In this post, I’d like to share some thoughts on language and gender, and what role I think language played in my own gender construction.
But before, let me introduce myself a bit. I am (legally) french, even if I might have some, well, let’s call it language dysphoria. I mean, I speak french nearly all the time in real life, with my friends, family, and so on; but on the other hand, most culture, or at least entertainment I got, came from english-speaking countries, most of it being USA. Most of the movies I watch are american movies – I find that french movies suck. Same things for TV series, except french ones suck even more. Novels I read? Mostly from UK and USA. At least for movies (for books it’s more difficult), I prefer to see them in english version. I’ve been using computers and video games since I was 4, at a time where there wasn’t much internalisation, so I used english too. And I am a PhD student, in a field where all my communications must be in english.
Of course, I am not the only one in this case. Many middle-class people of my age probably share the same influences and relation to english, but there are some mechanisms I find quite interesting to compare with being transgender; and in particular, one which is important for me, the “language switch”. I don’t know if there is a proper term to designate this, but for me it is the fact that I am in some mental “state” to speak and think in english, and in some other to speak and think in french. I need some adaptation to switch between the two: I need more effort to get myself to think in english, since it is not my native tongue, but when I have been speaking english for a while, I need some seconds to go back to french.
I feel the same way going from masculine to feminine in french (of course it would also work for any other heavily gendered tongue, french is just my personal example).
In french, you use variations of the same words when it is masculine or feminine: for example, to say “I am happy”, a man will say “Je suis joyeux” and a woman “Je suis joyeuse”.
This isn’t very complicated: female form just usually takes an additional “e”. There are more tricky things, because french is quite a complicated language, but that’s basically it.
The thing is, when you are in an everyday conversation, and you don’t think a lot about what you are talking about, what you say comes very spontaneously, and it is difficult to go from using a female form to speak (or, worse, think) about yourself to a male form, or the opposite.
I remember when I transitioned, the first step of it wasn’t my clothes, it wasn’t facial hair epilation or hormonotherapy, it was… well, “gender switch”. Speaking and thinking about myself in the female form, whereas I had been taught to use the male one since birth.
Adding a “e” to some of the words you say doesn’t seem that difficult, but let me tell you english-speaking trans people that you have it easy not having to go through this :p
The thing that I found really frustrating is that I felt like I was deluding myself: if I had been a true trans, I thought, I should have been thinking of myself in the female form spontaneously. I shouldn’t have to make an effort about this. And I am not the only one to think that: once or twice, I saw trans people wondering if they were truly trans because they were still sometimes thinking of themselves in the wrong grammatical gender.
Of course, the facts is it’s perfectly normal to need some kind of adaptation. I usually think and speak of myself in the female grammatical gender when I am with friends, but I have more trouble after a week with my family who still call me “he” and by my birth name. That doesn’t make me less a woman, in the same way that, after a week in UK, the fact that some words came more easily in english doesn’t make me less french.
(On the other hand, the fact that I am both lesbian and quite fond of Monique “Lesbians are not women” Wittig does make me less of a woman, and the fact that I reject my nationality does make me less french. But it’s another matter.)
I think the fact that my native tongue is quite heavily gendered affected how I defined myself: I tend to define as “female gender” because… I use female (grammatical) gender to speak. But maybe if I was speaking in a less gendered language in everyday life, I could use “ze” or even don’t care much if I was called “he”.
On the other hand, I’m happy sometimes to use female grammatical gender to spaek about me in order to subtly tell that I am not a man, without having to directly correct someone. And when I am with someone whose I don’t know the preferred gender, it helps me if that person use the masculine or feminine form to speak about him/herself.
I think language, which is linked to culture, have an influence in the way we think about ourselves, because we need this language to think, which is why feminists try to change the language: e.g., inventing new neutral pronouns instead of using the masculine one as neutral.
Which also means that differences in language can cause differences in the way we act and construct ourselves, both individually and collectively. Of course, I don’t think that e.g. trans people who speak french are very different from trans people who speak english or spanish or deutch or whatever (at least I can speak for western tongues and cultures that I vaguely know); but I think it can be interesting to see how the strategies we use to resist the forced genderisation that comes from language can slightly differ.
