Why Transgender People Care About Pronouns
As you have likely heard, Chelsea Manning announced through her lawyer that she was transitioning from male to female. A lot of people already knew this after reading her chat logs released years ago, but now she has made it official. She wants to be known as Chelsea and have people refer to her using female pronouns.
Cool. Done.
Except many, if not most, Americans are still freaked out by this, and that includes those in the media. I personally thought that by this point the shock value of being transgender would have worn off, and that people would just say “fine, you’re Chelsea, but you still do/don’t belong in jail for what you did,” but that is clearly not the case. Manning’s announcement has supplied another opportunity for people to act indignant about how weird it is that some people are transgender even though there have been transgender people since forever.
Other websites have better round ups of the shitty reactions to the news all over the internet, and Janet Mock has a good article on the issues around trans healthcare that affect pretty much everyone (including me even though I have a cushy job by almost any standard).
I’m not the most qualified person to speak on transgender issues, nor do I speak for all transgender people, but let’s cover the basic issues that have re-emerged with Manning’s announcement.
First, don’t call it a “sex change.” Manning is not getting surgery, she says she doesn’t want surgery, and she probably couldn’t have it if it she wanted it. Getting surgery takes a lot of money and years of evaluation by psychiatric professionals who are supportive of your transition, neither of which Manning is likely to have anytime soon. Sad, but true. “Sex change” is also crude and brings to mind images of yesteryear when (specifically male to female) trans people were even more commonly the butt of jokes in popular culture. One of my first memories of transgender people in the media was the episode from Ace Ventura, Pet Detective where the revelation that someone has transitioned literally makes everyone on scene vomit (honestly all I can do is laugh in a pitiful way now).
Gender transition is a long, difficult process, and there really is no defined endpoint. As someone who has been at this for something like eight years, I can definitively tell you that I have no idea what I am doing half the time. At my last job, my health insurance automatically assigned me an OBGYN as my primary care doctor, so when I went in for an initial physical I had to “have the talk.”
Manning is simply hoping to begin taking hormones to begin physical transition. There are likely other physical things involving more doctors that Manning will need and want to do in the future, but right now she is just trying to take the first step.
Second, and this has been said a million times already, use the right pronouns. Yes, your headline may need to refer to Bradley so people know who you are talking about, but at least use the right pronoun after the first sentence. This is like, the first lesson on day one of Transgender Sensitivity Training 101, and major media outlets should know how to handle this by now.
But since it has to be said again, let’s talk about why pronouns matter. These pronouns are pretty much a social construct in that you identify people as one gender or another based on secondary characteristics like clothes, hair, and physical appearance. I say secondary here because when you decide to use a certain pronoun for someone you generally don’t ask that person to take off their clothes or ask what chromosomes they carry in their body.
So when transgender people transition, it’s actually entirely up to you, the person using pronouns, to make the decision as to what to say. Chelsea told us she wants us to use female pronouns and that she likely intends to begin exhibiting some of those secondary characteristics that people usually identify with females. It’s really hard to make that change for someone who has grown up as a male and probably tried as hard as they possibly could to conform to whatever conceptions you, the person using pronouns, have about people that you use male pronouns for. As any transgender person will tell you, it’s not easy for people that don’t conform to people’s conceptions of how they should act. Manning even alluded to this in the released chat logs, saying she thought maybe joining the Army would make her gender dysphoria go away.
But her issues didn’t go away, and the only way that Manning is ever going to be at peace, the only she is going to be happy, possibly the only way she is going to survive, is to stop trying to conform and be who she actually is. And make no mistake about it, this part takes work too. Gender transition is not easy. You don’t go from constantly projecting a facade of one person to suddenly being your true self the next day without any work. But the right thing to do, the human thing to do, is to use the right fucking pronouns.
