social justice league chats
Daily Chat Thread, Partie VII: Transgenderedededer!

If there's one thing that language can teach us, it's how weird cispeople are. Misgendering somebody is no big deal, but don't you dare travel to a Latin country and call officers or seniors 'tu.' We took a masculine plural pronoun and can't decide if it's numberless or plural only. And my favourite is the word 'transgendered.' Who's doing the transgendering? Goddess? I'm tempted to refer to cispeople as 'cisgendereds' just to fuck with them. But yeah, discuss what you like.
Quote of the day:
'Behind every great man there's a great woman.'




Can we talk about Metal Gear Solid V here? There's a lot to say about the game. If this is the wrong place please let me know
I always thought, when watching the trailers and seeing in game footage, about the thing in the protagonists head. He has a thing in his head. And also he has a bionic robotic symphonic arm.
All I could think about was "How is nobody acknowledging the fact that the guy has a thing in his head? Can we acknowledge the fact that this guy has a thing sticking out of his head?"
It hit me today that the game may be doing a terrible job at portraying the protagonist as someone who has suffered physical and mental trauma.
He breathes through his head.
Kojima does a terrible job at most things.
He breathes through his mouth.
I have a small, probably stupid theory that "transgendered" is an "eggcorn", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
that is it was a mishearing of a word that spread.
Can we talk about the word "transgendered"? I'm coming at it from a linguistic perspective for a minute. Because I did use the word probably 15 years ago until a transgender friend of mine told me she didn't like it. I never questioned it, and just use the preferred terminology.
Taking out the "trans" or "cis" prefix, we do use "gendered" as an adjective. There's gendered products, gendered language, gendered dorms, gendered violence, etc...
And there's other identity-based language that has an -ed suffix, disabled for example.
So while I will continue to use transgender, since that is the preferred term, I can see why unknowing people could start with transgendered, or use transgendered as an adjective and transgender as a noun, especially if they're in a place where they haven't heard many people talk about LGBT+ issues or paid much attention while reading online.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joanne-herman/transgender-or-transgende_b_492922.html
That would be fine, except we're not talking about a participle, we're talking about an adjective. There are plenty of adjectives in English that end in -ed that aren't derived from verbs but derived from nouns instead.
Someone who talented hasn't been going around talenting, they posses talent. A feathered bird hasn't been feathering, it has feathers. While words like wing and eye can be verbs, a their adjective forms a winged-creature and six-eyed monster would both be derived from the nouns.
Like I said above, I will use the preferred term. Just like I will use anyone's preferred pronouns. I'm just explaining why someone would use the -ed ending without meaning anything harmful.
Well, talent and feather aren't adjectival (as far as I know). Transgender is already adjectival, so it raises questions as to why it needs an adjectival suffix.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transgendered#Usage_notes
It doesn't.
Julia Serano actually has a pretty interesting piece sorta about this, also over here:
So while I do use "transgender" (and find transgendered rather grating) I generally try to be cautious about overly jumping down people's throats when they say "transgendered", particularly in-community, because that can unfairly alienate a lot of older folks or trans people who aren't hip with the latest terms.
That timeline sounds about right. While sometimes people are being willfully ignorant or malicious, I think that there are many times people just make a mistake and aren't meaning anything hurtful by it at all.
Yeah, using "transgendered" makes it seems like you've never actually listened to a trans person, but the the idea that "transgendered" is grammatically incorrect (or really that a word can even be grammatically incorrect) doesn't make sense.
I woke up prematurely again, and now I can't sleep. Goddess, I'm going to be so relieved when I return home soon.