If you benefit from telling people “I go by ‘she/her’,” then you don’t want to lose the words “she” and “her” from your vocabulary, because you’re using them for something!
The way I’d summarise my argument is something like:
If you’re trans, the benefits of degendering pronouns are long term. There’s something that you’d have to remove in the middle of the process that benefits trans women, but doesn’t bring benefits to any other trans group. This is why I think of all trans people, I’ve met most opposition from trans women.
I think your summary has more to do with my ideal terminal state, and notably it’s symmetric (trans men should in theory agree with that as much as trans women), even though opposition is in my experience assymetric.
Makes me curious about trans women from countries that do not have gendered pronouns—what short explanations do they use? (Also, how do they know whether they are being misgendered?)
I’ve chatted with a few Japanese trans men and women online (although nobody who considered themself non-binary).
A relatively common complaint was being “-Kun”d or “-Chan”d (somewhat gendered Japanese name suffixes), and while I don’t know enough Japanese to fully understand, they complained about gendered uses of keigo (kind of polite speech) at/about them.
It’s worth noting that the Japanese queer community has a lot of English influence though, so a surprising portion of Japanese trans people seem to have preferred English pronouns.
Would this be a fair summary?
If you benefit from telling people “I go by ‘she/her’,” then you don’t want to lose the words “she” and “her” from your vocabulary, because you’re using them for something!
Hi Karl, thanks for the typo pointers!
The way I’d summarise my argument is something like:
If you’re trans, the benefits of degendering pronouns are long term. There’s something that you’d have to remove in the middle of the process that benefits trans women, but doesn’t bring benefits to any other trans group. This is why I think of all trans people, I’ve met most opposition from trans women.
I think your summary has more to do with my ideal terminal state, and notably it’s symmetric (trans men should in theory agree with that as much as trans women), even though opposition is in my experience assymetric.
Makes me curious about trans women from countries that do not have gendered pronouns—what short explanations do they use? (Also, how do they know whether they are being misgendered?)
I’ve chatted with a few Japanese trans men and women online (although nobody who considered themself non-binary).
A relatively common complaint was being “-Kun”d or “-Chan”d (somewhat gendered Japanese name suffixes), and while I don’t know enough Japanese to fully understand, they complained about gendered uses of keigo (kind of polite speech) at/about them.
It’s worth noting that the Japanese queer community has a lot of English influence though, so a surprising portion of Japanese trans people seem to have preferred English pronouns.