be a secretary or hairdresser or cosmetologist or work in a florist’s shop. (Or, sub rosa of course, sex worker, an occupation to which some still believe trans women are “particularly suited,” such as the esteemed Professor J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern, the man who also believes that there’s no such thing as a bisexual male, that “gaydar” is a scientific fact, etc., etc.)

    So, although it’s less true now with the availability of so much information on the Internet, and so many different people taking so many different paths, it was very common, until the last 10 or 15 years or so, not even to seek medical help, either because you didn’t meet the standard paradigm and therefore it never consciously occurred to you who you really were, or you managed to convince yourself (sort of) that you couldn’t possibly be what you thought you had been as a child. Especially when the whole world tells you continually, as someone assigned male at birth and raised as male, that there’s nothing sicker, lower (in all figurative senses of that word), more contemptible, more delusional, and more thoroughly disgusting, than wanting to be a girl or woman. I used to think sometimes that a man wanting to have sex with an animal (as long as it was a female animal, of course!) stood about equally on the social scale.

    When I came of age in the late 1970’s, the paradigm I described above was still in full force. And what alternative explanations or role models were there if, like me, one was far too terrified to go out and try to find other people like oneself? Who knows what would have happened to me if I hadn’t discovered the Internet 20 excruciating years later? At some point, with apologies for getting all melodramatic, I quite possibly would have just killed myself.

    Because even though I did have a pretty clear idea of what the story was in very early childhood, and, based on some things my mother said to me (mentioned in an earlier comment) it’s pretty clear she understood what the story was too — my father, by the way, claims to have no recollection whatsoever of anything of the kind, but then again he doesn’t give much indication of remembering much of anything about my childhood at all, busy lawyer that he was! — I realized by the time I was 7 or 8 that I needed to keep my mouth shut, because this was something that just wasn’t acceptable, to the world, or, more importantly, my mother. Until then, I was fairly open about it, and sometimes my 2-years older sister would even dress me up in her clothes and we would go outside. But there was one day I specifically remember when I was 7 or 8 and home with my mother — my father was probably at work, and my sister was out doing something — that I followed her around the apartment begging to be allowed to put on one of my sister’s dresses, a request that certainly wasn’t entirely unusual for me. And my mother finally gave in, and gave me one to put on, which I did. Right after I did so, I looked at my mother’s face, and could see clearly in her eyes, for the first time (or at least the first time I’d noticed), that she didn’t approve. My mother’s approval was the most important thing in the world to me. So call it the scales falling from my eyes, call it the moment of eating the apple from the tree of knowledge and being expelled from the Garden. Whatever one calls it, I knew what I had to do. So I quietly took off the dress, without saying anything, and put my boys’ clothing back on. And didn’t say another word about my feelings to anyone in my family for almost another 40 years, until long after my mother died when I was 20 after that car accident we were in. (I still sometimes wonder if she would accept and approve of what I eventually did, and still love me despite it. I like to think so.)

    I was lucky that not much more happened; kids like me back in the 1960’s and even later who didn’t learn to keep this kind of secret often were not only sent to doctors who were the equivalent of Dr. Zucker, or worse, but were subjected to treatments like electroshock therapy. The worst that happened to me was that around that time, my father came home with a button for me to wear that said “It’s a Man’s World” on it. I felt humiliated, since I knew that that was true in theory, but also knew that it didn’t apply to me, and was pretty sure it wasn’t a coincidence that I’d been given this. I tossed it in a drawer, and continued to keep my mouth shut. (While continuing to feel compelled to read, in secret, every single fictional or non-fictional story about gender transformation that ever caught my eye and that I could get my hands on without asking someone for it; I vividly remember several cross-gender themed episodes of different sitcoms, and a number of science fiction stories. And remember telling myself that of course, this had nothing to do with me; it couldn’t possibly. It was just “interesting.”) I don’t think all the testosterone injections and pills I was given for several years beginning a couple of years later had anything to do with my gender issues; it was all supposed to be to help me grow, partly because of the effects of the cryptorchidism. So that’s another story, including the fact that that happened to be the same doctor who sexually molested me.

    In any event, to make what could be a very long story as short as possible, I spent a good part of the next several decades struggling with myself to suppress my feelings, and to convince myself that I couldn’t possibly be transsexual — a truly frightening prospect — because of all the ways I didn’t quite match the narrow paradigm I described above. Dolls? Nope, stuffed animals. Friends all girls? Not after 6th grade; I went to an all boys’ private school from 7th-12th grades. Hating my genitals so much at all times that I refused to touch them? Um, no, not exactly, although I was 14 or so before I figured out what I was supposed to do and was able to do it, after several years of “encouragement” by that pedophile doctor). In adolescence, feeling attracted only to boys? No, I always was more attracted to girls — which made it rather easy to tell myself that I was simply a basically straight guy who had something very loathsome wrong with him. In about 1973 or 1974, when I was in my teens, Jan Morris — the only transsexual woman I’d heard of back then other than Christine Jorgensen, until Renee Richards came along — was on the Dick Cavett show (maybe it was David Frost?); she mentioned that there were transsexual women who considered themselves lesbians after transition, and I vividly remember the prolonged gales of laughter that erupted from the audience at such a ludicrous notion. I think that was humiliating enough to delay my transition for another 20 years all by itself! Being pretty or at least “passable” as a girl or woman? Even being as short as I was, I certainly didn’t think so, and after I was 7 or 8 never went out again in public as “myself” until I was in my 40’s, a couple of years *after* I began transitioning medically, because I thought I was not only hideously ugly (as a man or a woman), but had an undisguisably masculine face. (As it turned out, I’ve had no problems at all, but that’s what I managed to convince myself.) The only time I ever acknowledged to myself that I was actually transsexual as a young adult was when I was stoned, when it used to seem very obvious to me. One of the reasons I didn’t like to get stoned — way too scary.

    Eventually, of course, I acknowledged who I was, and that I couldn’t destroy that part of myself no matter how much will power I exercised. After that, I began the process of trying to learn to get past the shame and self-hatred. I’m not sure I ever will completely, but I’ve come a long way.

    So yeah, I’m not at all surprised that a lot of people didn’t recognize or acknowledge their transness until a relatively advanced age when they didn’t conform to feminine stereotypes, especially when they didn’t even have the early consciousness that I did.

49. Donna L: And why shouldn’t they instinctively choose, as concrete symbols of their internal feelings, things and activities to desire that they see other children who *are* treated and perceived as girls having and doing?

    Oh. This actually gave me an “aha!” moment. Thanks.

50. Martine Votvik: So yeah, when it comes to these issues I tend to be critical towards my allies, but since I respect them greatly and agree with so much of their general analysis of society I also can’ really reject what they are saying without trying to understand it.

    But being in a position where I feel undecided about this, basically means that I get no friends anywhere because everybody demands that I should be able to make up my mind and get with the program. I once naively imagined that it would be possible to listen to both sides and find an answer myself that didn’t reject either, I still believe in that, but not as easily as before.

    Good luck with that. It isn’t possible. It’s like saying one can simultaneously be a believing Orthodox Jew and a devout Southern Baptist. If you want to buy into what these people say about trans people, it requires rejecting everything trans people say about themselves and concluding that, at best, they’re delusional victims of the patriarchy. And if you reject what they say about trans people, then you’ll have to figure out a way of rejecting something that’s central to their ideology without rejecting their ideology. Good luck with that too. It’s one thing for me to say, well, such-and-such author held anti-Semitic views, but those views didn’t permeate his or her writing, so I can still appreciate their work. It’s another thing entirely when Jew-baiting comprised a large part of their work.

51. EG: In your experience, is this [using male pronouns and identifying terms to refer to one’s pre-transition self] something that varies greatly among different transpeople, or is it something on which there is a feeling more typical than others? I ask because a friend of mine to whom I was quite close for a while (we live very far apart now, so…harder) and who really opened my eyes and moved me out of the simplistic anti-trans paradigm I was in, does refer to herself as having been “a little boy,” when she was a kid. I wasn’t sure if it was OK for me to do the same, so I asked, she said yes, that’s how I should do it. Of course, when interacting with any individual, I would just ask or take care to avoid the gendered language, but in speaking about trans experiences generally, do you think she’s an outlier, or is there a generational component (she is significantly older than I am), or is it just a personal preference that doesn’t have a larger pattern?

    (My apologies for commenting so much in this thread, but there don’t seem to be too many other trans people who comment regularly here, so I hope people don’t mind if I answer a couple more questions, always keeping in mind that I’m not trying to speak for anyone but myself. Besides, I wasn’t feeling well today and stayed home from work, so at least I have time to do write responses, if I can get my cat Ziggy to stop falling asleep on my lap with his head and paws resting on my right arm.)

    EG, I do think it’s largely a matter of personal preference and context, although it probably is more likely, the longer one spent living in the sex/gender to which one was assigned at birth, to refer to one’s pre-transition self as a “boy” or “man” as the case may be. Whereas in Nicole’s case, given how young she is, and given that she asserted her identity beginning at the earliest possible moment, it seems needlessly petty to insist that she should be referred to as a “boy” for the entire period before she began presenting as a girl 100% of the time.

    But it does depend on context too. After all, the fact that I don’t like referring to myself as having been a little boy or a “man,” and that I try to avoid all situations in which I have to do so, doesn’t preclude the possibility that there might be contexts in which it might be appropriate to do so, or in which it’s difficult to maintain that that wasn’t what one was in any sense. Or that one couldn’t be more than one thing at the same time, depending on what aspect is being discussed. Like many things, there’s no easy answer. I admit that I always tend to complicate things, but even Nicole seems to refer to herself as having been a “girl-boy”; she seems to recognize that it can be complicated issue.

    To give one obvious example, let’s say someone was, prior to transition when they were living as a man (and not after transition), a vice- president of a company in X industry, which has never had a company with a female vice-president. Would it really be accurate for her, after transition, to say that she was the first woman vice-president in that industry? I’d have to say no, unless she transitioned while still at her job or at least people knew about her gender identity. However she identified at the time. Trans vice-president yes, woman vice president no. It would be like my saying that Renee Richards and I, 20 years apart, were the first two women to graduate from my all-boys’ high school since it stopped being co-educational earlier in the century. (It became co-educational again a year or two after I graduated.) Now, I may say that jokingly, or say sometimes that I was the only girl in a high school of 600 boys but that being short, Jewish, and unathletic made a great cover because at least 400 of them were like me in that respect, but I don’t think it would be strictly accurate given that I made very sure for the 6 years I was there that nobody knew a thing about my “secret.” (I do have to be careful in mentioning the high school I went to among people around my age, because it’s quite well-known. I made the mistake of doing so a few years ago when that was the general subject of a conversation people were having, and one woman called me out and said that I couldn’t possibly have gone there, because her brother went there and she knew there were no girls back then. So, to avoid being branded a liar, I had to out myself about my history, something I really hadn’t wanted to do. A good way to clear the room.)

    Or take this photo of me when I was 21 months old; that’s me on the left sitting next to my slightly older first cousin on Thanksgiving: http://img74.imageshack.us/img74/9956/lastscandmlandalanfc6.jpg

    Now, could I really say with accuracy that “that’s me as a little girl sitting next o my cousin,” when it obviously appears to be a photo of two little boys? Maybe that’s how I felt — I’m sure I was thinking deeply transsexual thoughts at the time! — but it isn’t true in terms of how it looks, or how I was perceived or “presenting” then. As another example, I also try never to say around my son that I don’t feel I was ever really a man, because as much as he completely accepts me as a woman, and as much as neither of us has any cognitive dissonance about his having a female Dad (which is what he still sometimes calls me in private, which is fine with me), for me to insist that I was *never* a man makes him almost feel that he never really had a father, that I must have been pretending when he was little (which, of course, I wasn’t for one moment; being with him was always the one part of my life which I felt transcended gender and gender dysphoria), and so on. Why in the world would I ever do that to the person I love most in the world, who’s done so much for me? So I don’t.

    EG: Can I just say how horrifying I find things like this? Even if we leave gender out of it, is there anybody out there who seriously believes that you should force children to play things they do not want to play, and that doing so will somehow create a love of playing that thing? Seriously, you could have tried to force me to play basketball all you wanted, and all you would have found on your hands was an extremely angry, depressed, cranky kid who hated you and wanted to go read a book. When gender identity is also at stake, it becomes even crueller and more foolish.

    Yes, same here. If I could have read a book in the middle of gym class instead of having to put up with things like trying to play basketball when I was 11 and barely 4 feet tall with tiny hands, or the wrestling coach peering down the front of everyone’s gym shorts to make sure they were wearing the requisite jock strap,
    I assure you I would have! Fortunately, my mother wrote me lots of gym excuses during my 6 years at that school.

    Some of the Zucker stories are truly heartbreaking; there’s one I read that described a little gender-variant child’s parents trying to enforce Zucker’s instructions by depriving the child of favorite toys that were too “girly,” and the inconsolable weeping and desolation that resulted. Reading it made me want to vomit; it’s repugnant.

52. DonnaL: My apologies for commenting so much in this thread, but there don’t seem to be too many other trans people who comment regularly here, so I hope people don’t mind if I answer a couple more questions, always keeping in mind that I’m not trying to speak for anyone but myself.

    Donna, I can only speak for myself as well, but I think you are a treasure and I thank you very much for contributing, here and anywhere.

53. Donna L, please don’t worry that you’re commenting too much. As long as you don’t feel we’re imposing on you to serve as One Voice and Educator, I’m really grateful for your history and perspectives here.

54. Jadey and Caperton, thank you very much.

    And yes, if I ever start to think that anyone expects me to be the Representative Of My People here, I will gladly bow out of whatever discussion is taking place. I’ve had plenty of experience with being the “only trans woman” over the last six years or so, not only online but in real life, both in the world of New York City law firms in general (there’s only one other person with a trans history, so far as I know, out of a total of probably 40-50,000 attorneys), and in organizations and committees of LGBT lawyers in particular. Being in that position (no matter how many compliments I get out of it, much as I appreciate them!) makes me feel uncomfortable enough, and enough like a token, without also feeling that I’m expected to speak for anyone but myself; I wasn’t cut out to be either a pioneer or a spokesperson. At least here, I’m clearly not the only trans person who comments, even if it seems to be fewer than the number who once did, and even if I have been speaking up a lot recently when trans-related subjects are raised.

55. DonnaL, I really like that post.

    The other day I was wondering what the correct terminology was with regards to gender changing situations. Like, how do I refer to someone I know who changed gender when talking about something in the past? Do you go with what they were publicly at the time or retcon it? I had no idea before seeing this post and was debating asking on Ask Metafilter out of curiosity. There doesn’t seem to be a well publicized standard of This Is What You Do In Order To Not Offend out there. Now I know.

    But I do agree with Donna that to some degree, retroactively changing the gender reference with regards to the past is…where I find it gets weird. And since I’ve seen plenty of news stories out there where someone was referred to in this manner as “technically a guy back then and then they went official as a girl,” I had the impression that that was correct. And I do wonder how other people handle it. For example, I grew up with a girl (my mom is friends with her parents) whose dad transitioned into being a woman. She probably spent 18-20 years with her dad as her dad. It’s one thing to refer to what they are now, but is she supposed to call her dad her other mom now? Change all pronouns when talking about past activity? It does sound/feel like you’d be “erasing” something there. And that seems even weirder to me. I kinda wish I could ask, but we long since lost touch since she got married, and it’d be rude to ask her directly anyway even if those weren’t factors. Now I know, so thanks for that.

56. I do have sympathies on this issue but I think starting too young there will be big trouble. How can it okay for a child to be sterilized before they reach adulthood?

    That is the giant issue above all others. That’s not a gender issue. It is an issue of sterilization of young children, and I am sure this will blow up badly. Is a young child capable of determining their permanent sterilization, especially when so many trans youth eventually change their mind? Can adults choose sterilization for them?

    Just judging by how many youth change their minds growing up, won’t their be lawsuits in the future by people who were sterilized as children and then wish they weren’t? That seems inevitable.

57. I can’t even respond to the concern trollery “they’re too young to know!” that goes on in articles like this. It always favors cissexism and the idea that the correct outcome is to be cissexual. Puberty is a ticking time bomb often for a trans teenager, and waiting is not neutral. If I had had the opportunity to postpone my original puberty and go on hormone replace to induce the correct one–if I had had that opportunity and someone took it away from me because they thought they “knew better” about my life–well, I don’t know whether the violence would have been directed inwardly or outwardly, but the denial would be abusive because parents and other caregivers are there to provide appropriate health interventions when those in their care need them. No one is saying this issue is easy. I see trans kids as one of the cutting edges of social justice today. But for the kids, it is not a neutral idea to make them wait. Time and their bodies march on. In my case, proper intervention could have prevented major surgery.

58. An: I do have sympathies on this issue but I think starting too young there will be big trouble. How can it okay for a child to be sterilized before they reach adulthood?

    That is the giant issue above all others. That’s not a gender issue. It is an issue of sterilization of young children, and I am sure this will blow up badly. Is a young child capable of determining their permanent sterilization, especially when so many trans youth eventually change their mind? Can adults choose sterilization for them?

    Just judging by how many youth change their minds growing up, won’t their be lawsuits in the future by people who were sterilized as children and then wish they weren’t? That seems inevitable.

    I think your underlying factual assumption that “so many trans youth eventually change their mind” — is something of a myth, based on one study done many years ago (at a time when admitting to being trans and pursuing transition in adolescence or later resulted in even more horrendously negative consequences than it still often does), by none other than the infamous Dr. Zucker.. Suffice it to say that that study — which is the underpinning for virtually all opposition to early transition — is dubious at best.

    Of course it’s probably true that if you take every child who’s ever expressed on a single occasion or even on a number of occasions the desire to be (or present as) a sex/gender different from what they were assigned at birth, the great majority of them don’t turn out to be trans. But as I explained above, that isn’t remotely the population we’re talking about here.

    As far as future regret is concerned, there obviously haven’t been enough ultra-early, pre-puberty transitioners yet, for long enough, to know what will happen in the future. But such transitions have been going on for a while, particularly in Europe, and I haven’t heard about anyone “regretting” them yet. Moreover, the figures for adult regret for transitioning are tiny, whatever falsehoods the trans haters out there may propagate based on the same one or two examples they always like to trot out. The only regret most adult transitioners, and even adolescent transitioners, I know have is that they couldn’t transition earlier, and specifically before the hormones associated with the gender they were assigned had their greatest effect.

    I do understand the fundamental concern with consent to losing one’s reproductive capacity — not that “sterilization” is the direct intent, but it is the byproduct of certain permanent medical and/or surgical steps towards transition. Please keep in mind, however, that the entire point of only administering medications that delay puberty — rather than actual cross-gender hormones — is to delay any such permanent loss of reproductive capacity until the child in question is, in fact, old enough to be deemed capable, in a legal sense, of making such a decision. Until cross-gender hormones are actually administered, the medications delaying puberty can always be withdrawn; there’s nothing irreversible. Even the effect on fertility of cross-gender hormones is not irreversible so long as they’re withdrawn within some limited period of time. (I assume that time-period must be quite a bit longer for trans men [assigned female at birth], given the number who’ve stopped taking testosterone, some of them after quite a bit of time, in order to be able to become pregnant. For trans women, the time it takes from beginning estrogen and/or anti-androgens until sterilization is permanent is much shorter, although there is usually the option — which trans women should always be advised of — to bank sperm in advance of transition. I realize that isn’t possible if someone has never gone through puberty in the first place. )

    If someone had asked me when I was 11 or 12 if I wanted to take the same path as Nicole has — assuming it were today instead of the world I grew up in, and I knew that my parents (especially my mother, to whom I was very close) were supportive — would I have said yes, and would I have confirmed the decision upon reaching legal adulthood in order to begin taking estrogen, etc.?

    That’s a very difficult question for me to answer. Retrospectively (in other words, from the perspective of the 2011 Donna, having experienced everything I’ve experienced and being offered the opportunity to live my life over again in a different way), the answer would, unhesitatingly, be no. The one good thing I got out of my life trying to be a man, and the best thing that’s ever happened to me in general, is my son. I can’t even begin to express how much I love J., or what he means to me. I could never, ever retroactively wish him out of existence, and would live the same life over again, no matter how difficult it’s been, a hundred times — an infinite number of times — in order to be given the great gift of being his parent (father, mother, whatever; the label doesn’t matter).

    Of course, some of this is easier for me to say than for others, given the fact that the “trans fairy” happens to have blessed me in certain physical ways (but certainly not enough!) that it isn’t as if the effects of male puberty (much as I hated the experience) were so devastating that they made it particularly difficult, never mind impossible, for me to transition and be perceived as what I am, a woman. It wasn’t easy for me to be a 5’2″, 115 pound man all those years; it wasn’t easy for me as a man to go through life with my voice never having changed and being “ma’amed” on the telephone (and accused of lying when I claimed to be a guy), 99% of the time in my adult life. But it’s all made my transition much easier in a physical sense. (Sure, I wish my nose hadn’t suddenly grown when I entered puberty, but it might have happened anyway given my father’s family’s history of noses, and, as it’s turned out, contrary to my expectation, it’s really just a “Jewish” nose, not necessarily an ineradicably male nose. My internalization of Northern European and anti-Semitic standards of nasal [?] attractiveness, and my wishing that I were more conventionally attractive, don’t have much of anything to do with being trans; they’re something that would have affected me at least as much if I’d been assigned female at birth and raised as female.)

    Still, even if puberty had made me 8 feet tall and built like a football player and given me a voice like James Earl Jones’s, I’d still say no to Nicole’s opportunity if it meant not having my son.

    But that doesn’t really answer the question, does it? Because if someone had really offered me that opportunity at the same age Nicole had it, I wouldn’t have known about my son, would I? So I wouldn’t have been giving up a specific child, and would never have regretted his specific loss. I didn’t really care all *that* much at that particular age, or even 10 years later, about having biological children, although having a child someday in order to try to carry forward my mother’s family, which was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust, was at least in the back of my mind from early childhood. Still, given the great intensity of my gender dysphoria back then, I suspect I would have said yes, and that I would never have regretted it. I would probably have tried to adopt a child someday, because I did always love babies.

    As I said, a difficult question for me to answer. But that hardly means that the practice of facilitating early transition should be thrown out the window, or that anyone should take too seriously the prospect of a parade of future lawsuits.

    Donna

59. Well, the other thing I wanted to say is tons of people are infertile. I imagine someone who has gone through transition as a teen and is sterile because of it would handle their sterility in the same way any other person handles sterility. Not everyone even wants to have kids, and not everyone must have biological kids if they do want them…and even if a trans person wants kids and can make them, not everyone wants to use their bio parts for kid making. I’m in that group.

    It may be that the original comment maker had an ok intent with that. But to some it may seem as grasping at straws.

60. Jennifer, you’re welcome.

    Jennifer: is she supposed to call her dad her other mom now?

    To be honest, there is no “supposed to.” It’s one thing if a parent (in this case, a father) transitions before the child is born or when the child is small; in that case, it is pretty standard, from what I know, for it to be simply a “two moms” situation, like it is in any other case where someone has two women as parents. But if the trans person’s child is already an adult or teenager or older child, with significant memories and experience of having one parent as mom and the other as dad, then I think it’s only fair to make the “name” for the parent — dad(dy), mom(my), maddy (the Jenny Boylan family solution), dammy, or whatever — pretty much the child’s decision. So long as the child is old enough to understand that if they’re in a store or elsewhere in public with a female parent, it isn’t necessarily cool to shout “Hey, Dad!” across the floor, thereby outing their parent as a trans person, with all that entails. I think I’ve mentioned that when I told my son, when he was 14, that I was trans (which it turned out he had long since figured out) and intended to transition within the next year, his very first question was “will it be OK if I still call you Dad?” How in the world could I ever have said no, and deprive him of that little piece of continuity he was asking for, that assurance that our lives together to that point still meant something and weren’t just a pretense on my part? So of course I said yes. In our case, “Dad” is not a gendered word.

    If he’d wanted to call me Mom, that would have been fine too. But he had one already, and that’s how he wanted to keep things. Whatever he calls me, I’m one of his two female parents, as he puts it.

61. EG: a friend of mine to whom I was quite close for a while . . . and who really opened my eyes and moved me out of the simplistic anti-trans paradigm I was in

    Apologies for dividing up into more than one comment my attempts to respond to your comment, but I just remembered that I wanted to say something about this aspect. It’s certainly great that your thinking changed because of getting to know your friend, and what struck me about your mentioning this is that you might be the first and only person I know of who used to hold the “anti-trans feminist” viewpoint (I’m assuming that’s where your views came from, rather than from fundamentalist religion!), and changed their mind for any reason. In fact, I’ve always been very discouraged by what seems to be the futility of trying to discuss anything about transness or trans issues with people who feel that way, and of thinking that “oh, if they could just get to know an actual rather than a theoretical trans person, maybe they’d start to understand or at least respect trans people a little better.” But it never works, from what I’ve seen. For example, trans people have repeatedly tried to engage with Julie Bindel, including in public discussions, when she’s indicated that she’s willing to do so. But then she always goes back and writes another incredibly nasty column. Fool me once, etc.

    Which is why I try never to get into Internet or real life “debates” with people who feel like that. It’s too upsetting and frustrating. Despite “getting” all the arguments on an intellectual level, and despite understanding how difficult it must be to accept that someone’s life doesn’t fit one’s theories, I don’t think I’ll ever truly comprehend emotionally why people with such views seem to despise and have so much contempt for trans people (or, at best, consider us pathetic dupes of the patriarchy and the medical establishment), and seem to get so much pleasure from conveying their feelings in such a truly cruel and vicious way. Even though I don’t have so much trouble “getting” all the other aspects of me that people seem to hate — like being a Jew, a woman, a Democrat, an atheist, a native New Yorker, a book lover (my former spouse’s famous last words to me before I moved out: “I don’t know what I’m happier to get rid of, you or all your books!”), a graduate of so-called “elite” schools, and (perhaps above all in inspiring intense hatred!) a Yankees fan. For some reason, I have more trouble getting the trans hatred. Maybe because it seems to be the most universally and broadly condemned — or at least, it seems to be condemned the most openly and most broadly across our culture, and gets the least defense and has the fewest allies — of all of them.

    In any event, I’m glad you changed your thinking. And hope you’re not the only one, as depressed about that as I sometimes get.

62. Hey Donna. . .I’m sure that is very confounding and depressing how cruel and bigoted so many people are about something that is such a core part of who you are. But if you want some reason for encouragment, you might want to check out Sady’s obituary of Mary Daly that was posted on this site two years ago:

    http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/01/07/acts-of-contrition-feminism-privilege-and-the-legacy-of-mary-daly/

    Daly was one of the first feminists that Sady got into, and Sady adopted her transphobic views. Sady since has gotten over them through a lot of hard work, and spent half the obituary lamenting the detrimental and oppressive aspects of Daly’s legacy, especially toward trans women.

    So I think there actually a lot of women who had an anti-trans feminist lens and moved past it. It’s just that most the ones still defending it in this day and age are too far gone to change, which explains all your frustrating internet encounters. But the I think the good news is that each generation is becoming less transphobic than the one before it, although there’s still a long ways to go obviously.

63. Thanks, LotusBen.

64. An: I do have sympathies on this issue but I think starting too young there will be big trouble. How can it okay for a child to be sterilized before they reach adulthood?

    That is the giant issue above all others. That’s not a gender issue. It is an issue of sterilization of young children, and I am sure this will blow up badly. Is a young child capable of determining their permanent sterilization, especially when so many trans youth eventually change their mind? Can adults choose sterilization for them?

    Just judging by how many youth change their minds growing up, won’t their be lawsuits in the future by people who were sterilized as children and then wish they weren’t? That seems inevitable.

    DonnaL already covered this, but it’s worth restating. Puberty blockers don’t cause permanent infertility. Hormones and surgeries that cause permanent infertility aren’t given to children.

65. DonnaL, I’m way late to the thread (been taking an internet break), but I wanted to add my thanks for your amazing and insightful commentary and answers.

    Even if you do like the Yankees…

66. Brian Schlosser: Even if you do like the Yankees…

    As I said, that may be my most broadly despised identifier (except in the New York area) of them all!

    LotusBen: most [of] the ones still defending it in this day and age are too far gone to change, which explains all your frustrating internet encounters.

    I should clarify. I’ve never actually had an “encounter” with anyone who holds such views in the sense of having a discussion, debate, or argument with such a person. I have no problem answering (appropriate) questions or trying to explain things on occasion in a proper setting, even to people who are completely clueless, as long as I think they’re engaging in good faith and as long as it isn’t the only thing a particular person ever seems to want to talk to me about. But there are some subjects (like the “validity” of my own experiences and identity) that aren’t open for debate in my opinion. And there some people I simply can’t deal with in any way — specifically, those who are openly hostile and/or contemptuous, and who clearly aren’t engaging in good faith; the kind of people who (for example) start threads on certain notorious anti-trans radical feminist websites, such as one I saw not all that long ago explaining that it’s always easy to tell a so-called trans woman’s so-called vagina from a “real” woman’s vagina, because it smells of rotting meat. And so on.

67. Donna L: In any event, I’m glad you changed your thinking. And hope you’re not the only one, as depressed about that as I sometimes get.

    Thank you. It is not something I am particularly proud of, having held those views, so I don’t often admit to it, but in this case I wanted to make clear how important it is to me to hold her views in esteem, not only because she is a dear friend and I care for her very much, but also because she had the patience and the generosity to play such a big role in my moral development (actually, Donna, you routinely remind me of her with respect to that patience and generosity).

    Donna L: I don’t think I’ll ever truly comprehend emotionally why people with such views seem to despise and have so much contempt for trans people (or, at best, consider us pathetic dupes of the patriarchy and the medical establishment), and seem to get so much pleasure from conveying their feelings in such a truly cruel and vicious way.

    I think that a difference in that last element is what made it possible for me to change, actually. While I held anti-trans viewpoints was uncomfortable with the idea of transness, it never seemed to me that holding such viewpoints and having discomfort gave me license to treat transpeople with anything other than respect; I think that is what made it possible for me to get to know my friend in the first place, and to really hear what she had to say while holding my tongue and rethinking the ideas and conclusions that I had previously held.

    That, and I was uncomfortable with the ideological company I was keeping, even if we leave aside the feminists (although, even then, when my friend told me what had been said and what had been done to her in the name of feminism…). Whenever you find yourself on the side of a dominant group condemning and oppressing and generally hurting a subordinated group, it is important to pause and reflect about which side you really want to be on, morally.

    Anyway, I, too, hope that more people–particularly feminists–are able to be moved from their positions of cruelty by managing to keep their ears open, their mouths shut, and their brains working.

68. But most troubling to me is that there is NO REASON to use Nicole’s coerced male name! That is not her name. It has no place here and most certainly neither do male pronouns. Has she specifically requested that people use male pronouns to refer to her in the past tense? If not, she is ALWAYS she.

    Sorry if I’m being ignorant here, but what’s the reason for the use of the word “coerced”? Most of us have names that were given to us by our parents that were chosen long before we could decide whether we liked them or identified with them. (Many of us even have names typically assigned to the “other” gender.) I understand the importance of respecting someone’s chosen name and pronouns, just wondering how this is coercion.

69. rhian: Sorry if I’m being ignorant here, but what’s the reason for the use of the word “coerced”? Most of us have names that were given to us by our parents that were chosen long before we could decide whether we liked them or identified with them. (Many of us even have names typically assigned to the “other” gender.) I understand the importance of respecting someone’s chosen name and pronouns, just wondering how this is coercion.

    I think it derives from the application to names of a fairly recent term some trans people use to refer to their gender/sex assignment at birth — for example, a trans man saying he was coercively assigned female at birth (CAFAB), or a trans woman saying she was coercively assigned male at birth (CAMAB). It’s supposed to emphasize the involuntary nature of the assignment, although for myself I don’t think it adds much — since I think the word “assigned” sufficiently conveys that it was imposed, on trans and non-trans people alike — and I don’t use it myself. (In fact, I’m not even sure the word really fits, since I think of the exercise of coercion as something resulting in coerced agreement by the party who’s the object of the coercion, as in someone being coerced into signing a document. In the case of gender or name assignment at birth it’s entirely an imposition, with no action, coerced or otherwise, taken by the “assignee”). I prefer to think of myself as a WAMABARAM (woman assigned male at birth and raised as male), whereas a non-trans woman would be a WAFABARAB, a trans man would be a MAFABARAF, etc. (No, I’m not entirely serious, but it does kind of work, and avoids terminology like “biological woman,” “genetic woman,” etc.)

70. Donna L: WAFABARAB

    Should, of course, be WAFABARAF! See, I can’t always keep it straight myself.

71. Is there a good trans 101 out there for people who want to learn more so that they don’t insert both feet in their mouth as the same time?

72. Hysterical Bitch: Is there a good trans 101 out there for people who want to learn more so that they don’t insert both feet in their mouth as the same time?

    It’s hard ever to get two trans people to agree on something like that, and there are so many of them (including a lot of terribly stereotyped, and way too gender-essentialist ones) out there, but this one (which has a number of its own links) seems to be generally well thought of:

    http://tranarchism.com/trans-basics/

    This one is a lot shorter:

    http://srlp.org/trans-101

    I guess if you take everything I’ve said in this thread, it adds up to my own trans 101 — not necessarily applicable to anyone else.

73. Thank you, DonnaL. I really appreciate you taking the time to link some stuff for me. I want to be an ally, which honestly means shutting up and listening most of the time. But I also want to be able to speak up when transphobic stuff comes up because being an ally also means that you say when something is seriously fucked up because people shouldn’t have to stand up all by themselves when pointing out that something is wrong.
    I don’t know if I am being terribly coherent. I’m still trying to feel out the difference between teaspooning and just being a busybody.
    In the interest of full disclosure, this is late because I got distracted by the Thread of Neverending Horribleness.

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