Today’s topic is less polyglot, but if you want you can shoot me an email at joannamartinevanschaik(at)gmail(dot)com and help me translate it. The good thing is that I’ll usually be able to tell you whether you screwed up somewhere. The bad news is that it will cost you two hours of your time for a cause we all need to worry about, but none of us are actually on the barricades fighting for enough.
So, here goes: the questions you can now look up the answers to here, without having to harass me about it in public and show off your ignorance!
Q: Were you actually a man once?
A: No, I was never a man. Trans women are women. No matter what old conservatives may tell you. But if you like, I can pretend I was a skippyball at some point.
Q: Does this mean you are having a sex change?
A: Can somebody, once and for all, tell me what the hell a sex change is? Also, I’ve always been a woman. I didn’t suddenly become one. I’m not changing my sex. At most I am having medically necessary interventions so I don’t feel like killing myself each day. And if you use the Dutch word ”ombouwen” – I am not a table to be redecorated at leisure. It bears repeating: trans women are women. Women. Women. Women. WOMEN. Get it?
Q: But you have a penis!
A: I do? Who told you that? Get the fuck out of my life, you’re not my sexytimes partner. And besides, if I did, what would that matter? Don’t you know many people are born with genital defects, have amputations, or otherwise got a little unlucky during their life? What do any dangly bits have to do with anything?
Q: Okay, let’s forget about penises. What about your chromosomes? I bet your chromosomes are all XY!
A: I didn’t get them checked. We normally don’t, we normally go by development. Which is why doctors get things wrong sometimes, and which is why we rectify those mistakes afterwards. Unless people like you vote for idiots who make this difficult for peace-loving folks like us. I don’t know what my chromosomes look like, and I don’t care either. There’s plenty ways your chromosomes can be screwed up, developmental issues are a thing.
Q: Don’t you think what you are doing, i.e. cutting off your dick, is unnatural?
A: So is your wearing glasses. Want me to break them for you? And besides, there are plenty of ways nature can make mistakes. Unfortunately things aren’t as black and white, and sometimes we need to resort to rather unfortunate measures to patch things up. That is, if we actually undergo surgery. Not all of us do, you see.
Q: You are going against the will of God! (Allah, Yahweh, insert your favourite sky daddy here)
A: God sat out the Holocaust. He didn’t lift a finger when those millions of people died. Do you really think he gives a flying dingo’s kidney what I do to my body? And besides that, I don’t even believe in any deity. So if I go against your imaginary celestial friend, the more I do so, the better, frankly. He’s a jerk if he wants to deny me my happiness, and you’re a jerk for using your belief to deny me equal rights. Honestly, I’d set more store by the will of my cat. And I don’t even have a cat.
Q: If I love you, will I BECOME GAY????
A: Yes, us trans folks secretly have magic potions we insert during sex. No, the only thing this makes you look like is a huge homophobe. Trans women are women. Please get this into your brain. Women. Two and two equals four, the earth is round, trans women are women, and if you think anything else you’re wrong. Facts are not political, lies are.
Q: Ok, I got it. You’re a woman. I give in. Why do you so desperately want to be a woman?
A: You speak as if it’s a desire. It’s not a desire. It’s an identity. I am a woman. The fact my physical development screwed up its congruency big time doesn’t change that fact. We don’t want to be women any more than you want to be a man (or woman). Honestly, for all the bullshit you’re giving us, we’d be better off as men in our sexist society. If we’re undergoing a transition, do you really think it’s for funsies?
Q: So what’s your real name?
A: Joanna. No, SERIOUSLY. It’s my real name. Real real name. It’s true. Everything else is fake news.
Q: But I mean your name before you got it changed!
A: That’s not a question. And if the government doesn’t have a right to know it (I can ask them to delete it from my records and they are legally obliged to do so), what the hell makes you think YOU do? And besides, you’d only deadname me.
Q: What is deadnaming?
A: It’s when you call a trans person by a name they do not go by anymore. The name’s dead, hence the name. What’s in a name? Don’t do it, otherwise we’ll lump you in with the arseholes that asked the previous two questions.
Q: Will you stop playing football / chess/ drinking beer (insert typically masculine thing here)
A: No. Don’t you know women drink beer, play chess, kick around balls on fields of grass and do all sorts of manly things nowadays? Are you 7000 years old? Do you still think all women work in kitchens? I’m sure you must be fascinated when you go out your front door and see all those women in jeans. Do you get excited every time you see a digital clock?
Q: How do you have sex? And with whom? I thought you were all gay!
A: Just like everybody else. How do you think we have sex? Do you think we’re all prudes? Our sexual preferences vary just like everyone else’s. Some of us are gay, but in normal words we call that lesbian. Or dyke. I’m a Dutch dyke. See what I did there?
Q: Will you grow breasts?
A: If we take hormones, yes, if not, no. And even if we take hormones – our breast growth could just as well turn out to be fuck all. Which is why we’d very much appreciate you chipping in for our breast augmentation!
Q: Do you take hormones?
A: None of your business. Once we get matey-matey we might have a convo about this. Otherwise, it is none of your business.
Q: Will your voice go up?
A: That’s not how estrogen works. By the way, if you don’t know this tidbit of information, you are actually excused, because this isn’t super common knowledge. Testosterone lowers your voice in puberty – but it’s a one way ticket, and estrogen can’t reverse it for us. Sucks for the bass women among us. Speech therapy can sort of help us. Sort of, by helping us make better use of what we’ve got. Not because our voice will actually be raised.
Q: Can you have kids? I don’t want your gender ideology brainwashing in my society!
A: Well, we can. There’s all sorts of techniques allowing us to store sperm nowadays, you know. Science is cool. But fortunately for you, and fortunately for us, the effect of the hormones is pretty serious, so we get quite sterile, and once you undergo vaginoplasty, that’s the end of the story. But honestly: do we want to have kids in a society full of idiots like you, where they’d get beaten up for existing ? And with the overpopulation (not to mention the overpopulation of people worthy of a Darwin Award) to boot? We just might procreate and create idiots like you.
Q: Are you mentally ill ?
A: No. Well, maybe we are, but not because of us being trans, mostly because of you treating us like dirt! As far as we know, it has more to do with developmental biology and brain structures than with mental illness. Which is why the psychological diagnoses and gatekeeping we have to endure are such a joke.
Q: Ok, I understand all of this. But what if you regret your decision?
A: Odds are we won’t. It’s pretty ingrained. And if we did… well, the three of us that do, they probably have other issues to worry about. Basically, we’re women. Why the hell would we regret being women when that fight has pretty much been going on all of our lives? Sometimes people can be so dense.
Q: So how should I address you?
A: Finally a sensible question. In my case: as she/her, please. And keep in mind – it’s better to ask about someone’s pronouns than to misgender them.
Q: I agree with you! What do I do?
A: Tell all your friends. Hammer the point home. With a mallet, if you have to.
Q: You sound so hostile! Why don’t you chill out?
A: The moment we’ve had a year where no trans women have died because of your idiocy, I might stop being less feral. But until that time, I’m manning the barricades. Clearly it’s necessary to stamp out the idiocy.
If you’ve heard any other variant of the stupid, please inform me, either in the comments or by mail.
And I didn’t include trans men, because I’m not a trans man. Neither am I non-binary. Sorry. You can make your own FAQs, because I don’t want to steal your thunder with my absence of knowledge. I know your plight is just as tough, I just won’t claim to know your shit better than you do.
Like a Polyglot 
Love it Joanna. You are an inspiration x
GillaGilla
May I translate this into French as an exercise? I would—of course—give you the French version to post on your blog! (I am doing more translation work professionally but I’d really like to translate more queer/transgender-related texts, to try to stretch my legs with this vocabulary, terminology, and contribute to more French transgender resources, too.)
GillaGillad av 1 person
Vas-y, go ahead! Just keep in mind that I learned European French, so if I don’t understand a slang term, it’s because they don’t have it in Belgium or France 😛
GillaGilla
I agree with all what you said except for one thing: sex and gender are different things. Sex: male/female/intersex (it has to do with a combination of chromosomes, innate genitalia and natural hormone production). Gender: man, woman, etc. (this has to do with psychology and identity). Many trans women were born as males (sex) but they’ve always been women (gender). Making this distinction is important in a medical level because some things work differently if a person is male, female or intersex and this doesn’t make the person any less woman/man/or-whatever-their-gender-is. The problem is that many people use the words ”sex” and ”gender” as if they were interchangeable when they are actually not.
GillaGilla
Of course, but that distinction is practically only relevant for my doctor, and not for you.
GillaGilla
I partially disagree. You don’t have to be telling every person you meet if you were born male, female or intersex (that’s none of their business); but I do think in a more general level (here I’m talking about society and things like sexual and genre education in school) it is important that people understand that distinction because part of the hardships trans people face are caused out of a huge misunderstanding because everyday people are not aware of such basic distinctions. Most people just think ”female=woman”, ”male=man”, and then they may have a really hard time trying to understand (or come to terms with) that someone may be a born-male woman or a born-female man. If people were educated early on about the distinction between sex and genre I think things would be a lot easier for everyone and there would be a lot less people suffering. Of course discrimination and busybodies would still exist, but I think there would also be a lot more understanding and support for human differences. Differences enrich all of us and are a real treasure.
GillaGilla
I wasn’t born male. I was born female. We should teach the difference between sex and gender in biology class, for sure, but that doesn’t change anything with respect to how people should treat me. My chromosomal make-up is for my doctors to determine.
My body is a woman’s body. It is not, has never been, and never will be, a man’s body. It may have masculine sexual characteristics, but that’s all a developmental process gone wrong. It doesn’t make me ”not a woman.” This is what I am referring to when I say that trans women are women.
GillaGillad av 1 person
I think trans women are women from the very beginning. They are BORN as women. For me, trans women are women who just happened to be born on a male or intersex body, but they were also born women, they ARE women from the very beginning.
Having a male body or male characteristics doesn’t make a woman not a woman. I think we agree on that.
GillaGilla