At some point in the past, in a comment thread where we were discussing what I was then calling “routine infant male circumcision” in the United States, Grace pointed out to me that phrases like “the routine medical circumcision of infant boys” and “routine infant male circumcision” were both not trans inclusive because they contain the assumption that an infant with a penis, who is obviously too young yet to have anything even resembling a gender identity, is by definition already gendered male. One could, I suppose, quibble that “infant male circumcision” is identifying biological sex, not gender, and maybe someone did–I don’t remember and I cannot find the comment to which I am referring. The fact is, though, that even if the word male in the phrase male circumcision can be read to refer to biological sex, the constellation of cultural, social, and even medical assumptions that attach to the procedure frame it as one that turns infants with penises into appropriately-bodied boys. In other words, Grace was right, and so I have since then used phrases like “the routine medical circumcision of infants with penises” or “routine penile circumcision” instead.
This change didn’t cost me anything, except the time it took for my ear to get used to the different rhythms and sounds it wrought on my language–which is not a trivial thing, since the aesthetics of my writing are very important to me. Once I did get used to it, though, it was hard not to notice that the new phrasing had the benefit of being more descriptive, in that it named the body part being discussed, and it also had the felicitous consequence of, implicitly, making clear that penile circumcision precedes the formation of gender identity, leaving open the possibility of arguing that the procedure, where it is practiced, is actually part of the male-gendering process and not simply a medical intervention that either does or does not have ostensibly objective, non-ideological benefits. (I am not talking here about brit milah, Jewish penile circumcision, which is not intended as a medical procedure and is explicitly defined as creating appropriately-bodied boys.)
I have not thought about it deeply, but it seems to me this could have really interesting implications for thinking about the connections between the medical circumcision of infant penises and the kinds of circumcisions done in adolescent male rites of passage elsewhere in the world. But that’s not really what I’m concerned with here.
I’ve used this new phrasing here on Alas, on my own blog, and elsewhere, and no one has stopped to ask me what I mean by it; no one has suggested it is inappropriate because it leaves the infant’s gender unspecified or because it does not address, for example, the fact that the infant’s parents, and probably almost everyone else who comes in contact with it, experience the child as a boy. Indeed, it has seemed as if readers barely even noticed the change. I have my theories about why, and maybe these will come out in the comments, but for my primary purpose in the post, those reasons don’t really matter. What matters is that I changed my language to make it more trans inclusive and it was, or at least it seems to have been, no big deal.
I thought about this a lot as the now-closed discussion that followed Amp’s recent post, Don’t Call Trans Women “men who identify as women,” sadly and unfortunately devolved into a hurtful argument over precisely the question of what it means to use, or willfully not to use, trans inclusive language. (PLEASE NOTE: I do not want to reopen that discussion here, and if anyone does, then I–or any other moderator who sees it (I’m asking you all to keep an eye out for this as well. Thanks.)–will simply delete their comments.) Unlike my discussions of penile circumcision, of course, Amp’s post was about language used to describe trans women, people who already have a gender identity, which makes misgendering them as men not only inaccurate and deeply hurtful. Misgendering trans people is also an act with potential real-life consequences for how they are treated socially, culturally, professionally, and even legally. I am referring to that thread because buried in it, or maybe just implicit in it, is a much more interesting and constructive conversation that we could have had about how to navigate and negotiate the changes in language use that mainstream affirmation of trans identity will inevitably bring with it.
Those changes–or, rather, the need for those changes, the potential within those changes–have been on my mind since I posted a comment to my Reading The Veil and The Male Elite thread about the Jewish laws concerning menstruation. In that comment, I did not use phrases like “people who menstruate” or “people with vaginas” and so, inherent in the comment, is the assumption that women are the only ones who menstruate. I was aware of this as I wrote, and I consciously chose to leave the trans exclusive language the way it was because making the language inclusive would have meant untangling a knot that not only had nothing to do with the point I was trying to make, but that, even as I am writing this, I am not sure I will be able to untangle.
At the center of the knot, for me, was this: Unless something has changed in the past couple of years, Orthodox Judaism–and I was discussing in my comment the menstrual laws of Orthodox Judaism–does not recognize trans as a legitimate gender identity. Trans women, in other words, are legally and “really” men for Orthodox Jewish purposes; and trans men are legally and “really” women. So it seemed to me as I wrote the comment that to write a sentence like, “In the orthodox [Jewish] tradition, people who menstruate are considered ritually impure” would misrepresent that tradition, not because the sentence is false in anyway, but because it elides the strict gender binary that Orthodox Judaism not only insists on, but relies on. It’s not that I think it’s more important to respect Orthodox Jewish tradition than it is to respect trans people, but what I thought at the time, and I still think now, is that accuracy matters. So, for example, while there are probably ways I couldn’t think of at the time to signify the gender binary in Orthodox Judaism while still keeping phrases like people who menstruate, I also got stuck when thinking about the misogyny–though I didn’t use the word misogyny–in Orthodox Judaism. It didn’t make sense to me to use language intended to be inclusive of some percentage of trans men and then talk about how Orthodox Judaism viewed them misogynistically because they menstruate. It felt disrespectful to those men and, again, misrepresentative of Orthodox Judaism.
Now, maybe I am overthinking this. Maybe this is just me working through my own cis-centered assumptions and imagination, and it is not as big a deal or as interesting as I seem to think it is, because there is a simple solution that I just haven’t seen yet. It does seem to me, though, that once we accept the notion that there are men who menstruate, we also raise the question of whether the misogyny that we usually think of as directed at women because they menstruate is less a response to the biology and physiology of menstruation itself than it is a way of culturally shaping appropriately-gendered female bodies. In other words, once we fully accept the notion that gender is a social construct that can be attached to any configuration of human sexual biology, then maybe we also have to accept that the attidudes and assumptions we have tended to experience as responses to gender–or, perhaps more accurately, to the relationship between gender and biology–are actually what drive patriarchy’s strict gender binary, what build traditional male and female gender identities, in the first place. And that, I think, is not such a simple issue to navigate.
Just to be clear, I am not trying to argue for this position in any strong way. Rather, I am trying tentatively to tease out what seem to me some of the implications of revising the way we use language so that it is more trans inclusive. I am eager to learn from what other people think about all this, of course, but I also want to share with you the little exercise I did for myself that gave rise to this post. I decided to forget for the moment that Orthodox Judaism does not recognize trans identity and simply revise the comment that I wrote in the “Reading The Veil and the Male Elite” thread to be more trans inclusive. It was not difficult to do and, with this caveat, I’d also be interested to hear people’s responses to the revision: This is not a piece of writing I intend for formal publication. It’s excerpted from a blog comment, written (as such comments usually are) relatively quickly and in the context of a very different conversation. Similarly, I did not spend a lot of time on the revision; indeed, that was part of the point, to see how relatively quickly and easily it could be done. Therefore, if anyone decides to dig their teeth into the revision, I would ask that they treat it as a draft, an exercise, as language that is no longer attached particularly to me, but rather as an example for us all to play around with.
That said, here is the excerpt from the original comment:
In the orthodox tradition, menstruating women are considered ritually impure, and there are all kinds of restrictions imposed on them, and they need, when they are done with their periods to go to the mikvah, the ritual bath, to purify themselves. (These days, only married women tend to go to the mikvah, but it used to be the case that all women did once they started menstruating.)
As you might imagine, all kinds of rhetoric and cultural baggage has been attached to a woman’s ritual impurity, all of it devolving from a patriarchal mindset that sees women as dirty, disgusting creatures, etc. However, if you examine the actual biblical texts that concern ritual impurity—I think it’s from the biblical and not rabbinical texts that we know this—the ritual impurity of a menstruating woman is, in and of itself, in essence, no different from the ritual impurity of a man who has had a nocturnal emission, is no different from the ritual impurity of someone who has touched a dead body.
Ritual impurity, in other words, attaches to someone who has come in physical contact with let’s call it a life-death nexus, and that person is required to withdraw from certain ritual activities (in the biblical text) until he or she has gone to the ritual bath. The length of time of separation has, if I remember the logic of this reading correctly, to do more with the “depth”—for want of a better word—of the nexus than with anything else. So, a nocturnal emission is not as “serious” as touching a dead body, and I am pretty sure that menstruation is the most “serious.” In the biblical text, except that the words are translated as pure and impure, my understanding is that there is no implicit moral value placed on either of these states.
Now, if an orthodox woman tells me that his reading is meaningful to her—and I’m pretty sure this explanation was published in something written by orthodox women, or at least people who were trained in the orthodox tradition—that she finds in this reading none of the misogyny that informs traditional understanding of nidah, and that practicing the laws of nidah within this reading fulfills her spiritually, I ask again, who am I to tell her that she is wrong, that, in fact, she is merely practicing a kind of, say, internalized self-hatred because she simply cannot see outside the tradition in which she was raised?
It seems to me that her ability to give this kind of reading to the text, her ability to see the reading as valid, meaningful and as one in which she can find herself, demonstrates precisely her ability to step outside the tradition in which she was raised.
And here is the revision:
In the orthodox [Jewish] tradition, people who menstruate are considered ritually impure, and there are all kinds of restrictions imposed on them, and they need, when they are done with their periods to go to the mikvah, the ritual bath, to purify themselves. (These days, only married people who menstruate tend to go to the mikvah, but it used to be the case that anyone who menstruated did, once their menses started.)
As you might imagine, all kinds of rhetoric and cultural baggage have been attached to the ritual impurity of menstruation, all of it devolving from a patriarchal mindset that sees people who menstruate as dirty, disgusting creatures, etc. However, if you examine the actual biblical texts that concern ritual impurity—I think it’s from the biblical and not rabbinical texts that we know this—the ritual impurity associated with menstruation is, in and of itself, in essence, no different from the ritual impurity associated with nocturnal emission, is no different from the ritual impurity associated with touching a dead body.
Ritual impurity, in other words, attaches to someone who has come in physical contact with let’s call it a life-death nexus, and that person is required to withdraw from certain ritual activities until he or she has gone to the ritual bath. The length of time of separation has, if I remember the logic of this reading correctly, to do more with the “depth”—for want of a better word—of the nexus than with anything else. So, a nocturnal emission is not as “serious” as touching a dead body, and I am pretty sure that menstruation is the most “serious” [because it is connected to childbirth and the actual beginning of a new life]. In the biblical text, except that the words are translated as pure and impure, my understanding is that there is no implicit moral value placed on either of these states.
Now, if an orthodox person who menstruates finds this reading meaningful and spiritually fulfilling, with none of the hatred that informs the traditional understanding of nidah [Jewish laws concerning menstruation], then who am I to say this person is wrong and/or is exhibiting a kind of, say, internalized self-hatred instilled by the tradition in which she or he was raised? It seems to me that this person’s ability to give this kind of reading to the text, to see the reading as valid and meaningful, demonstrates precisely the ability to step outside that tradition.
Finally, just a reminder: as a matter of basic courtesy and respect for trans people, the use of trans inclusive language is a condition of participation in any discussion thread that follows from this post. Any comments that willfully cross this line will be deleted.
Cross-posted.
