Written but NOT posted to the genderqueer group. Submitted here instead for the further edification of those who haven’t the vaguest idea what I’m on about in the OP: TL/DR Warning: VERBOSE
There’s an important distinction between “what language I should use when referring to your overall gender situation” and “what language should I use to describe what it means to be genderqueer to an audience”.
Being cordial and respectful to each other’s chosen terminologies is easy, or easy enough:
• XXXX, who was assigned male at birth, is a woman and is female because, to XXXX, to be a woman is to be female;
• JJJJ is a person who has a penis and JJJJ is a woman and is female; and that penis of JJJJ’s is a woman’s sexual organ since it is part of a woman’s body.
• VVVV is a man and is male and has a penis. The penis of VVVV was referred to by doctors and parents as a clitoris and is sometimes as long as my thumb when he has an erection and VVVV does not pee through it, but his partner feels his passion there and loves his hungry cock.
• DDDD is a girl and is male, with male sexual anatomy that doesn’t make him a boy or a man because to be a male is not necessarily to be a boy or a man and in his case he isn’t.
We can accommodate all that the same way we accommodate pronoun choices: hey, you are what you say you are, and more power to your authority to define yourself and congratulations for finding your way through the wilderness and knowing who you are.
I trust all of you to respect my self-description choices just as I respect yours. Probably better. (I’ll try to be more careful myself, I’m learning from you).
*** deep breath ***
But meanwhile there’s the, umm, what-would-you-call-it. The “narrative”, the general description about sex and gender that we use when we tell the world who we, in general, are. The public education efforts, the things we post elsewhere on message boards and twitter and the things we say in that human sexuality class or that speakout at the pride march or how we explain it to our 10 year old nieces and cousins when they ask.
Have we (the overall genderqueer activism community) decided that we do not distinguish between sex and gender to explain how we are different and how we want mainstream folks’ thinking to change? So instead we are explaining it how, exactly? “Some people who are assigned male at birth, or assigned female at birth, are mis-assigned. Not everyone with a penis is male and therefore a boy, and not everyone with a vagina is female and therefore a girl. Later on in life, when such people are old enough to use language to identity themselves to others, they may explain that their real sex and gender is something else”.
? something like that ?
That, or something akin to that, seems workable, and unlike saying “Some male people are not boys or men, and some female people are not girls or women; gender is not always a direct match with sex and later on in life such people may explain that their gender is something else”, it doesn’t impose my distinction between sex and gender on those of you who don’t like my use of terminology.
But although it might make you happier (by you in this case I mean those of you who, like XXXX, believe that to be a woman is to be female and so forth), that way of explaining it would be offensive or misgendering to people like VVVV who would object to words like “penis” and “vagina” being hard-wired to the conventional assignment. So have we (the overall genderqueer activism community) decided that yes we will use “penis” and “vagina” to talk about the body structures even at the expense of offending non-surgically-changed AMAB people who regard their erogenous part as a clitoris and non-surgically-changed AFAB people who regard theirs as a penis? But that no, we will not use “sex” to refer to the socially-conventionally assigned body structures and “gender” to refer to the self and personality and identity because we do not wish to offend non-surgically-changed AMAB people who identify as female as well as girls or women and AFAB people who identify as male as well as boys or men?
Terms like “M2F” and “F2M”, although accepted as self-identification terms, would not be available for public discourse, I presume, since they imply that the AMAB person wasn’t female all along and only became female as part of some kind of transition process, prior to which they were male (and vice versa for AFAB folk). But using “AFAB” and “AMAB” terms in our public presentations is likely to cause confusion. Cisgender people are AFAB and AMAB also — they just don’t later come to dissent with those assignments. These terms also don’t provide us with terms for people who are currently in a situation where the body they inhabit would generally cause people to misgender them in the absence of medical corrective interventions, the very medical corrective interventions that many of us would like to see covered by insurance plans and so forth.
Ultimately, it seems to me that we live in a world that is heavily geared towards biological essentialism: anatomy is destiny and all that, you get born and the obstetrician or midwife takes a peek, sees a vagina and says “it’s a girl”. And that, in contrast to that, we have in this community a widespread tendency towards social essentialism: that everything is a social construct in which nothing is intrinsically as it is perceived, it is only perceived that way because we’ve been trained to categorize using those socially constructed criteria.
And ultimately I don’t like either essentialism and I don’t think essentialism works for our public message. If everything is social, what is the “it” that requires reimbursable medical intervention? If people who are men are male, whether because we see them that way because we’re biological essentialists or because we’re social essentialists, what needs modifying? Falling back to specific names for specific organs just narrows the spotlight, it doesn’t change the problem: if what makes this set of cells a penis instead of a clitoris and vagina is its physical morphology, the actual shape and structure, and its owner needs medical intervention to convert it to being a penis because he’s already male and has always been a man, we have an explanation, one that people can follow and understand, but by the same logic that we decided categorizing someone’s body male or female is social construction, someone else— VVVV, for instance, but also the insurance company— could say that categorizing that set of cells as a clitoris instead of a penis is also just social construction so why not devote more effort into explaining that it is already and always has been a penis?
