The Language of Queerness
June is Pride Month. Unofficially this has been the case since 1970, but it became official in 1999 thanks to a presidential proclamation by Bill Clinton, and it is marked every year by the global LGBTQIA+ community. We’ve had so much progress in achieving equality and inclusion over the last few decades, but our community is currently facing some of the most flagrant attempts to roll back those rights and erase us from reality.
As a writer, language matters to me. Words have meaning. We understand things based on those meanings.
Ever-changing
But here’s the problem, the language we know as English has been changing for millennia. The version of English we have now would be incomprehensible to someone from 950 AD, just as Old English texts like Beowulf are gibberish to modern audiences. Equally, while the concept of a dictionary exists as far back as 2300 BCE, the first purely English alphabetical dictionary was written in 1604. Before then, words were frequently spelled in many different ways. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) became the standard for over 150 years before being replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884, which remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary.
Words come and go (Who here today has heard of ‘snout-fair’? Or who would have understood what a ‘deepfake’ was even 10 years ago?).
Letters like ‘þ (Thorn)’ or ‘ð (Eth)’ have long since vanished from our words (all those ‘Ye Olde’ Pubs you see, should actually be ‘The Old’ because they actually used þ which is mostly transliterated as a ‘th’).
And words change meanings all the time. Think about the word ‘nice’. Today we generally use it to mean ‘good natured or kind’ or ‘pleasant’ (unless we’re using it ironically). But it has had about 44 different meanings over the centuries, including 22 of which are obsolete, one of which was ignorant or foolish. Effectively, the word ‘nice’ has completely changed in its meaning since it’s first usage around 1300.
Queer Language
As with all communities, people develop their own unique variants of their language. You need only to travel across the UK to hear the multiple words used to describe a cob (bread roll/bap/teacake/barm/bun/stotty) or words wholly unique to that area like mardy.
The most common example people tend to use when discussing linguistics is the slang derived from Black culture, and the broader LGBTQ+ community is not unique in co-opting a lot of terminology from its Black members. Slang like ‘slay’, ‘reading’, ‘tea’, ‘shade’ all originate from New York’s predominantly black ballroom culture and has been popularised by the likes of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.
There are a lot of specific words used by the queer community, some of which, like ‘queer’ itself, were at one times slurs against people in the community. While the word itself has existed since the early 1500s, the pejorative use of ‘queer’ against LGBT+ people spawned throughout the 1900s, but was reclaimed by activists in the late 1980s. Some still feel uncomfortable using the term, but a lot of young queer people find it a more freeing way to label their identity than the more prescriptive terms of ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’ and so on.
The Acronym
The LGBTQIA+ acronym as is typically used has grown to incorporate a larger number of identities than it initially did. It began as LGB, for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals.
In the late 80s, the T was added to include transgender people in recognition of their involvement of the fight for gay rights and because ultimately so many trans people also identify with one of the other letters. They were also part of the original Stonewall riots which effectively launched the gay liberation movement.
The 90s saw the addition of the Q for queer, as it became more of an umbrella term for a non-heterosexual identity. The I, for intersex, and the A, for asexuality and aromanticism, were added through the noughties.
The plus is intended to cover the many other members of the community who don’t feel connected to any of the current initials.
There have been multiple variations, and people have tried adding and removing letters from the acronym, but generally it has stuck. It has been criticised as ‘alphabet soup’ and mocked as the ‘alphabet mafia’, but it has become the way the queer community has decided to describe itself.
There are arguments about whether it is appropriate for communities whose issues relate to sexuality like the LGBQA part of the acronym should be connected to the communities whose issues mainly relate to gender identity, the TI. While a valid argument, the reason the communities have bound themselves together is in part because there overlap (there are many trans people who have a sexuality that isn’t ‘straight’, and often a person comes out as gay or bi before they come out as trans and so find it important to retain that part of their identity and community.)
Equally, as a civil rights movement, the LGBTQIA+ community has seen the two big movements that came before it: Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement.
Both were important and influential, but both also excluded people to achieve their goals. Women’s suffrage frequently excluded black women though they present and part of the fight. The Civil Rights Movement was about stopping race-based segregation, and one of its most prominent leaders was a gay man, Bayard Rustin. He was instrumental to organising the March on Washington in 1962 where Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. But because he was known to be a gay man, other members of the movement avoided giving him public credit.
While there was dissent when activists began, the acronym is all about inclusion. It is not about fighting for some people’s rights; it’s about fighting for everyone’s rights. It’s about knowing that we are stronger together than we are apart.
I could talk at length over the idea of labels, and I have mentioned them in the past. Some find them helpful, some find them restrictive. Some use them to explain parts of their identity, while others prefer not to use labels and just exist. Both are perfectly valid ways of living. As I’ve already pointed out, language is ever-changing and as important as it is, it’s never perfect. If the labels of the acronym help you, wonderful! If they’re too confusing to you, don’t worry! At the end of the day, they’re just words.
The current ‘argument’
This brings us to today. The current argument raging through the courts and society. Why it’s become such an issue in the past six years is something academics will be discussing for decades. But there are three things that shape the current debate around the language of queerness:
- Sex vs Gender
- What is a woman?
- Pronouns and basic language
Ultimately, none of these arguments appear to be presented in good faith. They are political jabs used to over-simplify and dehumanise people. But if we were to take these points in turn, you’ll find that language is not as simple as some people would wish it to be.
Sex vs Gender
The term ‘sex’ refers to the sum of the characteristics concerned with sexual reproduction and the raising of young, by which males, females, and intersex people may be distinguished. It’s existed since at least 1382.
The term ‘gender’ in this context, began around 1474 as a collective of males or females when viewed as a group. However, in 1945, the concept of gender began to be altered to refer to the state of being male of female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than the biological ones.
As a society, we have used these two terms and their connected terms (Man/Male, Woman/Female) interchangeably, even after science progressed to understand the concept of a gender identity and to understand the large variety of differences in sexual development.
This is, I believe, part of what’s led to the current debate. Our ideas of sex and gender have been shaped by the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, even though there are so many cultures around the world which have the concept of a third gender like the Hijras or the Fa’afafine. As a result, our collective language hasn’t evolved to meet our current scientific understanding of human beings.
Equally, this obsession with ‘biological sex’ feels both redundant and at odds with what anybody seems to be trying to achieve. If a female is, as the White House puts it, someone who “at conception, produces the large reproductive cell” – this means that technically the entire male population is female because all foetuses are female at conception and develop their male characteristics later. So how does that work? If the focus is on the ability to give birth, does that mean that we’ve been incorrectly sexing seahorses where it is the male that becomes pregnant and give birth? And what about those females who are unable to give birth for whatever reason?
The concept of gender identity is still relatively new, and as such, terminology is constantly evolving. As someone who finds labels both helpful and unhelpful, I wonder whether it would be more helpful to everyone if we shifted our approach to sex and gender.
What is a woman?
And here we have the dog-whistle that is ‘what is a woman?’ Ignoring the fact that the question ‘what is a man?’ is hardly ever asked; there is this idea that women are simply adult human females. But the logic is circular, because then you must define ‘female’ and as we know, some people’s attempts to define this never quite includes all the people they deem to be women and excludes all those they don’t.
Additionally, certain sex characteristics can be altered. Hormone levels can be changed through medication (women going through menopause are on HRT just the same as trans women) and surgery can alter external characteristics like facial structure, breasts, penises, and vaginas. Chromosomes are not as simple as XX and XY (there are a large number of permutations), so that’s not a useful distinction.
And if we’re using the social ideas of masculinity and femininity, these are also ever-evolving and complex. For starters, certain things that are seen as feminine now like make up, high heels, tights and so on were originally made for men. We didn’t fully associate blue with boys and pink with girls until the 1950s. In Shakespeare’s day, theatre was only performed by men so there were constantly men performing the roles of women in drag (and since it was usually the younger boys playing these female roles, that’s why Shakespeare’s women often have so much less dialogue than their male counterparts and also part of the reason why there’s so much cross-dressing). Plus, did you know, there’s even Old English texts that use the term ‘wæpenwifestre’ which apparently meant either an armed woman or a woman with a penis.
The most accurate definition of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ from my understanding of the terms, is that they are gender identities of adult human beings who identify with certain traits and behaviours which can vary depending on their culture. For most people this is aligned to their sex, but it can be different to their birth sex.
It’s why I like the distinction between ‘Gender Identity’ and ‘Gender Expression’, and why I’d argue that ‘sex’ is less important than ‘sex characteristics’. One covers where your brain sees itself on the spectrum of masculinity and femininity, one covers the clothing you wear and how you present yourself to the world, and ‘sex characteristics’ covers your biological machinery. Is this more complex than we used to have hundreds of years ago? Yes. Does that mean it’s wrong? Absolutely not. Is it perfect? Maybe not, but it works for me.
Pronouns and Basic Language
Finally, we come to some of the most basic elements of the English language. ‘Pronouns’ are not some strange new concept that trans people invented five years ago to confuse people. They were listed as one of the eight parts of speech in a treatise on Greek grammar from the 2nd century BC. We’ve been using the pronoun ‘they’ to refer to singular people (without referring to gender) since the 14th century, and while its use in this way has been celebrated and criticised throughout the centuries, most style guides these days include it as both a singular and plural pronoun. In fact, if our society hadn’t been so patriarchal for all of those centuries, we may not have been defaulting to ‘he’ in so many of our parliamentary texts to include both men and women. Are there new pronouns that have been created? Yes. Will they all stick around? Not necessarily. Only time will tell. But people getting up in arms about one of the core parts of speech and language feels more than a little ridiculous, and often suggests a lack of basic language skills we’re taught from a very young age.
And then we also have this misunderstanding of adjectives. ‘Transgender’ is an adjective. It is a describing word that gets associated with a noun. So, its use works exactly the same as other adjectives like short, tall, fat, thin, smart, dim, and so on. The word comes from the prefix ‘trans-‘ which generally means ‘on the other side of’ or ‘across’ and is used in many other places like transatlantic or transparent or translate. This means that a transgender woman is a woman whose gender identity does not correspond with the sex registered at birth. It is literally a description of a type of woman or a type of man in exactly the same way as we would describe someone as blonde or brunette or white or black.
The opposite of ‘trans-‘ is ‘cis-‘ which means ‘on the same side’ and has been used in geography and chemistry for years, and while it is still relatively new in being used in relation to gender, it makes complete sense. Transgender and cisgender are ultimately two sides of the same adjective coin and just a way of describing whether someone has a gender that aligns with their sex assigned at birth. It doesn’t remove anyone, it isn’t a slur against anyone, it’s just a factual way of identifying difference. Can these things be used as a slur? Of course, as can any word. But most people aren’t using it in that way.
The important thing to note is that no one is saying that trans people and cis people have the exact same experiences. They don’t. But they have areas of common ground. Trans men and cis men have different experiences but are united in their experiences as men. White men and black men have different experiences and similar experiences, and the list goes on and on. So, when people say “Trans women are women”, they’re correct. All trans women are women, but not all women are trans. It isn’t that hard.
Conclusion
Language matters. Words have meaning. But if you’ve made it all the way to the end here, you can see, it isn’t that simple and it’s constantly changing. We just have to change with it and learn and grow. There is a lot more high-quality research that needs to be done to understand the human brain, gender identity, gender expression, sex, and sexuality. There is the chance that the language of queerness will change again and evolve further. There is a chance it won’t. We’ll just have to see.
As a society, we are becoming kinder and making the world better for so many different types of people and enabling everyone to succeed. There are those that want to drag us back to darker times. I have to believe that in the end, they won’t succeed. Someday in the future we’ll just accept that people are who they are and love who they love and we’ll treat them with the love and respect they deserve as people. We’ll focus on what people do, not who they are.
We use the term ‘Pride’ to show the consciousness of our own dignity and the qualities we have and achievements we’ve made which deserve to be admired. It is about finding pleasure and satisfaction and love.
There are so many wonderful LGBTQ+ people and so many queer people who’ve achieved incredible things that have changed our world for the better. So, in many ways, ‘pride’ is the perfect word to describe this month. So let’s help everyone learn and make the world a better place for everyone, and one of the places we can start is language.