‘Is’ and ‘ought’: How the American trans rights movement failed, and the tenuous path back to a limited success

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

I have drafted this essay literally dozens of times. As long drafts in my head, as an op-ed that got a very polite rejection letter, as various stale drafts on this blog, as a Mastodon thread I never posted, as an audio essay I never posted, as a video essay I never made. It started out as a commentary on the Dylan Mulvaney clusterfuck in 2023, built around the idea that trans visibility had been a bad thing. In the two years since, it’s become clear that that then-edgy take was in fact an understatement, that the trans community’s strategy for the past 15 years has been a continuous push in the wrong direction.

This essay will probably make some people mad, and that’s fine, but I do want people to get mad for the right reasons, so I want to stress a few things from the start:

First, the trans rights backslide in the US is primarily the fault of bad actors on the far right. That does not, however, mean that trans rights activists bear no responsibility in it. Pushback is the constant; we are the variable. Firefighters don’t get a free pass for letting a house burn down just because fire is inevitable.

Second, a lot of my analysis rests on my perception of what the median American thinks of trans people. Where possible, I’ve cited hard numbers for this. That is supplemented with my anecdotal observations on how cis people talk about trans people. I gave the least weight to politically self-selected discussions, and the most to conversations where non-ideologues brought up trans issues organically without being aware a trans person was present.1 I also gathered anecdata by letting various cis people in my life (ranging from center-right to far-left) know that I wouldn’t judge them for expressing their honest opinions on trans issues, and then listening to what they had to say.

Third, I’ll stress a very important distinction: There is the way the world ought to be, and the way the world is. Political advocacy is about trying to bring the world closer to what you believe it ought to be. But the strategy behind that advocacy is based on the way the world is now. Well… or at least it ought to be.

With enough political moxie and enough banging of the table, you can at least briefly build a strategy that treats that ought as the is. You can insist really loudly that the planks of your platform are all basic common sense and that no sane or kind person would ever disagree, and you can make that the controlling dogma in spaces you control, and for a while it will look like you are leagues ahead of the opposition. That platform might be able to support tons upon tons of rhetorical weight. But one day the floor will give out.

In some ways I saw this coming, but in a lot of other ways I was as caught in the echo chamber as anyone else. The trans community of c. 2010–present has done a really good job at challenging outside binarist and cisnormative assumptions and normalizing trans-inclusive alternatives. Some things, like getting people to not refer to people with vaginas as women by default, never really caught on even among trans people, as much as people liked to pretend otherwise.2 But a lot of things, like the idea that a transfeminine person’s genitals can be meaningfully feminine even if they haven’t had bottom surgery,3 or that you can call yourself a man or a woman even if hormones haven’t brought your body close to the binary expectation of that, have been tremendously effective memes (in the Dawkins sense) within our community. This has been, in a vacuum at least, a good thing. Trans people should feel comfortable in our bodies. We should feel safe to live the lives we want without having to meet cis people’s expectations of gender.

It’s one thing to change how your community sees things. Even in a large subculture it sometimes just takes a few determined advocates to change the collective understanding of something. But it’s not quite as easy with society at large. You can be very effective within your community at normalizing the idea that an AMAB person4 who has taken no outward steps toward transition, but has a “she/her” nametag on, is a woman. If your community really believes in that value enough, they will genuinely see her that way without having to put on any pretense.5 But no matter how affirming you are, nothing changes the fact that when she walks out the door of your trans safe space, she will be perceived as a man by everybody she meets.

That’s a sentence that will make a lot of trans people uncomfortable. For many of us, “Everyone thinks I’m a <other gender> and is just being nice” is a constant nagging fear. But this is where the is meets the ought. You can really strongly believe that that hypothetical transfem ought to be a considered a woman. That does not change the fact that she is not considered one.

The rotten foundation beneath the trans rights movement’s platform is perhaps best illustrated by the movement’s de facto motto: “Trans women are women and trans men are men.”6 Even within the trans community, this is not wholly uncontroversial, but it does have broad acceptance within the portion of the trans community that engages in any degree of gender discourse.

The movement has been very effective at evangelizing for this axiom. It underlies many government agencies and private entities’ policies on gender and sex. It has led to many online spaces considering it hate speech to call a trans woman a man or a trans man a woman. People get fired for disagreeing with trans women being women and trans men being men. In many circles, the taboo of that disagreement is entrenched alongside that of saying the N-word.7

And so, what percentage of Americans do you think agree that trans women are women and trans men are men? Better yet, what percentage of Americans do you think agree that at least some trans women aren’t men, and at least some trans men aren’t women?

Well, Pew Research has asked asked Americans three times whether a person can change their gender. The percentage who said yes was 44% in 2017, 41% in 2021, and 38% in 2022. Again, that’s not just agreement that trans women are women and trans men are men; that’s agreement with gender being even the slightest bit mutable. In the 2022 numbers, even among 18-to-29-year-olds it was only 50%. There was only one cohort that cracked 50%, that of Democrats and lean-Democrats. Their 61% may appear to be some solace, or evidence that this is all just the result of political polarization, but 3-in-5 is a remarkably low percentage of left-of-center people to agree with a view seen as non-negotiable in most progressive spaces.8

That is the floor. This is the sound of it falling.

We built ourselves safe spaces. We built ourselves a world where a woman was anyone who said she was a woman, a man anyone who said he was a man. Where someone who looked like a man to outsiders and only dated the same could call herself a lesbian and that was celebrated. We did all of that, and it was our right as a community. And then we told the rest of the country that they had to agree. And we told their bosses and the people who moderate their content that they had to agree. And they said “Bull. Fucking. Shit.”

Not just the diehard gender conservatives; also all the moderates and the silent majority who are politically indifferent—even the teenage girls I overheard at a Dunkin’ Donuts this winter chatting about how a former classmate was “actually a boy”. Teenage girls are rarely subtle about snark, and I heard none in their voices. They didn’t seem to have any problem with her having been born male. But once that was ascertained, there was no question about the right word for such a person: a boy. That’s your median American right there.

The trans community’s is was not the rest of America’s is. And to some, us foisting an ought on them just confirmed what they suspected: that we are an ideological movement.

Which we are.

Continue reading‘Is’ and ‘ought’: How the American trans rights movement failed, and the tenuous path back to a limited success

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.

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.

Tamzin (wan Tansin)
Tamzin (wan Tansin)
@tamzin

Longer-form writing by Tamzin Hadasa Kelly. @ my Mastodon if you want me to see a reply.

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  1. Well okay, in that context I would argue tonsi is simultaneously a noun, adjective, and verb, but that’s an essay for another day. ↩︎
  2. Although this may include cis gay men and lesbians in some contexts… a topic for another post. ↩︎

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

Posted on 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.

Tamzin

Proud to say I have collected all 3 of a possible 2 genders!

April 23, 2025, 5:05 pm 4 boosts 8 favorites

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.

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

[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

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

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

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

Okay but actually…

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.

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