Woman Plus…

Or how to forget the label and concentrate on the quality of the cloth

Adapted from an original address to subscribers to the Press for Change News Service - October 97

By Christine Burns

Copyright © 1997, 1998 Christine Burns

One of the things that’s getting to be very daunting these days, when I settle down on a Friday night to deal with the week’s electronic mail, is the sheer overwhelming volume of it, inflated by all the discussions between members of the various circulation lists I subscribe to.

… And one of the most active of those lists these days is the "forum" which we established for Press for Change campaigners and followers to exchange their ideas and views.

The postbag recently hit a new all-time record, however, with well over a hundred messages to read and, when I’d finally waded through them all for the FIRST time, I realised why.

If you’re not a subscriber to a list like UKPFC-forum, then perhaps it’s worth explaining that the idea behind the list is that somebody will post an idea or article for discussion, as you might do on a noticeboard, and everybody who subscribes to the "list" will receive a copy as though it had been sent to them in person.  Any member who wishes to reply can then do so, so long as it keeps to the forum’s rules for debate, and everybody will then see that reply and can respond to that, in turn.  So it goes on …

Forums can sometimes be very sleepy places.  At other times, there will be something that catches everyone’s imagination, or pushes the wrong button for them, and then suddenly you can be knee deep in electronic indignation in a matter of hours.

This was one of those occasions.  And the cause was something that goes to the very heart of the transsexual rights campaign … to the very thing that seems so hard for others to understand, and yet which unites Press for Change with just about every other human rights lobby, in common cause.

The reason for all the fuss was that somebody had raised the question of labels … what to call oneself … what others should call you … and (perhaps more importantly) who owns the right to accord labels to people in the first place.

It started with a discussion that is hardly new, about the semantics of the term "transsexual" … the effects of its’ common usage as a noun rather than an adjective, the confusion and misunderstanding caused by the root word "sexual" which it is based on, and whether or not the prefix "trans" makes the word meaningful, even as an adjective, after the completion of an individual’s physical journey from one anatomical model to the other.

Put that way (and I think this does summarise the major threads of the argument) it all may all sound a wee bit academic at a distance, but that would be to miss the point … and although few correspondents actually GOT to the point, there’s no mistaking that the unspoken crux is instinctively felt and understood implicitly by all transsexual people … to the extent that feelings were so strong that successive attempts to limit an increasingly forceful statement of dearly-held views fell on deaf ears.  The forum’s membership had desperately important and heartfelt things to say about labelling … and nobody and nothing was going to stop them saying their piece!

Reading all this anger on the screen (and you could almost hear the keyboards being hammered at speed in the rush to push home a point) my first instinct was to feel disappointed … disappointed to see people arguing with such force over something they fundamentally agreed upon … and swamping the forum to a degree that other very important news that week was almost forgotten.  When I watched over a hundred messages cascade down the line, especially when it descends to people calling each other names, I caught myself wondering whether this was really what we’d intended when we set the forum up … and whether arguments of such ferocity might not threaten its’whole purpose.

As I read further, however, I became equally aware that something of value had taken place too … for behind the superficial differences lay a strong and common thread.  The correspondents in the forum all had different ways of expressing it, but the things they had in common were the realisation that labels matter, that they matter even more when somebody else controls the definition and application of the label … and that it’s OK to be angry about that.

For some people, this gets dressed up as an argument about technical semantics … questions of whether the prefix "trans" is appropriate when you’ve stopped, or whether "sexual" means the whole word is etymologically flawed from the outset.

This isn’t unique, however … as any brown or dark orange-coloured person can’t have failed to want to point out when they’re described as "black" … or when any of us have wrestled with the choice of whether to "man" an exhibition stand, or "staff" it.

Words aren’t LEGO though … they’re not restricted to having meanings that are simply the sum of their parts … and to concentrate an argument on the assumption that they are is to carry on missing the point.

The word "black" isn’t contentious just because it fails to correctly describe the skin colour of the majority of people it’s applied to, but because of all the meanings which it carries when somebody else (a non-black person) uses it to LABEL somebody else … and that’s the point, then, when it becomes synonymous with the huge wealth of meaning and political significance which it shares with single-meaning words like "Nigger".

You can do the same in just about every other area of human power-broking too …

"Girl" isn’t wrong because it inaccurately describes a woman in her twenties and beyond … but because of the shared understanding of oppression conveyed between the person USING the term, and the person having it applied to them.

"Cripple" isn’t wrong because it’s unfashionable these days … but because of what it suggests about the user’s evaluation of the person they’re applying it to … making the lack of a limb or some other disability into the characteristic which DEFINES that person, rather than an adjective which simply adds to our overall picture of them.

No … what matters … and what all these examples have in common … is WHO applies the label, and the assumptions which the usage of the label (or any substitute term) then leads to.

Think of some labels you could use for yourself … woman, man, lover, wife, husband, daughter, son, adult, child, worker, unemployed…

With the deliberate exception of the last one, these are all terms which we can appropriate to describe ourselves and be happy to be described AS, so long as they’re appropriate.  Labels are OK, then, if we think that they describe us accurately and favourably … and if we’d therefore be as happy to volunteer them as to have them applied.

But what if we’re not happy with the label, because someone else has defined it inaccurately and seeks to pin it on us, inappropriately and without our consent?

The emotive thing about labels, therefore, is who owns the definition, and who does the pinning … and in the huge outpouring of feeling on the subject in my postbag, the membership of UKPFC-forum were, in effect, showing how they shared the anger and frustration and helplessness of anybody who has ever been disempowered by society’s misuse of a word.

But what is there to do about it?

Well, as somebody pointed out in the midst of the discussion … merely changing the word doesn’t address the issue.  You may call it manure or fertiliser … faeces even … but who wants it on their shoe?  "Physically challenged" people still find there’s a whole heap of things they can’t do in our society … and whether you call me a "woman" or a "girl" doesn’t alter the reality of the fact that my career advancement contains obstacles which a "boy" or a "man" wouldn’t face.  Who doesn’t (secretly) translate "person of colour" to a shorter, more pronounceable form, when thinking privately about the implications of that term? What distinguishes those who do, however, is the associations attached to the idea of ethnicity, and to all the synonyms and euphemisms coined to bury the unpleasant assumptions of our ancestors.

One thing we CAN do is to keep the word, and try changing the associations … which is what the last six years of PFC’s campaigning have subtly set out to do.  The hundreds of people now flocking to join the campaign, and the growing support in legal and governmental circles have only happened because we’ve rewritten the definition of a word.

The problem for this community is that it’s a bit like an iceberg … with a large part of the mass totally invisible to the world.  What’s seen is what’s visible … and unless you go out of your way to attach yourself to the term … to say, "Look … I’m transsexual too, your model’s wrong" then the term (and those which replace it) will ALWAYS be an innaccurate reflection of the bit that sticks out of the water.  For that reason, although it seems odd, when appearing for PFC I insist on being captioned as a "transsexual woman" … a woman to whom a stigmatic word inappropriately applies … so that, for me, the word is something I own … and which ceases to be oppressive, because I’m defining what it means and it becomes a symbol of my own pride.

But then the word "pride" seems to give a lot of people problems … so much so that many have questionned how on earth I could express pride in having once been transsexual, and acknowledging that label, as many others, as a qualification of my womanhood…

I’m an ENGLISH woman, a WORKING woman, a DIVORCED woman, a CARING woman, a HAPPY woman … all adjectival qualifications which I can happily presume to give myself and which colour the picture you have of me.

If I want to do so I can add (and have to justify) some other adjectives too … words like CLEVER and RESPECTED which we are all taught, from birth, to regard as labels which are supposed to be the gift of others to bestow upon us.  It’s only considered "proper" to describe ourselves in neutral or self-effacing terms.

But if I’m to claim the adjective "RESPECTED" then I also have to acknowledge that a large measure of the respect I enjoy stems from two things I was born with … or, more specifically, the way in which I’ve used them…

There is no praise to be be earned from having a good brain and failing to use it.  So, the adjective "clever" only applies if you’ve done something of worth with your mind.  Equally there is, as we all know, no praise to be earned from being transsexual and being merely a "victim" to it.

So when I use the words PRIDE and TRANSSEXUAL in the same sentence the congruence comes about through the pride I now have in what I have done-with and made-of that part of the hand I was dealt … and of course that achievement is only visible to others when they’re aware of what it is.  Then the word means that I’m not a woman LESS something … but a woman PLUS.

Words can be chains or they can be the means of asserting individualism and pride.  It depends on who takes the initiative, and what you make them mean.  This week’s huge and vocal forum discussion has shown, however, that no matter what stage individual forum members may have reached in truly integrating and owning their condition, a word matters … and has the power to crush and enslave us all … unless WE seek to own and define it in our own image.

A word that fails to descibe something meaningful soon falls out of use.  Language is a living thing, and words either survive by acquiring new uses, or they’re replaced.

So, blacks, girls, cripples, homosexuals … and transsexual people … the message can never be repeated often enough … we SHARE a common discrimination, characterised by the desire of others to label and hence control and define our lives to fit a place under theirs.

We can accept the label … we can cosmetically alter the word used to describe the prejudice … or we can fight back … and to do that first means reclaiming the language used to describe us.