Submission by Sylvia Renee, TNG columnist

Originally, I had been planning on sitting on this topic for a minute until I needed to dip into the ole reserve basket, but two recent events have made me rethink that. The first occurred at this year’s Dupont Drag Race. For those of you unfamiliar with the tradition, well, there are a whole lot of men in various stages of drag, some of which revolve around Lady Gaga (a drag persona if ever there were one). And then they … uh … race. In Dupont. It’s actually pretty self-explanatory when you stop and think about it.

I happened to be close enough to a group of middle-aged straight women to hear the following gem. “Is it a boy or a girl? What should I call it?”  That sound you just heard was the impact of my face on my desk reverberating through the internets. And maybe even the sound of your own head on a hard surface of your choosing.

First of all. There is no ‘it.’ There is a fully realized human being. The equation is pretty simple. It = thing. Thing ≠ person.

Yes, the English language is absurdly terrible at expressing any kind of gender diversity beyond an assumption of masculine men who were born male or feminine women who were born female. But under no circumstance is ‘it’ ever, ever acceptable.

For most of you, the only time you will hear yourself referenced as an ‘it’ is the five seconds of life before the medical authority in the room pronounces the gender that will be instilled in you from every pink or blue second after that. If you happen to be privileged enough to be ok being assigned this identity, then congratulations. If not, well, welcome to ‘it.’

Next on the list of offenders is last week’s episode of Glee, featuring songs from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now, I understand that some of you may have certain feelings about the guilty pleasure that is Glee and some of those might even be feelings that I share (especially if they happen to be about Brittany and Santana). But in this case, we need to talk about what words the writers find acceptable. Transvestite? Acceptable. Tranny? Perfectly fine. Transsexual? OHMY GOD WE CANNOT AIR THAT! Instead of the line from the original “Just a sweet transvestite, from Transsexual Transylvania,” we get some one’s idea of a sanitized substitution. Instead of the only term of the trio that might describe someone we are given ‘sin-sational.’ Apparently transsexual is just too damn racy for television

In most cases, “transvestite” hasn’t been appropriate, or even really accurate, for decades. It is term designed to medicalize, pathologize, and fetishize a group of people who take it upon themselves to express themselves in socially unacceptable way. Sometimes this expression is erotic, and that’s fine, but sometimes it is just another authentic expression.

“Tranny” is even worse. Much like “faggot” or “dyke” can be used by others to hurt us, the same applies to “tranny.” Given how much this show treds near “after-school special” territory with the openly gay character, who in the world thought even for a second that this would be acceptable? Take the general uproar following the show’s usage of “faggey” and now imagine what would have happened had the writers chosen to use “dyke” or “faggot” in place of “tranny.” I promise that this alternative looks nothing like the hand full of reactions that are coming in because again, to be trans is to be considered inhuman, a freak. Welcome to ‘it.’

Socially we just don’t have the words to talk about trans-people. There are plurals for the other members of this sexual alliance, but what about us? I once spent an entire semester explaining to a professor that, in fact, most of us hate the term ‘transgenders’ or worse, ‘transgendereds.’ And he wouldn’t listen. Because all the literature that had been written by straight, hetero-normative researches used those terms. Apparently my identity wasn’t entitled to the same basic consideration that others received.

Gays, generically, are men. Lesbians are women. Even those categories tends to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Bisexuals are afforded an invisible sense of gender security. But anyone on the trans spectrum – we are something else entirely beyond comprehension. All because we devote so much energy to knowing exactly what kind of genitals we can expect to see on a person.

Yet, unless you have some kind of amazing game that I don’t know about or maybe a certain way of making money, you probably don’t spend a whole lot of time looking at various sets of naughty bits. Even if you do spend your entire day looking at other people’s genitals, the ratio of those you see to those you don’t is probably skewed toward the latter. Unless you live in a nudist colony. Then I got nothing. You win. This time.

Personally, anytime I write a plural identity in the LGBTQQIA continuum I prefer to use the identifier as an adjective, rather than a noun. I am a trans-woman. There I more to me than just my gender identity, just like there is more to you than your sexual identity. We are not static objects. We are human, first and foremost.

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