Chapter 975, in which Crip Dyke goes off on a melonfucker

Ooh, do not get in the way of this one.

We were talking about definitions just a bit ago, right? That was me being all academic and pedantic and very, very definitely helpful and not at all needlessly geeky. This is not that. This is me reacting to something I read on Wonkette today. The article was about a trans woman at Space Camp, but the thing I want to write about is this bit, a note from a fucked up, hateful human being who decided to accuse that trans woman of … being trans. Which, you know, in his world is a pretty horrible crime. Bigot said in part:

“She said, ‘I can assure you that your kid’s safety is my number one priority, and no males are allowed in female dorms, and no females are allowed in male dorms.’ So I asked, do you allow transgenders in?”

Emphasis mine.

Well, first let me say, "Thank you Wonkette Author Sara, you big ol' queerbo dorkosaurus space nerd."

After that though, let me just say for EVERYFUCKINGBODY WHAT HAS A BODY, when you see the words "transsexual" or "transgender" or "trans," you do not need to be freaking out. HOWEVER, when you see any of those three words as a noun, IT'S TIME TO FREAK THE FUCK OUT.

I have been a trans 911 operator, a trans ethics consultant, a trans fuckup, a trans programmer, and even a trans home owner. I have never been "a trans."

There is one reason and one reason only to do what this fucked up, hatred-poisoned cis man did with his, "do you allow transgenders in?" phrasing, and that is to portray transness as something that entirely dominates who a person is and can be. To the people who use "a transsexual" the purpose is not to list an important feature, but to name the only defining feature, to assert that no other features matter, to stand firm on the ground that to know this one thing about me is to know me entire.

One of the reasons that people today think that "transsexual" is a dirty word that must not be spoken is that for decades it was used as exactly this type of noun, a defining categorization, a cage. You didn't hear "a transsexual schoolteacher" or "a 9th level transsexual paladin in full plate armour" before 1990. There's nothing inherently wrong with crossing lines of physical sex instead of crossing lines of gender, but somehow cis people were hard to train out of using transsexual as a noun while still using it as an adjective. And so now we have collapsed categories and okay, what the fuck ever. It bugs me that I'd like to be able to say, "this is an important part of me," without having it be a slur but instead I have to say, "Well, I'm transgender, but actually my gender is incredibly boring and looks like a good 30% to 40% of what you'll see from any queer woman in Cascadia, cis or trans, and no one would bat an eye about my gender except that my biological sex at birth wasn't what they guessed it was." It's not nearly as pithy as saying, "I'm a sarcastic transsexual asshole," but language evolves. I get it.

But if I have to put up with language evolving then so do these cissexists. So I'm giving you all permission to say — every time you hear this shit — "Did you just use [trans/ transgender/ transsexual] as a NOUN? Whoa if true, because Crip Dyke says you're a par-boiled bigot if you do that. Better take it back before I give her a link to this comment."

I don't care how busy it keeps me. I'm gonna bust a rhetorical foot off in the rhetorical ass of every single one of these melonfucking Bluetooth assgadgets, because this is the language that separates, that dehumanizes, that isolates. This is the way us produces them.

If we don't want the already horrifying state of cissexist affairs to get worse, we have to kick this language in its cissexual balls. Every. Single. Time.