A Cursory Contradiction
Are people who use contradictory labels harming the “true” members of that group? An essay on good faith identification and “conflicting” & “contradictory” queer and trans identification.
Recently I’ve seen a lot of discussions about queer and/or trans people using "labels they shouldn't use", here meaning, a label that the person wouldn't fit the dictionary definition of.
While I get the urge to go "words mean things for a reason, definitions serve a purpose" this rests on a misunderstanding of how language functions fundamentally. Language is a living thing that is constantly evolving, that changes depending on location, context, the relationships between the people using language. Because of this, it is reductive and unhelpful to meet a complex human being with the retort of "words mean things" when they are using a term to express or identify or label themselves that you don't believe they should be "allowed" to use. I could go into a whole thing here about how the policing of language creates power dynamics, because the people who control language, control how things are defined and control how they are perceived - but that's not actually the point I want to make. My point is about the second retort I've seen popping up around here these days to affirm the position that it's a bad thing to use a label that you do not fit into the dictionary definition of.
“If you use a label that you should not be using, and you enter a space with the people who truly belong to this category, they will be under the assumption that you share the same experiences, and when they find out that you do not, they will feel betrayed and harmed and like their privacy and trust has been taken advantage of.”
While I understand this retort on its face, it is again, a position that is reductionist, along with also being reactionary. To understand where I’m coming from you first have to understand (and genuinely believe in) good faith identification. Good faith identification is when someone adapts a label or identification in good faith, meaning they are not doing it to provoke people, to satirize something, to directly harm a group of people, or some other bad faith reason to adapt a label. If you believe in good faith identification, and you believe people when they tell you how they identify, then you can actually get to the next steps of understanding the intricacies of their identity. If you reject good faith identifications that confuse you, make you feel uncomfortable or you don’t feel should be allowed, you have created a dynamic where you become the arbiter of identity, no further explanation required. “You can always tell”, huh? Enough that you feel comfortable ejecting someone who is not disrupting the space, from the space, based on the assumption that you have nothing in common? That’s a reactionary impulse stemming from reducing the person in front of you to the perception that you and you alone have of them. How can you tell someone their existence is contradictory unless you know them intimately? How will you determine who among you are true members of the group? How will you do this continually without then establishing an in-group and out-group within your own accepted ranks? Ask yourself these questions if this is how you feel. I would love to hear how you would navigate these things if you are someone who desires a community with all different kinds of queer and trans people, and if you desire ultimate liberation for us all. If you don’t believe in good faith identification whatsoever, and you think people who use labels that seem conflicting or that you feel they shouldn't be “allowed” to use, you can probably just stop reading here, though, because I don’t think I’ll get through to you, and this piece isn’t actually about the intricacies of good faith identification, which is something I could write dozens and dozens of pages about. It is a rhetorical plea to those who do not desire the role of the arbiter of identities to deconstruct their discomfort with conflicting identities to grow toward expanding solidarity and ultimate liberation.
If you are someone who believes in good faith identification and does not reject people who use conflicting labels or labels that they do not neatly fit within the societally agreed upon and/or dictionary definition of, but you are still uncomfortable with it and think of it as deceptive and harmful for people to enter spaces, continue on.
So - someone uses a label in good faith, and you do not reject them, but you’re uncomfortable and feel betrayed and hurt, and to avoid this you believe that these people should simply not join these spaces, instead opting to be a part of more inclusive ones, as not to mislead anyone. This is also reductive and reactionary. Even though you don’t reject or deny the validity of their identity, you do not want to seek any further information or understand or commune with this person at all. Fair, nobody has to be in community with anyone else, we aren’t owed automatic acceptance into intimate community spaces anyways, right? The reason this breaks down is that there is no possible way you don’t end up excluding people who actually do fit your dictionary, societally agreed upon definition , because you deny them the opportunity to express themselves and articulate their experiences to you, and oftentimes even when someone does explain, they are already being perceived as an infiltrator and outsider, so the articulation of their experiences is taken in bad faith and disregarded.
TDLR: If you think people using conflicting labels or labels you don’t think they fit the definition of is harmful and bad and a betrayal, you are participating in politics of identity that harm movements overall, when the goal is collective liberation. In the book “Power In Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics” by Sidney Tarrow, she comments on the ways that communing around identity causes temporary solidarity and leads to movements that do not last stating, “It is only by sustaining collective action against antagonists that a contentious episode [things like riots, short-lived group structures] becomes a social movement. Common purposes, collective identities, and identifiable challenges help movements to do this; but unless they can maintain their challenge, movements will evaporate into the kind of individualistic resentment that James Scott calls “resistance” (1985), will harden into intellectual or religious sects, or their members will defect from activism into isolation.”
If you believe this line of logic, that those with contradictory labels are harmful to you and others like you, you admit that an identification with a label and a physical/visual cue that you categorize with that specific identification is what it takes for you to see someone as aligned with you and your experiences, and this is what leads you to the next step of communing and entering into intimate spaces with that person, and actually getting to know them and their experiences and deciding to fight for liberation with them. The alternative, and what I believe is the way that queer + trans spaces should function is by reversing these things. We accept one another's good faith identifications, we get to know one another’s experiences, and we commune around our similarities and differences, because there will be differences even in groups where everyone comes from extremely similar paths in life. The words we use to describe ourselves are for ourselves, and for other people. They are to signal to others something we want them to know about ourselves. If someone shows up in a space for someone of a specific experience, but you do not perceive them as being someone of that experience, so you automatically view them as an infiltrator and a deceiver - you have judged a book by it’s cover, and have turned away someone desiring community with you because you refuse to allow space for their expanse of humanity.
The ways that we label ourselves and the identities we share actually tell us very little about how well we would function as a part of a community together. A label does not encompass all of the oppressive or celebratory experiences a human being could have. You know what does? The person. You have to get to know them to know if their experiences align with yours, instead of assuming based on a label that they do, because a label doesn’t actually mean that, in spite of the dictionary definitions and societally agreed upon definitions. There are people who were raised completely opposite the way that you were, that have experienced some of the same exact things you struggle deeply with. There are people who grew up extremely similarly to you who are nothing like you today. There are people who use the same labels you use who have no experiences in line with yours, or maybe just one or two, and literally nothing else. There are people who use none of the labels you use whose lives look like companion pieces to yours. And you rob yourself of this when you view these people as infiltrators and deceivers. You feed into the concept that bad faith is the dominant force, that people who enter into these spaces are doing it to hurt you, and not to find community, to participate in building safety and to contribute joy and love. Why would you want to believe that? I promise you there are so many people in this world who want to be good to you. Who want to find someone like you to be good to, to build with, to share similarities and differences with. Centering the micro-differences of our identities before our goals toward collective liberation is such a clear contributor toward the fractures in our movements as trans people, a miniscule marginalized population of people that sincerely need all the allies we can get. We generally accept, as trans people, that all trans people are not allies to one another. Some trans people avidly work against the fight for our rights and freedom. So why assume that someone who shares a more micro label of trans is that safe space? When the reality is, that word doesn’t actually tell you anything about them? I think we shoot ourselves in the foot a lot here. Just like the gender I was assigned at birth doesn’t really tell you anything about the specific experiences I’ve had growing up, that I've had as a trans person, the labels I use don’t tell you about my experiences either. They just tell you the label that I’ve chosen to use, and that I’m okay with you assuming whatever societally agreed upon definition of that label applies to me. I historically do not have a lot of childhood experiences in common with trans people of the same assigned sex at birth. I have a lot more in common with trans people who were children of alcoholic mothers, trans people who grew up religious, trans people who lived in oppressive, conservative environments, trans people who were taught that cisheteronormativity will save us, that the white picket fence 2.5 kids pathway is the pathway to enlightenment, the trans people who were taught growing up that to be good is to be compliant, the trans people whose parent(s) had a vision for them that you could never fulfill, the trans people who used hypersexuality to dissociate from hellish depths of dysphoria, as a means of escape from the body, trans people who have been told that the way that they are trans is not the right way no matter what they do, trans people who have never had a forever home, trans people who have been forced to sell their bodies for food, trans people who do not have control over the presentation of their physical bodies, trans people who have deep, extensive health complications and medical trauma that influences how we are able to experience our transition and bodies, trans people who can’t ever find a word that feels completely right for long, trans people whose hearts break every single day. Those are the trans people I want to commune with. Those are the trans people I want to be in intimate space with, that I want to belong among, that I want to build and create and expand with. To know that you are that kind of trans person, I do not need to know what you were assigned at birth. I do not need to know what label(s) you use to describe your gender or sexuality. I just need to see you, accept you, and then I will learn all of those things, or I won’t. You may be the kind of trans person who grew up with two loving parents in a blue state, who owned a home, who were major liberals that used gentle parenting and felt more like your friends than your parents, who encouraged you to be yourself unabashedly, who accepted you when you came out at a young age, who held you through your transformation into yourself. You might be a trans person who went to college on a full ride scholarship, got a masters degree and a full time six figure job right out of college, and now you’re living 5 miles off campus with two dogs and your polycule, never experiencing any serious trauma or major upheavals in life. I love these trans people who fit this bill, I’m sure they do exist. All 15 of them. I love and accept them, but there is a limit to how intimate I can become with someone who doesn’t understand what it means to be hungry. I don’t get to know if you’re that kind of trans person before I accept you and I allow us both the space to figure it out. I will never be able to tell if someone is the kind of person I desire closeness and/or community with based on a label, an identification. And I don’t want to. Cause it sucks, and isn’t going to lead me to liberation.
So - next time someone says something along the lines of “if you obscure that you’re x, while you use the label of y, you are bad and wrong and hurting people”, remind them that even though we use words to identify ourselves – those words do not define us or express even the top layer of the intricacy and vastness of our experiences. Why is it so terrible to think you might have similar experiences with someone who you perceive as being on the opposite side of those experiences? This is not an argument for the destruction of the meaning of language, but rather an expression of my desire to center solidarity above all. I fear that with the focus of so much intra-community discourse and disagreement being on the specifics and intricacies of the language we use to express our infinitely complex and expansive identities and how they function in the world, we lose the ability to commune and organize around the most dangerous thing — cisheteronormative society trying to kill and erase us all.
This is also not an argument to persuade anyone to let their guards down. We’ve all got to protect ourselves the ways that we see fit. It’s really just me imploring you to see other queer and trans people with a little more good faith, so that hopefully we can build more bridges, seal more fractures, and present a more united front against the fascists seeking to eradicate us as well as developing more enriching, positive, lifelong relationships across vast spaces and communities.
I’m making sure more trans people exist by treating every good faith identification and curiosity toward expanding gender and sexuality that comes my way as legitimate. We are not defined by our bodies. There are infinite ways to be your gender, to be my gender, to be any gender. We are all unique. We exist in community, and we are not alone in our experiences. Our possibilities are limitless. I think you either love trans people and want more trans people to exist or you don’t. You either accept that more trans people existing comes with trans people who are trans in ways you don’t understand, or don’t agree with also existing. Try this. If you come across an embodiment of transness or identity or labeling that you don’t understand or that makes you feel weird or even hurt? React first as someone who wants more trans people to exist. To be comfortable existing. To feel encouraged to exist. Center that first, lead with that feeling. Let your confusion be secondary, and treat it as your own feeling to deal with, because it is. Center love. Center solidarity. Center what comes next, center what is beyond the label, beyond the identification. Because I want us all to exist, and I want more of us to exist.
Describe yourself in one word. Does that really tell me everything I need to know to connect with you?
I took it to heart when Audrey Lorde told me that my lived experience matters and that I alone define that experience. I took it to heart when she said "If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.", and you should too.
