lang: en

America isn’t politically divided

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

The old man at the café in Bangkok was from New Jersey too. His birthplace in Newark was on the far side of the state from my home in Cape May, but I told him that Newark was still significant to me because it was the last bit of U.S. soil I touched. I told him that we’d fled the U.S. on the day the airport’s ATC went haywire. He hadn’t heard about that. He hadn’t heard about the plane crash in D.C. in January either. He hadn’t heard about a lot of things. But he was happy to listen.

He was 70. He walked with a cane and used the ASL “I love you” sign to say hello and goodbye. For 18 years he’d been living almost as far as possible from home. He was, in his own words, a mystic; he spent hours each day in deep meditation, learning about the outside world only from chance encounters. His main source of information was another American expatriate, who’d often invite him over for dinner and regale him with the day’s news from Fox. He found the stories interesting, but knew they represented but one narrative. He got some news from videos that came across his YouTube feed, but had been burned enough by AI fake news as to not fully trust anything. He’d never heard of Wikipedia.

I invited him to sit down across from me, and we spoke for an hour about the earthly world he’d left behind. He made clear his own perspective: He bore no ill will to anyone and saw a beauty in everyone’s experience of this world in which he merely superficially resided. He was moved but not surprised by my assessment that the U.S. as we knew it was in its final years. But when I tried to explain why, a funny thing happened: I found I couldn’t explain what anyone was fighting about.

A lot of my time every day is spent watching people argue about American politics. Less of it since I left, but my media consumption still skews American, most of my friends and family are still in America, and as a Wikipedia administrator I choose to, for whatever reason, spend a lot of my allotted hobby time intervening in disputes among people with very strong opinions on American politics. But talking to someone with only limited exposure to American politics since the G.W. Bush administration, how was I to explain the political polarization so ever-present that civil war is increasingly seen as likely?1

In much of the world, bitter political divides are about starkly different visions for a country. Capitalist or socialist? Monarchical or republican? Secular or religious law? Aligned with one great power or with another? As I tried to explain American politics to the mystic, I was struck by how little of that kind of division there was. Most Americans believe in a federalist representative republican democracy with an individualist and moderately libertarian attitude toward private life, a capitalist economy, a strong sense of national identity and patriotism, and (even if many wouldn’t describe it this way) culturally Christian values. America has had the same constitutional structure for almost a quarter-millennium, and almost everyone likes it that way. There are, to be sure, those who favor more radical change, and these groups do influence the broader movements they are a part of, but they are nonetheless relatively niche.

The political issues that actually get fought over in Congress and the state legislatures are almost always questions of degree, not kind: The military should be powerful, but how powerful? Drugs should be illegal, but how illegal? Crimes should be punished with draconian prison sentences, but how draconian? The government should provide a moderate amount of social safety nets, but to whom and under what conditions? In a vacuum, none of these debates sound like those of a heavily divided body politic. These sound like implementation details for fairly strong national consensuses.

The exception are what broadly get categorized as “social issues”, especially immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. But when Americans approach these with a political mindset, there’s not as much division as you’d expect. Most Americans think abortion should sometimes be allowed and sometimes not. Most Americans dislike it when illegal immigrants commit crimes but like it when they do cheap labor that citizens wouldn’t want to do. Most Americans generally favor being decent to queer people, while rejecting more ideological aspects of modern queer thought. There is more division on these issues than on, say, drug policy, but still not as much as you’d think from the degree of rancor associated with them.

The catch is that most people do not in fact approach these issues with a political mindset. The labels are what matter. A 2018 Gallup survey showed that people are significantly more likely to support first-trimester abortion than identify as pro-choice, and significantly more likely to oppose second-trimester abortion than identify as pro-life. But those labels matter more than a specific set of opinions on the nuances of abortion policy. They and other social-issue labels represent cultural camps, ones only orthogonal to any particular political views.

Continue readingAmerica isn’t politically divided

nimi kulupu: “popu”, “wiki”, and the future of Toki Pona

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

nimi sin discourse is a staple of Toki Pona. Often it’s fun, sometimes it’s not, and it’s addictive enough that I’ve had to restart this essay twice to avoid getting bogged down in my personal opinions on which nimi sin are crucial and which are a disgrace to the language.

Let’s say this instead: the 120 nimi pu, minus at most 31 and plus at most 22,2 give you enough to have a completely satisfying conversation with anyone in the world. The exact number you settle on largely depends on whether you think the nimi pu adequately express a few basic concepts like “cut” or “take”. Different people will answer those questions differently, and that’s fine. As long as most speakers understand the 142 words that make up the vast majority of Toki Pona as actually used, it doesn’t really matter whether a given speaker thinks that “medicine” is adequately conveyed by “pona”, or whether it’s sufficiently distinct to warrant the nimi sin3 “misikeke”.

Beyond that buffer of 25 non-unanimously-used words, I will be honest, I think most nimi sin discourse has been A Bad Thing. It’s not that I have a problem with coming up with new nimi; we’ll get to some of that later. It’s that the discourse doesn’t really seem to represent natural language development by people who routinely speak a language. One level of this is obvious in the form of the ubiquitous “I just started learning Toki Pona and I think we need a word for this” post, such a staple of the community that it’s become its own genre of memes and humor. A subtler issue, though, comes from the fact that much nimi sin discourse seems to focus on “How would you say X?”, not “How do you say X?”

For a lot of people, Toki Pona is more of a thought experiment or artistic tool than a language they intend to have fully fluent conversations in. This is a great and beautiful aspect of the artlang, but it is not a great breeding ground for actual language development. A common phenomenon in Toki Pona spaces is the person who declares that they use a certain word in some unusual, provocative way. After some amount of discourse over whether this is good usage, someone may ask the person, “Do you ever actually use the word that way?” and it becomes apparent that no, they just think it’s interesting to say that they do.4 This betrays an important truth, which is that for every person who routinely uses Toki Pona in their daily life, there’s probably 20 who speak the language fairly well but aren’t frequently confronting new situations and having to think about how to describe them in Toki Pona.

This bedevils the nimi sin situation because most nimi sin are, at their core, an argument that some lexical gap exists. “lanpan” argues that “pana” and “jo” need an antonym. “leko” argues that “sike” needs a counterpart. “tonsi”, perhaps the most persuasively, argues that “meli” and “mije” really oughtn’t be a binary. And so on. But how can a community tell where the lexical gaps are when most of its members don’t use the language day-in-day-out, don’t become fluent enough that they can facilely talk through complex abstract subjects only to find that there are still one or two concepts that are unwieldy to describe and would be abetted with a nimi sin?

So here’s my take: We have enough nimi sin. Usage seems to have found an equilibrium. For one reason or another, the community mostly feels like fear is distinct enough from general badness that it needs its own word, but that shame isn’t; that we need a word to cover gender variance but not ones to cover sexual orientation; and so on. There may be some movement left to be seen,5 but I don’t think we’re going to see another word where a large chunk of the community all say “Oh wow, yeah, we really can’t make do without a word for that.”

We don’t need more nimi sin. What we need is something much, much cooler than that. And something we’re going to get naturally, as long as one thing happens: More people speak Toki Pona face to face.

Continue readingnimi kulupu: “popu”, “wiki”, and the future of Toki Pona

Maybe trans people not caring about respectability politics was a bad idea

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

Human rights are not something we grant to one another. They exist inherently, created either by G‑d or by the invisible mesh that ties all humans to one another. The best and worst among us are equally entitled to them, and the most someone should ever have to do in order to exercise them is ask.

This is a nice idea. It is, at least in the moral philosophy I subscribe to, true. It is also completely irrelevant to how human rights actually work, a process in which oppressed groups have to find some way to convince privileged groups that they deserve those rights, sometimes with great difficulty and only through making painful concessions.

I’m from Washington, D.C., a city where it sometimes feels like more things are named after Malcolm X than after any president, and also a city where the incomplete success of the civil rights movement is on display mere miles from where Martin Luther King presented his Dream to the world.1 It was always hard not to wonder, when I was younger, whether the moral of the civil rights movement was that Brother Malcolm’s strategy should have won out, not Dr. King’s.

As a queer teenage boy in the early ’10s, the rhetoric around gay marriage always annoyed me for how much it was tailored toward normativity. Sure, it was good to have the right to marry a guy with a good career, settle down in the suburbs, and adopt two girls from a foreign country… but didn’t I also have the right to get trashed in Vegas and wake up wearing a $100 wedding ring in the bed of a guy whose name I couldn’t remember?

A lot of queer folk from my generation, the kids who grew up with marriage equality in the air and radical Tumblr discourse on our minds, felt the same way. And when we got our chance to take charge of our own movement, the chance for our generation of trans and nonbinary teens and twentysomethings to broaden what our transsexual forebears had started, it was clear whose strategy we were going to follow. We would finally get an answer to the question of what would have happened if Malcolm X had been in charge.

And you know what? It turns out things go really badly.

How we got here

My first inkling something was amiss came before my own transition. I was in AmeriCorps, assigned to a school in a very socially conservative community, the Benning neighborhood of Washington, D.C.2 A new corpsmember told the team they were nonbinary, and another member asked their preferred pronouns. Before answering they prefaced, “Well, they’re not preferred pronouns. They’re mandatory.” On another occasion, a supervisor asked how they wound up with their name (a feminine name that is also a common noun, and is not common in that supervisor’s community). They snapped back, “Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a trans person about their name?”3

I understood their frustration. They dealt with transphobia daily in that school. I dealt with a lot of the same, being open as a gay man at the time. But it wasn’t so simple as “conservative community so everyone’s shitty to the queers”. The single most popular teacher in that school, beloved by students and colleagues alike, was a she/he/they nonbinary butch lesbian, who talked frequently about their wife and ran the schools’s LGBTQ club.4 I don’t want to dwell too much on this example, to talk about what that teacher did right and that corpsmember did wrong, in large part because I do think the latter was a good person under a lot of stress, and to their credit they were infinitely patient with the students when it came to gender. But still, it illustrated a difference: some trans and nonbinary people were thriving in trans-skeptical communities, and some weren’t.

One day I accidentally described myself as nonbinary to that teacher—saying something I’d casually identified as but never voiced—and after that found I couldn’t unsay it. In January 2019 I decided to transition, and that’s when I began to explore the trans Internet. I learned a lot about what to expect from my transition. I found a community where I could fit in. But I also kept seeing things that bothered me. A girl, early in her transition, wanting to cut ties with her grandmother for accidentally misgendering her, and people encouraging her to. A college student insisting there’d be no problem with switching the whole country to single-gender bathrooms, on the basis that it worked fine in her dorm. So many other comments that seemed utterly disconnected from the realities not just of cis Americans, but—it became clear, as I started my social transition—of most trans Americans.

It started to dawn on me that a lot of the people establishing the orthodoxy of transgender thought were not actually living representative trans lives. They weren’t the teacher I worked with. They weren’t my transfem enby redneck friend who works at a hardware store and makes their own rifle ammo by hand. They weren’t the girl I met from Atlantic City with the most utterly stereotypical Jersey-girl life except for the part where it started as a boy. They were living in their own ivory bubble, and from within it deciding what the rest of us had to do.

Continue readingMaybe trans people not caring about respectability politics was a bad idea

There is no transgender in toki pona.

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

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.

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

Posted on 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.

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.

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