Tamzin (wan Tansin) – Page 2

Don’t Do to Me What You Did to America: Why I Fled the Country

Posted on April 30, 2025 / Updated July 8, 2025 by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

I have loved you, I have grieved.
I'm ashamed to admit I no longer believe.

-- Sufjan Stevens, "America"

I write from 35,000 feet above somewhere on Earth. Where I am, and where I and my family are going, don’t particularly matter, so much as where we’re leaving, perhaps for good: The United States of America, the country we were raised to believe is the greatest on Earth.

For a long time I’ve rolled my eyes at the “That’s it, I’m moving to Canada” stuff. Well-off liberals threatened it under Bush, under a hypothetical McCain or Palin or Romney presidency, under Trump the first time, and now again. And frankly I think fleeing the country because you disagree with the politics of the guy in charge is stupid.

I have an eclectic and esoteric political philosophy. It’s unlikely the U.S. will ever have a president whose politics I solidly like. But politics isn’t everything. I live (… lived. sigh) in a county Trump won three times in a row by 15- to 20-point margins. I never had trouble with anyone there. At the local gun store, which sells Trump merch and bans face masks, the only acknowledgment of my and my wife’s queerness came when the range safety officer, a retired cop, asked if I minded if he put his hand on her shoulder to correct her stance. When I went down to Florida to see my other wife’s family before we left for good, I stayed up till 2 AM getting drunk with her brother and talking conservative politics. There is something to be said for just getting along with who you get along with, politics be damned. I find that many objections to being around conservatives stem more from classism than any ideological complaint—as evidenced from how often liberals complain about people driving pickups, watching NASCAR, or listening to country music, with this supposedly sufficing as evidence of their politics.¹

It’s funny to me (and by funny I mean sad) that the left/right axis of the political compass gets all the attention when the authoritarian/anarchist one matters far more. A few years ago, I said that anyone who supports authoritarian regimes, including Donald Trump’s, should not be an admin on Wikipedia, and almost everyone took this as a left/right statement, with some even asking how I’d feel if someone said the same about Biden supporters. But I have no loyalty to the corrupt and cronyist Democratic Party. Nor to liberalism or progressivism—I consider myself culturally conservative in the sense that I think preserving tradition is generally a good thing and that change in a community needs to be an organic decision from within. And I only have a qualified loyalty to an American left whose members squandered much of the past eight years more interested in cancelling one another for saying “stupid” than in going after actual fascists.²

No, it’s the other axis that matters. Arguably it’s the only one that matters, since if all views can be exchanged freely and equitably in a society, one can expect the left/right axis to accurately represent the consensus of the body politic.

That is what puts the three of us on a plane that with every hour takes us another 600 miles away from the land of the free and the home of the brave: Fascism. Or if you’re the type to be pedantic about that word, sparkling authoritarianism.

My relationship with my trans-ness is as complicated as my relationship with leftism. I have hormonally and socially transitioned from male to some fem-of-center space, and so by that definition I am trans. But I reject the idea that gender is something one identifies as; gender is a social construct, an emergent property of our interactions with others. As a result, I’m not willing to call myself a woman, or even to say I’m not a man, unless it’s using a definition someone else has provided. Instead, my trans-ness feels largely incidental to my life, just a simple fact about the medications I take and clothes I wear, not dissimilar from the fact that I wear glasses. As I’ve been travelling, both in this flight from fascism and in our goodbye trip to relatives before it, I’ve found masculine clothes easier to work with, and so for the first time since 2019 have been getting a smattering of “sir”s in with the “ma’am”s. It surprises me a bit when it happens, but it doesn’t upset me.

And so I might not seem the type to worry that much about how the Trump administration is treating trans people. The “M” on my passport does not cause me any gender dysphoria. If I’m being true to my philosophy of gender being based on others’ perceptions, I can’t even call it inaccurate, even if it might be inconvenient.

But reality is more complicated than that. The U.S. government did not reach a reasoned decision to only use anatomical sex at birth as its definition of gender or sex. It decided to arbitrarily enforce that strange definition specifically in the context of trans Americans leaving the country and trans foreigners entering. This both discourages trans people from getting passports, and complicates travel if they do get them.

I don’t know about you, but if someone tries to make it harder for me to leave a place, I start to get worried.

Combine that with efforts to deprive trans prisoners of HRT and place trans women in cells with men, restrictions on trans healthcare for minors that are creeping above the 18-year mark, and a smorgasbord of proposed laws that would criminalize various aspects of the trans experience, and it’s hard not to see a pattern, a conspiracy to render trans people helpless, criminalize us, and then abuse us. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a trans person’s genitals—forever.³

And this horror will not discriminate based on what kinds of trans we are.

[NSFW] The surprising profundity of how toki pona handles sex

Posted on April 2, 2025 / Updated July 8, 2025 by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

[Obvious CW, this entire post is about human sexuality. Academic-ish terminology but yeah.]

As I was writing “There is no gender in toki pona.“, I kept thinking about how what I was saying applied to discussions of sexuality. But I didn’t want to meander too far from my main point, and didn’t want to turn an SFW post into an NSFW one.

↬essays-by.tamz.in/there-is-no-gender-in-toki-pona/

In the previous post I talked about how gender-related words in toki pona are not exempt from subjectivity. That’s the idea that the words we choose depend on our own perspective. Some Penicillium roqueforti, for instance, might variously be jaki ‘grossness’ if found somewhere undesirable, namako ‘flavor’ if found as part of Roquefort cheese, soko ‘fungus’ to a mycologist, misikeke ‘medicine’ to a manufacturer of penicillin, and laso ‘blueness’ to an artist painting a slice of Roquefort and interested only in the color. None of these words is more or less correct than the other, even if some will statistically occur more often than others.

But I can’t think of a better way to explain the full depths of subjectivity in toki pona than by talking about how it applies to human sexuality. That’s because sex, as one of the most intimate and primal acts humans engage in, is one of the things most defined by the perception of the person doing it. And in toki pona, if we want to talk about sex in detail, we have to subjectively describe the things and acts involved.

There is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)

Posted on April 1, 2025 / Updated July 8, 2025 by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

toki pona, as an isolating language with no gendered pronouns, is grammatically gender-neutral. End of post.

Okay but actually…

↬essays-by.tamz.in/there-is-no-gender-in-toki-pona/

This is an adaptation of “There is no gender in toki pona.“, with added glosses and footnotes and reduced code-switching, so as not to assume toki pona proficiency on the part of the reader. If you understand at least basic toki pona, I would recommend reading the original instead. If there are things that are still not explained well enough for non-speakers, please leave a comment! If you are interested in learning toki pona, please see “Recommended learning resources” on sona.pona.la.

[CW: Very brief references to sexuality; discussion of what gendered terms to use for people.]

There are certain pitfalls ubiquitous to learners of toki pona. One early one many of us run into is hypermodification. We might translate “I drank some cold orange juice” as mi moku e telo lete pi kili suwi sike suli jelo loje, ‘I drank cold liquid of red yellow big spherical sweet fruit’. Eventually we realize we can just say mi moku e telo, ‘I drank liquid’.¹ The next big hurdle is understanding the things we can’t translate directly because they represent views that clash with toki pona’s philosophy. Trying to say that you want something but don’t need it? Too bad; you’re going to have to learn to express differing kinds of wile instead.²

As we become more fluent, we internalize these pitfalls and learn to seamlessly navigate around them. This, in fact, is the essence of fluency. We learn to think not just how to translate the English words but instead the underlying, wordless concepts. But the toki-pona-incompatible worldviews closest to us are the ones that are hardest to let go of. And in my experience, the one I see toki pona speakers struggle with the most is the idea of gender. Discourse around gender in toki pona almost exclusively revolves around trying to twist the language to convey things that simply aren’t its nature to convey, any more than want-versus-need is.

Let’s start with this: There is no direct translation for “woman” and “man” in toki pona. “Hold on!”, you might say. “pu³ translates ‘woman’ as meli and ‘man’ as mije.” And yes, it does. But the translation doesn’t go both ways. If I say, “mi toki tawa mije,” ‘I speak to the mije,’ do you know the gender of the person I’m referring to? If you think you do, take another look at pu.

meli

noun woman, female, feminine person; wife
mije

noun man, male, masculine person; husband

The simplest form of this, that meli and mije do not refer exclusively to gender identity, can be proven pretty decisively. If I see someone in public with a funny joke on their T-shirt, and that person matches my local community’s definition of masculinity, I might say to my partner “o lukin e mije poka. len ona la sitelen li musi,” ‘Look at that mije over there. Their shirt is funny.’ I am not attempting to convey to my partner, in that moment, any commentary on the stranger’s gender identity. For all I know the person is a woman and takes she/her pronouns. Rather, I am using mije to describe their appearance, which will helpfully eliminate ~50% of the nearby people I might have been referring to.

If you have ever used toki pona to talk about strangers, there is a good chance you have used meli and mije in this purely presentation-based way. But the divergence between these two toki pona words and their frequent English mistranslations goes farther than that. Consider this scenario: A lesbian is at a lesbian bar. She is exclusively interested in women, and the friend beside her knows this. The lesbian says to her friend, “ike la mi taso,” ‘I hate being single.’ Her friend gestures to a fem at the end of the bar and says, “o toki tawa ona,” ‘Go talk to them.’ She shakes her head. “mi alasa e mije,” ‘I’m looking for a mije.’ In this context, it is unlikely that the lesbian is trying to communicate that she has suddenly become interested in men. Much more likely, she is saying, “I’m looking for someone butch.” Because a butch lesbian is—sometimes, in some regards—a “masculine person,” and thus mije is an appropriate (not the appropriate) term.

A different person, looking to convey the same meaning, might have said “mi alasa e tonsi” (where, by the same logic as here, tonsi can refer to any kind of gender-nonconformity) or narrowed her scope by saying something like “mi alasa e meli pi nasin mije,” ‘I’m looking for a meli with a mije vibe,’ or set gender aside and specified what precise attributes she sought. Context-sensitivity and subjectivity don’t stop mattering in toki pona as soon as gender is involved.

There is no gender in toki pona.

Posted on February 20, 2025 / Updated July 8, 2025 by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

toki pona, as an isolating language with no gendered pronouns, is grammatically gender-neutral. End of post.

Okay but actually…

[CW: Very brief references to sexuality; discussion of what gendered terms to use for people. This post assumes basic familiarity with toki pona. “There is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)” also exists.]

There are certain pitfalls ubiquitous to learners of toki pona. One early one many of us run into is hypermodification. mi moku e telo lete pi kili suwi sike suli jelo loje. Eventually we realize we can just say mi moku e telo. The next big hurdle is understanding the things we can’t translate directly because they represent views that clash with toki pona’s philosophy. Trying to say that you want something but don’t need it? Too bad; you’re going to have to learn to express differing kinds of wile instead.

Let’s start with this: There is no direct translation for “woman” and “man” in toki pona. “Hold on!”, you might say. “pu translates ‘woman’ as meli and ‘man’ as mije.” And yes, it does. But the translation doesn’t go both ways. If I say, “mi toki tawa mije“, do you know the gender of the person I’m referring to? If you think you do, o awen pu.

meli

noun woman, female, feminine person; wife
mije

noun man, male, masculine person; husband

The simplest form of this, that meli and mije do not refer exclusively to gender identity, can be proven pretty decisively. If I see someone in public with a funny joke on their T-shirt, and that person matches my local community’s definition of masculinity, I might say to my partner “o lukin e mije poka. len ona la sitelen li musi.” I am not attempting to convey to my partner, in that moment, any commentary on the stranger’s gender identity. For all I know the person is a woman and takes she/her pronouns. Rather, I am using mije to describe their appearance, which will helpfully eliminate ~50% of the nearby people I might have been referring to.

If you have ever used toki pona to talk about strangers, there is a good chance you have used meli and mije in this purely presentation-based way. But the divergence between these two toki pona words and their frequent English mistranslations goes farther than that. Consider this scenario: A lesbian is at a lesbian bar. She is exclusively interested in women, and the friend beside her knows this. The lesbian says to her friend, “ike la mi taso.” Her friend gestures to a fem at the end of the bar and says, “o toki tawa ona.” She shakes her head. “mi alasa e mije.” In this context, it is unlikely that the lesbian is trying to communicate that she has suddenly become interested in men. Much more likely, she is saying, “I’m looking for someone butch.” Because a butch lesbian is—sometimes, in some regards—a “masculine person,” and thus mije is an appropriate (not the appropriate) term.

A different person, looking to convey the same meaning, might have said “mi alasa e tonsi” (where, by the same logic as here, tonsi can refer to any kind of gender-nonconformity) or narrowed her scope by saying something like “mi alasa e meli pi nasin mije,” or set gender aside and specified what precise attributes she sought. Context-sensitivity and subjectivity don’t stop mattering in toki pona as soon as gender is involved.

Kelly’s Typology

Posted on July 27, 2022 / Updated July 8, 2025 by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

CWs: Transphobia; brief references to various maladaptive behaviors; brief, mostly clinical depiction of sex.

Preface: Occasionally people ask me if I’m serious about this. There’s nothing I say here that I don’t believe per se. At the same time, part of the purpose of this post is to lampoon an incredibly stupid idea one cis guy had about trans people, and to subvert his own strange binarist, clinicalized way of looking at us. Make of that what you will.

Blanchard is so obviously wrong, and yet there’s something alluring about his typology. Yes, it ignores the existence of trans men. Yes, it ignores the existence of nonbinary people. Yes, it says that all trans lesbians are autogynephiles. But there’s something lurking beneath it that, for many trans people, on some level clicks.

What clicks? The notion that there are, broadly, two different kinds of transgender. And that they occupy spaces very roughly corresponding to Blanchard’s “homosexual [sic] transsexual” and “autogynephile”. Blanchard’s theory about the nature of those two types makes no sense, but the types nonetheless exist. Let’s drop the inaccurate labeling. Let’s call “homosexual [sic] transsexuals” Type N and “autogynephiles” Type S,¹ and let’s forget about what Blanchard says defines them. We, as trans people, know people who clearly fall into Type N or Type S, and we’re aware of the difference, even if we can’t articulate what divides the two types.

Type N transfolk are the “knew it since I was a baby” type. They’re the “Being trans is just a fact about my past” or “I don’t even see myself as trans” type, the type much more likely to want bottom surgery and to be stealth even in trans-friendly environments. They’re almost always binary.

Type S transfolk are the “I feel better this way” type. They’re the “Trans pride flag in every social media profile” type, the type much more likely to feel any bottom dysphoria resolved by calling it the right word and to out themselves as trans because they think it’s something people ought to know about them. Many are nonbinary, and many more are “binary with caveats”.²

To explain what separates these two types of trans person, we have to start with something that all trans people have in common: All trans people are autistic.