Using Transphobic Slurs Is Not Respectful (TW: transphobia, cissexism, dysphoria, and slurs)

It's about fifteen minutes before my first class starts, but I just had to write this.

A bunch of people in the geek scene at my school - yes, we have a geek scene and yes, I am in it (actually, a lot of trans people are geeky or nerdy, simply because geek and nerd "culture" is pretty accepting of misfits on the whole)  - were talking about weightlifting.

My (cis male) friend Jordan: You can lose like twenty to thirty pounds in three days with weightlifting.
A cis girl named Elena who I kind of know but not really: Noooo! My mom and I tried that and we just bulked up.
Jordan: Well you have to run afterward.
Elena: It's different for you. You're a guy. We have different genetic...you know...
Jordan: Genetic codes?
Elena: We just end up looking like...like he-shes.
Me (annoyed): He-shes?
Elena: Yeah, you know, they look like a guy when they're really a girl. Or they look like a girl when they're really a guy.
Me (pointedly): You mean they're transgender. (sighs, disgruntled) I have scholarship stuff to work on.

And then I left, knowing that if I spent one more moment around this girl, she'd end up making even more micro-aggressions and I'd lose my temper and scream at her.

To clarify, I think it was rather obvious that I'm genderqueer. I have an awesome new androgynous pixie cut that can look masculine when I want to look masculine, and feminine when I want to look feminine. The jeans I was wearing were relaxed-fit boyfriend cut, a style beloved by many in the genderqueer community for its androgyny and ability to minimize leg, hip, and butt curves. My graphic t-shirt (it has a tent logo across the chest and the words chat room underneath), which was layered over a sports bra and three tank tops, came from the men's section, and I had the sleeves on my hoodie rolled up because I'd heard it helped to distract from breasts (I don't have a binder, but with all the effort I put it, those things damn well better have at least looked like large, well-defined pecs).

I mean, sure, a lot of the geekier girls at my school tend to go for a more tomboyish style, but most of them don't actually have any real desire to not look like girls. They just don't care what other people think. None of them looked like me, actively trying to make their hair, bodies and faces look more masculine on some days but liking dresses and jewelry and makeup on others.

Now, on with the post as I explain what is so wrong with he-she - though in a fair world, I wouldn't even have to.

Trans men are not women. They are men. Regardless of what is between their legs or what they are trying to conceal under binders, hoodies, undershirts, whatever, they are men. They are hes. Trans women are not men. They are women. They are shes.

And above all, trans people, whether binary or not, are people. We aren't he-shes. We're not liars or pretenders or monsters - we're just ourselves. We have our own identities, our own experiences, our own lives. We expect that to be respected. We deserve to be respected. Our rights, our humanity, our safety...those things aren't up for debate.

But when cis people use transphobic slurs or refuse to respect our pronouns or out us without our permission, they're saying, "I don't respect you. I don't consider your identity valid and even if I've only just met you, I know you better than you know yourself. And even if I do know you, I still don't respect you. I don't consider your privacy or feelings valuable, even if I'm related to you."

And that's not cool. So. Cis people, let's lay off the he-shes, transvestites, shemales, and trannies, mmkay? Because while you may not understand our identities, they are just as valid as yours.

Names

Like most trans* (the asterick indicates the entire transgender spectrum) people, questions are complicated for me. Questions like "Are you a boy or a girl?" (unfortunately, I haven't been able to make myself look that androgynous since I was about eleven, but I still have to deal with annoying cissexist forms with their stupid little gender boxes) and "What kind of clothing do you like?" are easy for most cis people, but when you're genderfluid, the answers to those questions aren't so clean-cut.

Another question with an answer that isn't so clean-cut is "What is your name?"

If it's a formal setting, like a college interview, I will say Elizabeth. The annoyingly feminine name I'd always hated, handed down from my great-grandmother, when I was little because I thought it sounded like a little old lady at a tea party. When I was eleven, I got my first period and started overeating because the changes were supposed to be happening to a girl and that's not who I was. And after that, as I grew bigger and bigger, hiding behind too-big shirts and hating my body, hating the fat that was simply part of the wholeness that was me. It was me, and it was part of my identity. It spoke of the emotional scars of body hate, of looking down at my chest and hating what I saw because I knew what other people saw. As if other people have any right to dictate who I am, to teach me to hate myself. In those years, I hated Elizabeth because it was feminine, It was lace and silk and femininity, and I was hoodies and jeans and cotton, looking again and again down at my chest and wishing desperately that I was flat before the word binder even entered my vocabulary. I looked down at my chest and hated what I saw.

I need to work on that. Because while I still want a binder, while I'm still learning to love my body with all its monthly bloody cramping glory and D-cup breasts, preparing me for a child that I will likely never give birth to, there are times when I look down at my body, with its softness and curves and fatness and hate it even though it is mine. I'm learning to get past that, but I need to work on loving my body. I probably always will. That's part of being transgender, but I still wouldn't trade any part of my queerness for anything because like my body, my queerness is a part of my identity that I hated and denied myself for so long. But like my body, I'm learning to love my queerness because it's part of me. And it is a part that I need to love, everyone else's opinion of it be damned.

I'm learning to love myself, and with that self-love I can look people in the eye and say with the boldness, the determination, the courage of someone who is loved and loving and has the braveness of love inside of them, "You do not need to be in my life." And if they can't respect me for who I am, they won't be in my life.

Body love rant aside, let's continue with the post.

When I was fourteen, I frantically started making people call me Bess. It was the most androgynous short form of Elizabeth that I could think of, though at the time this wasn't a conscious factor in the decision-making process. At the time, I hadn't discovered words like genderqueer and genderfluid. It wouldn't be until I was sixteen that I discovered the words that described my life story. It wouldn't be until I was seventeen - last month - that I wrote a paper on nonbinary issues and basically came out to the teacher by mentioning my own experiences as a genderqueer person.

And it was also only a few months ago that I realized that the androgynous name I'd loved so much was actually pretty feminine...even if the femininity was only a social construct. So much about gender roles, especially in America, with its queerphobia and its white-normative, western-normative social conventions (I once read a book set in Indonesia where the men wore clothes that most Americans would call 'dresses' and had flowers in their hair. It was awesome.), is a social construct.

I told myself this and it was true, but that didn't change the fact that I still didn't feel completely comfortable in my own skin and my name was partly why. Experimenting with androgynous names, I finally found one that fit: Ari.

That doesn't mean I'm going to straight-up stop going by Bess, but it would be really great if people could call me Ari sometimes. Just to acknowledge that they respect my transgender identity and acknowledge that having breasts and bleeding from my crotch once a month and being able to give birth - pretty much the only good things, to me, about being afab (assigned female at birth) are that a) masculinity is more socially acceptable in afabs than femininity is in amabs because fuck logic and fuck this misogynistic culture we live in and b) the knowledge that my body is totally badass - don't necessarily make me female. Not only female, anyway.

I've started using the name Ari on various social networking sites. Not Facebook (yet, at least) because too many people would be confused. But my profile on NaNoWriMo says 'My name is Ari and I'm okay with female, male, or neutral pronouns' and my profile on Trevorspace lists my name as 'Bess or Ari.' And my fanfiction.net account says 'Ari' under the name section.

I have a friend who is also genderqueer - she doesn't really like labels, but she prefers 'masculine' or androgynous presentation pretty consistently, doesn't have any traditionally feminine interests, and got really upset when telling me her mom was talking about making her shop only in the section marketed to women - and people call her by masculine names (they alternate between masculine names and her birth name) because of this. So I'm hoping it works.