Slurs: Let's Mention Unmentionables

The least fun topic ever, now with a glossary!

On a certain Wonkette post last weekend, discussing the failures in media coverage of a certain gubernatorial candidate, I had an important occasion to mention the word “tr@**y” — a slur for a trans person used especially often for AMAB at birth folks and especially especially often in sexual contexts. CNN quoted the loathsome Mark Robinson using it and reproduced it in full, no asterisks. The same quote included Robinson’s use of the word “fucking,” which CNN fig-leafed with an asterisk over the “u”. In so doing, CNN showed that they cared quite a lot about the middle class’s conceptions of what is crass, but not at all about actual slurs used to hurt real people, so long as those real people are trans.

There was, then, good reason for me to reproduce the quote just exactly as CNN had rendered it so that Wonkette readers could understand just whom and what CNN values, and the people whom they don’t. Even so, reading the word wasn’t easy for the trans people in Wonkette’s audience. That led to a conversation with Boo Radley about the power of the slur, and how much anxiety it can inflict, even in a context where its reproduction is being used for good ends.

Others, too, have left comments or questions for me recently about this slur and others, and the insult (which I distinguish from a slur) “cissies.” As a result, it seems timely to consider slurs and insults, why some words aren’t said, and the many words that have been used as slurs against trans people. As in this weekend’s context, I think it’s important to be clear on exactly what these words are, so later on I’ll reproduce some of them in full. That’s a caution for those who would prefer to skip that section, but the section heads will also give you a last minute heads up so you should be able to read the rest of this essay comfortably.

What is a slur?

A slur in the sense that I’m using it here is not a mere insult, but an insult that both singles out a specific community or group and also has a history of close association with the advocacy or justification of harm, oppression, killings or even genocide. In fact, the association with justification of murder and genocide is far more common for such words that most would first think. For the people on the receiving end of these slurs, that close association means that it is completely reasonable to believe that the more a slur is used in an environment, the more dangerous that environment is to them.

The more a slur is used in an environment, the more dangerous that environment feels.

Why don’t we say them?

Words are magic to the exact same extent that intent is magic, which is to say not at all. But intent still matters, and so does the usage of a word. This helps explain why specific words aren’t ever wholly banned, though they can and do fall out of use. In the case of slurs, we should be thankful for that. If slur is defined the way I have done above, then we’re talking about words that inspire fear, and fear is incompatible with full participation in society. While protections for the freest possible expression are crafted with the same ultimate value (maximizing societal participation), when a word’s use harms social participation more than its banning diminishes participation, then there’s a strong case shunning the word.

But if shunning a word is understood as avoiding the imposition of fear, we can see why some uses of slurs receive little critique. In academic texts or contexts where the purpose is to investigate slurs with the hope of countering or mitigating their harm, the context should reduce the fear to much less than use of the same word on, say, an organized scouting trip where one teenager is singled out for slurs by others. This doesn’t mean that just because a slur appears in The Journal Of Applied Navelgazing that no one will be intimidated into lesser participation, but the risks are lower and they can be lowered further by how carefully the authors craft the context. Special contexts like this that reduce risks can justify different approaches to using or limiting use of a word.

This idea that slurs are not forbidden, but that we avoid them in order to avoid imposing fear and thus reducing participation is supported by how bigots use slurs. Frequently slurs are used with threats encouraging a person to leave a group or refrain from an activity, thus the clear intent and effect is to intimidate a person into less than full participation in society. In other words, bigots use these words to terrify and exclude, which increases our confidence that this understanding of what makes slurs distinct from mere insults is correct.

But importantly this understanding is also supported by when we find slurs acceptable. If two people truly are friends, and they’ve explored issues related to slurs (or one particular one), they might — when others are not around — joke amongst themselves in ways that use slurs to mock bigots rather than to intimidate one (or both) of the friends. The general prohibition against using slurs is not enforced because the reason for the prohibition, concern that someone might be intimidated out of participation, does not apply in that context.

Of course, humans being human, one can mistake the context and make a joke referencing a slur that nevertheless makes someone feel uncomfortable or afraid or intimidated. For careful and empathetic people, this is a reason to censor ourselves a little more than we think is necessary, just to make sure that no erroneous thought leads to slur use which leads to exclusion.

This gets complicated in practice.

Consider slurs that are aging out of relevance. The word “gay” once had terrifying power. After all, there was a reason why accused killers used “gay panic” as a defense, and why juries found killers of people labeled “gay” legally innocent or guilty but of lesser crimes than murder. But the word has been almost entirely reclaimed in the United States and Canada. Justifying the murder of people by mere reference to gayness has fallen out of favour. And within the gay community it’s easy to find examples of the use of “gay” to mean something positive. “That’s so gay!” still has some power as an insult, but it can also be used by gay people to call attention to common experience. This is a use whose purpose is to express sympathy. Gay might have been a slur once, and it might still be used occasionally as an insult, but it’s a slur no longer.

Dyke is different. Every major pride parade is led by women on motorcycles named as. a group “Dykes on Bikes.” Yet this summer on trans Reddit I was told that my internet ‘nym Crip Dyke, “includes a slur.” It’s hard to resolve the conflict between “dyke” as a slur and “dyke” as the decades-old name of literal heroes of Pride. But the conflict exists. While lesbian may be reclaimed to a similar extent as gay, dyke has not been. It rests upon a dangerous fulcrum point where using the word to describe any person other than oneself is fraught.

The n-word’s use is also complex (and oh, lord, do white people love to talk about its complexities). In some Black communities its use is a powerful statement of Black independence and self-determination. In others, its use is default and expected, with little special positive or negative meaning. But no one using the word within those communities is unaware of its power and its terroristic use by outsiders.

If a slur can be accepted so long as the particular use in question can be trusted not to threaten, to oppress, or to justify violence and dehumanization, then the acceptability is based upon contextual levels of trust. Some of this context might be actively communicated (e.g. by softening or dropping the final r sound), other aspects are passive. Outsiders to these social contexts haven’t built up the necessary trust to use the n-word safely, which justifies a general shunning of the word with exceptions for specific social contexts (specific social contexts, FOX News, which doesn’t include national broadcasting where the expression of the word will necessarily reach many different groups)

The power of the n-word still exists almost undiminished over the past 50 years (though possibly diminished over the 50 before that). But the taboo against its use has grown stronger. Not absolute, but stronger. And thus it’s easy to witness white spaces that ban the n-word because the group values Black cultural participation, while a Black space might use the n-word for its own purposes, possibly because it values Black self-determination.

As was mentioned, this gets complicated, but not necessarily because of opposing cultural values. Instead it may very well indicate shared cultural values (social participation, self-determination) that are simply prioritized differently in some contexts.

What does this mean for anti-trans language?

Slurs and their use say important things about whom a person can trust. Previously established trust can make the use of a slur privately acceptable because whatever use the slur has as a signifier of trust or distrust is overwhelmed by a shared history between people that have far more on which to base trust than the use of a slur. This is a new idea to many people, but I think it’s easier to grasp when considering slurs with which a person is already familiar, and arguably no slur is more familiar than the n-word which is why I discussed it above.

Having grasped that, I want you as readers to consider the history of the n-word’s use, not only during slavery but also during Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and in the decades since. Its power was created by people literally threatening death to someone on the basis of race in a context where people really were killed because of their race. The threat alone did not create the power. The rampant killing of Black people became associated with the word that so frequently preceded those killings. The word and the murders were linked. This is fundamentally different from mere insults like “dickhead” or “fartface” or “assgadget.”

Consider playground insults and how adults can use them casually, even humorously — as I did with fartface above. While to a second grader the word might be used quite seriously to communicate true and powerful anger, as adults we look back on the consequences that immediately followed the use of fartface and … we find nothing meaningful. Even if we ran away from the swings in fear (or made someone else run away from the swings), five minutes later we could easily have been swinging from the monkey bars. We don’t take the word seriously because we don’t take the consequences that follow from the word seriously.

This is one of the biggest barriers in getting people to recognize the seriousness of a slur. I, personally, have never murdered anyone after using or hearing the n-word. In fact, I’ve never witnessed a murder after using or hearing it. So as a white, non-violent person, it would be easy for me to overlook just how much intimidating power the word contains. But at least there is a long and well documented history of racist murder for me to research and understand, and that can give me the context I need to understand someone’s request to shut it the hell up with the n-word.

This is more difficult with the slurs aimed at trans people. Our murders are vastly fewer and also less well documented compared to the racist murders of Black people. Even with smaller tally, however, the percentage of our population murdered is terrifying. I have personally known people who died of murder or suicide, and all save one of my friends or friendly acquaintances that died this way were trans.

This isn’t enough to live my life paralyzed in fear, but it does mean that when I hear an anti-trans slur, it carries serious emotional power that an insult cannot match.

Without equating experiences, if you’ve been the target of slurs you can at least remember what that use meant to you and consider anti-trans language to have similar power. Not the same, never exactly the same, but sufficiently parallel that understanding one can increase understanding of another. And, hopefully, increase empathy as well.

So what are the anti-trans slurs? (Skip if you like.)

Here I wish to talk about what specific anti-trans slurs and near-slurs exist, and whether there is ever any reason to use them. I will reproduce them in full so that no one is mistaken about exactly what they are.

Tranny is first, and among the most powerfully threatening. This is the slur that Mark Robinson used when saying that he loves porn with trans actors. It doesn’t carry (or need) any deeper meaning than simply “trans person” because to the people who use the slur, to be a trans person is to be less than human, to be as worthless and disgusting as anyone wearing a human shape might be.

While it is most closely associated with MtF trans women who have not, or have not yet, had vaginoplasty, in the past that was largely because cissexists treated FtM people as irrelevant to nonexistent. The increase in FtM visibility corresponds directly with the increased use of tranny to intimidate FtM people.

This word accompanies many anti-trans attacks, and whether it is still as closely associated with MtF trans women as it once was, the historic close association with the group that tends to be murdered most forces every trans person who hears it to consider the potential level of threat. There are, of course, legitimate occasions for its use (I am using it here after all), but unless you’ve established unshakeable trust in your pro-trans bona fides, using this word always carries risks of intimidating and marginalizing people that any Pervert Justice reader should want to welcome.

There are sometimes attempts by trans people to use tranny as a way of daring cis people to react. These uses of tranny can function as a test or challenge. Some reactions might tell a trans person that the listener is not to be trusted. Non-reactions might establish a certain level of trust. And certain reactions might tell a trans person that the listener can be embraced, that they fully support not merely trans humanity, but trans resistance against cissexism.

If you have the sort of relationship with the trans person in question where you can ask them at a later date, in a less emotionally charged atmosphere, what they intended and what they hoped for in response, asking for clarification is a good idea.

Tranny is definitely a slur even if sometimes used within a pro-trans context, and its use should generally be avoided as certainly as one avoids the n-word and similarly stigmatizing words that target women or queer folk or others.

Trap is a less common but in some ways more frightening word. While tranny has grown in its generality as bigots begin to apply it to FtM folks, trap has stayed close to its original meaning and even become more common in some circles. It is used to mean an MtF trans person who in physical appearance passes for cissexual and is attractive according to heterosexual norms.

The slur buys into many stereotypes, both sexist and cissexist, but ultimately hinges on ideas that trans women are intent on lying to straight cis men in order to have sex with them, revealing that they are trans after it is too late for the cis man to avoid gay cooties. Although most commonly used for trans women who have not (yet) undergone vaginoplasty, it has been used for women who have had such surgeries. The word “trap” plays a key role in the “trans panic” defense that justifies the murders of trans people through describing cis men as victims of trans women’s deceptions. The core idea is that cis men are reasonable to lose control over their murderous emotions when they learn that someone they previously thought to be cis is, in fact, trans.

Though the language is quite directly connected to justifying our murders, to those who oppose trans humanity, “trap” is sometimes considered a compliment, an indication that a trans person has convincingly simulated a “real” woman and thus a “real” human being.

The danger, of course, is that for those who buy into the notion that to be fully trans is to be less than human, a person being called a trap loses the temporary humanity granted to them the moment they fail to pass as cis. This conditional humanity is brutally exhausting, akin to the trope of walking on eggshells, but eggshells covering a pit full of knives directed at your face and breasts and genitals.

To live as a trap is to live life trapped.

Though in theory I can imagine someone wanting to reclaim the word, reclamation only truly works when the insult behind the word is nothing more or less than who one is. While tranny is synonymous with “trans person” and reclaiming it can mean sending a message that being trans is not the same as being bad or valueless, trap isn’t merely asserting that someone is trans, but also that someone is a liar who wishes to trick and harm others. There probably is no good use of “trap” in any sense relating too trans people, so use of trap in this way should be avoided even more strongly than use of tranny. Fortunately the slur is not as widespread as tranny, and isn’t common enough to justify avoid using the word trap in its common senses that have nothing to do with trans people or bodies or stereotypes or honesty.

Shemale is exclusively used for MtF trans people who have not undergone vaginoplasty. It is most common in porn, and it is considered extremely insulting, but is less associated with threats of murder or with justifications of murder. I have a hard time determining whether, under the definition of slur used in this essay, shemale is more insult or slur. Whichever it is, it is still degrading and should not be used.

The similar Ladyboy is most commonly used for people of asian ethnicity who might otherwise be called shemale. In other words, it is highly sexualized and almost porn specific, though with a racist component grafted on. Do not use.

Hermaphrodite is rarely used for trans people, but on occasion it will be. It is more commonly applied to intersex people. Originally a medical term supposedly without value judgement, its consistent use to justify harmful surgeries on babies and young children has rendered it toxic. Unless you, yourself, were subjected to these surgeries as a child, I’d stay far away from this one.

Terms that incorporate anti-trans slurs.

These terms are used for people who are attracted to trans folks, have relationships with trans folks, or seek out trans folks for short term sex.

Tranny chaser is the original catch-all term for such people. Trans-attracted persons have never been as targeted for violence, abuse and harassment as trans people themselves. Unsurprisingly, this term has thus never acquired the power of a slur, but it is still frequently considered insulting. Because of the seemingly high incidence of domestic violence¹ targeting trans people, when used by trans folks it often carries the connotation that the person is someone to be afraid of. The main reason to avoid its use is that it includes the word tranny within it.

Chaser is the same as tranny chaser, but with the slur removed. It still carries the connotation that trans people should be cautious around the person designated, but otherwise it’s mostly neutral and can sometimes even be an affectionate term. If you wish to be respectful to the chaser, it’s probably more kind and respectful to use terms like “trans-attracted” or queer or genderqueer (a word which has many meanings of which this is only one). If you don’t care about their feelings, especially if they are acting obsessively or scaring you or a friend with their heavy handed pursuit, this word is fine to use. (Indeed it is frequently used in trans communities.)

Trap hunter is the more extreme version of tranny chaser and implies that the person is only sexually interested in a trans woman who can and will pass as cis. Someone who is especially attracted to trans women whom other people see as cis can be particularly dangerous as a partner if they do not want others to know that they are dating someone trans. When used in this way, the conditionial humanity of trans people implied by the slur “trap” is often not present. At least, as the speaker of trap hunter you will probably not be assumed to agree with this view of conditional trans humanity. Rather it is taken as a statement that the speaker doesn’t believe that the target of the term accepts and supports the unconditional humanity of trans persons. To call someone a trap hunter is typically to say that you believe any trans person dating them is in extreme danger. While trap on its own is unacceptable in all but a few cases, embedding trap within “trap hunter” can be one of those cases. Personally I still wouldn’t use it, but I’ve been in the room when friends used it with each other to talk about which people in the community gave off frightening vibes or had a history of violence against trans people. The twisted world view of people who use the term trap really does make them terrifying.

Whew! Is that everything?

Slurs are a big topic, and we might revisit them in the future, but for now this clarifies all the questions that came up last week while covering Mark Robinson. Given that this has already reached 3,800 words, I think it’s time to give this a rest.

As always, however, your comments, especially ones with disagreement or questions, are welcome below. With a topic as difficult as this one, I’m bound to get something wrong here or there. I hope you won’t be shy about helping me learn more and get better.

Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!

1. I say “seemingly” because it’s impossible to get unbiased samples. While the data we do have is entirely consistent with DV rates the same as or higher than other communities experience, proving an exact level of DV is not currently possible — and won’t be until being trans is no longer stigmatized, thus making it easy to ensure demographically representative samples. Nonetheless, my opinion, if that means anything to you, is that DV targeting trans people is somewhat (but not dramatically) higher than the DV rate targeting heterosexual cis women.