One thing I sorta breezed past in “There is no gender in toki pona” is the word tonsi. tonsi isn’t technically a nimi pu in the sense of appearing in Toki Pona: The Language of Good, but it’s so widely accepted in the toki pona community that it is better counted alongside those words than the nimi ku suli. It is unique, I think, in having received jan Sonja’s explicit endorsement even before the publication of ku.
So… what does tonsi mean? Lacking a pu definition, we can look to lipu Linku, which gives:
nonbinary, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, transgender*
* – Broader in meaning, somewhat less commonly accepted.
So, what’s going on there? Why is the sense of “transgender”—in English, a much more common word than any of the other three—somewhat less accepted? If tonsi isn’t how you say “transgender” in toki pona, then how do you say it?
First let’s acknowledge one point of view from which it would make sense to say tonsi strictly maps onto “transgender”: that in which “transgender” is the catch-all term for non-cisgender people in English. If you take that view, then yes, you can translate the word that way. But that’s not actually how most people use “transgender”. It’s a usage found in some academic, medical, and legal contexts, and favored by some trans activists, but word use is descriptive and that definition has never enjoyed widespread currency in English, including among nonbinary people, who—if I can soapbox for a sec as a nonbinary person—are really the ones who should have been asked about this. So for the rest of this essay, when I say “transgender”, please read that as binary transgender—people assigned male at birth who identify as women, and people assigned female at birth who identify as men.
To answer the questions above, we have to return to the point that toki pona is a subjective and context-sensitive language, and that this does not change when we’re talking about gender. There is no one way to say “transgender”, because it depends on why we’re saying it.
As discussed in the previous essay, when talking about gender presentation, identity doesn’t need to inform word choice at all. o lukin e meli ‘look at the meli‘ is equally correct regardless of whether that’s a cis woman, trans woman, fem enby, or male crossdresser. And we might modify meli to meli tonsi or tonsi meli if the person has a fem-androgynous presentation, but that is still independent of the question of whether they are transgender.
Meanwhile, to the extent that mije and meli convey gender role, it is rarely relevant whether someone is transgender. We modify nouns based on essential information without which the sentence would be incomplete. That is why mi becomes mi mute if it necessary to clarify ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, but stays as simply mi when unambiguous or when the distinction doesn’t matter. So if someone occupies a mije or meli gender role, it is rarely appropriate to modify that based on the incidental fact that they started their life gendered a different way.
So when is it appropriate to use tonsi to refer to binary trans people? Well for this we need a working definition of tonsi beyond some imperfect English translations. My gloss of tonsi in these essays has been ‘gender-variant’, and I think that’s a good way to think of it: tonsi is that which defies binary expectations of gender. Androgynous clothes can be len tonsi. Any person can be tonsi in terms of how they present. Someone who occupies a gender role that is neither strictly mije nor meli is tonsi.
To state the obvious, a binary transgender person’s existence usually does not defy binary expectations of gender. But there are situations where it might. Consider:
- “mi lon tomo pi ilo waso, la jan lawa li lukin e sijelo mi. tonsi mi li nasa e ona.” — ‘At the airport, security scanned my body. My being tonsi [having a body not matching binary expectations of femininity] confused them.’
- “tan tonsi mi la mi kute e toki ‘meli o’, la mi awen lukin” — ‘Since I’m tonsi [have a life experience not matching binary expectations of masculinity], sometimes when I hear “Ma’am”, I still turn around.’
With the same caveats as in the last essay regarding use of meli/mije/tonsi to refer to body parts, someone who does choose to use the words that way might say:
- “mi o moku e misikeke tonsi” — ‘I have to take my tonsi [related to a medical existence differing from binary expectations] medications’
- “lupa anpa sinpin mi li tonsi, la telo li ken lili” — ‘Because my vagina is tonsi [has a structure not identical to a binary expectation of a vagina], sometimes it is a little dry’; see also “[NSFW] The surprising profundity of how toki pona handles sex“
- “mi tonsi, la mi ken ala kama mama sijelo” — ‘Because I’m tonsi [don’t have a physiology matching binary expectations], I can’t become a parent biologically’
This last example is a rare case where it would make sense to use tonsi as a noun1 to refer to a binary trans person based on their body—and even then, with the aforementioned caveats about that. The unifying thing in all of these cases is that it’s not being trans that makes a person tonsi; it’s certain aspects of the transgender experience. These could change, too. In a hypothetical society where there is zero expectation that a woman have a vagina, for instance, then nothing about a woman having a penis would qualify as tonsi. Even in cases where it led to some confusion because it is statistically less common, that wouldn’t be a departure from any binary expectations of gender; it would just be a regular departure from a norm, no different from some people being left-handed.
All in all, tonsi is a word that applies to binary trans people in the minority of cases where their life is closer to what is the default for nonbinary people, living in a space where neither male nor female norms apply. toki pona doesn’t have a word for any other aspect of being transgender, because those aspects aren’t worth discussing in toki pona. The one exception might be describing the trans community. kulupu tonsi is a reasonable approach when discussing the community of all people who could be called tonsi in any way.2 To refer exclusively to binary trans people, that is not a concept that is natural in toki pona, and so it works best to treat “transgender” as a name, e.g. kulupu Tansente.
Longer-form writing by Tamzin Hadasa Kelly. @ my Mastodon if you want me to see a reply.
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