What Words Mean

I often chide my students for assuming too much knowledge on the part of their reader.  Don’t be an egocentric writer, I will tell them.  Explain yourself, I say.  Give context.  And yet, I find I am failing to give context in this blog as I have had a few readers tell me privately they are confused about certain terms I am using.

Also, on Facebook, an old graduate school friend of mine went on an inebriated transphobic rant about “cisnet” (she’s confusing it with fishnets, I’m sure), and he/she/they, and was slurring her typing with indignity about people changing language for the transgenders.  Okay, woman, slow your roll. 

That’s what I probably should have said to her. Slow your roll.  Calm the fuck down.  Think about what you’re typing there, fellow ENGLISH major. I didn’t say any of these things because I was furious. I love far too many transgender people, have had far too many transgender students, have read far too many stories about violence and discrimination against transgender people to tolerate this fishnet cishet woman any longer.   I unfriended her.  Then, I wrote my own Facebook rant about bigots and how they need to take their trash talking to the curb. 

Why did I unfriend this old grad school friend so quickly instead of trying to educate her, help her see the other side of things?  Because listen, if someone loves English, language, and literature so much they pursue it all the way to graduate school, then they have no excuse for not understanding that language is constantly changing, that language is organic, that language is a tool for describing our world, not a calcified piece of wood buried beneath layers.  She knows what she’s saying.

Language is constantly changing; language is organic; language is a tool for describing our world, not a calcified piece of wood buried beneath layers. 

I do want to clarify a couple of her “misunderstandings” with language.  She claimed she didn’t know what cisnet is or why we even need the concept of cisnet.

First.  It’s cishet, not cisnet, or fishnet.  Cisgender.  Heterosexual. 

Cisgender:  On the same side.  Comfortable with the gender you were “assigned” at birth.  Intersex people are often “assigned” a sex (a.k.a. gender) at birth, so I’m guessing this is where the language of “assigned at birth” originates.  Wait.  Okay.  Now I have to define other words, right?

Intersex: Someone born with the sex organs of male and female.  Yes, there are many intersex people among us.  And sometimes, intersex people don’t even know they’re intersex (for various reasons) and sometimes it’s not necessarily the sex organs that make a person intersex — it could be their chromosomal make-up — but whatever the case, it is actually possible you could be intersex and not know it.  I did a Google search and it looks like 1.7% of people are intersex.

Assigned at birth:  This is the gender of the baby that the doctor announces to the momma and the other parents and guardians and whoever else is in or near the birthing room related to the baby.  We’ve all it heard it.  It’s a boy!  It’s a girl!   The doctor (or whoever signs the birth certificate) is assigning a gender at birth.  The trans community uses the abbreviation: AMAB or AFAB.  This means “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth.”  I was assigned female at birth, and I’m okay with that, so that means I am…

Cisgender

Sort of.  I’m what is called “gender nonconforming” or “gender fluid” or “queer” (because I’m different, see). Tallie keeps telling me I can fall under the trans umbrella because I am “across from” my assigned gender. 

But, I tell her, I’m not across from, because I’m fine with being a woman, I just don’t buy what “the man” is telling me about how I am supposed to dress and act.   I’m not digging the gender expression that my assigned “sex” is supposed to dig.

I have assumed for years that the “trans” in transgender, or the old-school term – transexual, meant “transition.”  Tallie claims “trans” means “across from” and this is why nonbinary or genderqueerfluidbadassmotherfuckers also fall under the trans umbrella.

Tallie’s oldest kid is trans, and they explained this same thing to me over a year ago, yet here I am, almost ready to calcify, not being able to brighten up my neuropathways with some new knowledge.  I’ll come around.  Probably.  No doubt.

Just as I think you, my dear reader, are coming around – although, I’ll bet you were here all along. 

So.  What other words need to be explained? 

My former grad school friend was babbling on about her annoyance with he/she/they.

He/she/they are pronouns.  We use them to refer to people when we don’t want to use their names.  Language would suck without pronouns.  Think about this sentence:  Mary is driving Mary back to Mary’s house because Mary forgot Mary’s wallet, and Mary needs it for Mary’s night out with the girls, girls also named Mary.

We need fucking pronouns!

But, sometimes people are uncomfortable with the gender assumptions that go along with pronouns.   I’ve been pissed about pronouns for eons.  Seriously.  For all of English language’s existence, the dominant pronoun has been male.  The default has been he.  Fuck that shit!  Look.  Even I do it.  Look how I listed the pronouns.  Yeah, skip back a couple paragraphs.  You see that?  I wrote HE/she/they.  Why didn’t I write SHE/he/they?  Or, THEY/she/he?   Default.  Male.  It’s insidious.

We need pronouns, so why would anyone complain about using accurate pronouns?  Do they want to make the language even more complicated than it is? 

Did you notice how, in the previous sentence, I used the “plural” pronoun “they” to refer to one person?  Do you see how natural that is?

What the hell is so hard about using “they” for someone who doesn’t identify with the gender expression of male or female.  We genderqueercoolassmotherfuckers may not like being tied down to one of those boring-ass male or female genders.  We like to keep our options open.

And, let me tell you something else.  If a transgender woman tells you to use her/she, you better use her/she, because otherwise you’re a rude jerk.  What makes your nearly calcified perspective of the world more valid than another person’s dignity?

The same goes for calling a transgender man by his pronouns, too. 

Transgender woman: A person who was assigned male at birth (AMAB), but whose entire being is female, who can’t “force” herself to be male, though she’s probably tried damn hard to, and who has been told by almost every living human around her that her sense of herself is wrong.

Transgender man:  A person who was assigned female at birth (AFAB), but whose entire being wants to barbeque and scratch his balls.  Sorry, guys.  Women are more complex, and you know it.

Anyway, I’m done schooling the old grad school friend of mine who is no longer my friend.  She’s not reading this blog anyway, so I’m really not schooling her.  Reading this would probably make her calcified brain explode, and not in a good new nueropathways kind of way, either.

Let’s move on.  One of my actual friends, who I’ve known a lot longer than that English major poser, is genuinely curious and wants to learn, and she asked me to explain the difference between gender and sex.

Gender: Expression.  How the person presents to the world.

Sex: I like sex!  But seriously. Give people their privacy.  Jeez.  Why do we always want to know about what goes on in people’s bedrooms?  So what if I’m bisexual? So what if she’s a lesbian?  Who cares if he’s gay? I don’t care. Let’s give it up for the polyamorous folx! Don’t leave out the asexuals. Wait. They want to be left out. And where my demisexuals at? None of my frigging business. And none of yours.

I must admit, I am curious about other people’s sex lives, because I like sex! (I mean, really. I wrote an entire book about a cishet chick who can’t keep her hands to herself.) And so do you. And that’s why you want to know what goes on in other people’s bedrooms. Pervert!

Gender is what we show the world.  Gender is a construct, but a construct deeply rooted in our sense of self, and therefore not one that can be forced on people.

A person’s sexual attractions have nothing to do with their gender expression, but rather with their gender preference in a partner.  When two cisgender people like each other, and these two cisgender people only have sex with people of the opposite gender, they are considered heterosexual.

Cisgender + Heterosexual = Cishet.  

Simple enough.  

Why do we shorten language like this? We live in the age of Twitter and texting and sliding into DMs. And I’m sure the same people who complain about needing to “learn” new language because of the “Wokes” are quick to learn texting shortcuts. We use shortened language because our tools demand it.  Twitter, chatrooms, texting et al have compressed our language into miniature sausages. LOL.  

DMs.  Cishet. 

Them/They

You bet.

There you have it.  A short, simple lesson on the fluidity of both language and gender.

Yours,

A nonbinary, yet strangely still cis, bisexual – but more accurately now that I am with a transwoman, pansexual — genderqueerandfabulous woman.