Seeing the Star Wars movies does not make you a Star Wars fan. Actual Star Wars fans have done some of the following: * Read the novelizations * Read books in the EU * Read new canon books * Read some comics * Watched the animated shows * Participated in SW discussion groups.

Coercing with categories

Recently some guy tweeted “Seeing the Star Wars movies does not make you a Star Wars fan. Actual Star Wars fans have done some of the following…”  This is a great opportunity for me to talk about a particular kind of category fight: coercion.

Over the past several years I’ve written about some things people try to do with categories: watchdogging, gatekeeping, pedantry, eclipsing and splitting.  Coercion is similar to gatekeeping, which is where someone highlights category boundaries with the goal of preventing free riders from accessing benefits that they are not entitled to: the example I gave was of Dr. Nerdlove defending the category of “socially awkward men” from incursion by genuinely abusive men.  He argues that these abusive men do not deserve the accommodation that is sometimes extended to men who are simply socially awkward.

Coercion is different from gatekeeping in that the person making the accusation is shifting the category boundaries.  Ed Powell knows quite well that most people’s definition of “Star Wars fan” includes people who have not done any of the six things he lists.  So why is he insisting that “Actual Star Wars fans” have all done some of those things? Because he wants to control the behavior of people who care about whether they are considered Star Wars fans.

Why would someone care about being considered a Star Wars fan?  Because fandom is often a communal affair. Fans go to movies and conventions together, and bond over their shared appreciation for Star wars.  As Powell says, they may participate in discussion groups. There’s a satisfaction people get in talking about Wookiees or midichlorians with people who share background knowledge and don’t have to ask what a protocol droid is.

I’ve also heard that some people get a sense of belonging from participating in these groups.  They may have been teased – and rejected from other groups – for being one of the few Star Wars fans in their high school, especially in the seventies and eighties.  There’s a satisfaction and relief in finally finding a group that you share so much with.

Of course, these groups are vulnerable to the dark side.  They contain people, and people aren’t necessarily nice just because they’ve been treated badly by other people.  Sometimes not even if they’re Star Wars fans. Sometimes people discover they can wield power within a group like that, and they’re not always interested in using that power for good.

One way to wield power is to be able to give people something they want – or to deny it to them.  And if people want the sense of belonging to a group, or the enjoyment of participating in group activities, it’s a source of power to be able to control who belongs to the group – and who doesn’t.  Some groups are arbitrary: in theory, the only person who gets to decide who belongs to “Brenda’s friends” is Brenda, and the only person who gets to decide who’s invited to Kevin’s party is Kevin.

Other groups are based on categories, like these Meetup groups that are hosting events tomorrow: the New York Haskell Users Group, Black Baby Boomers Just Want to have Fun, or First Time Upper West Side Moms.  Or like Star Wars fans. These groups are much less arbitrary: if a woman lives on the Upper West Side with her only child, it’s going to be hard to throw her out.

It’s hard to exclude people from a category-based group, but not impossible.  What if our First Time Upper West Side Mom is trans, or a stepmother? Or if she’s a stepmother and a first-time biological mother?  Or if she lives on 107th Street? Or if her kid is in college? Because categories are fuzzy, the power to draw category boundaries can be the power to exclude people from group membership.  If the group leader doesn’t like our hypothetical mom, all she has to do is draw the boundary of the Upper West Side at 106th Street. Sorry honey, there is no First Time Morningside Heights Moms?  Oh gee, what a shame.

The power to exclude doesn’t even need to be exercised.  It doesn’t even need to have any direct force to have a chilling effect.  Even if the head of your local Star Wars fan club totally owns Ed Powell on Twitter, you still may be wondering if people at the next regional convention are going to look at you funny because you haven’t read Dark Force Rising.

But if you’re not actually going to use this power to exclude people, what do you use it for?  This is where the coercion comes in. You can use the threat of exclusion to bully people into doing things.  And the easiest way to do that is simply to make doing those things the criteria for inclusion.

So here’s what I think happened: Ed Powell got tired of going to conferences and not having anyone to talk about novelizations and animated series with.  All they wanted to talk about was the movies (I can’t imagine why!). So how does Powell get people to read these books? He changes the criteria for what counts as an Actual Star Wars fan.  Now they have to read them, or watch the series, if they want to be Actual Star Wars fans.

Now as far as I can tell, Ed Powell is just some guy on Twitter, and has no authority to exclude anyone from any fan club.  And he seems to be getting owned by everyone. I doubt that his shaming will have an effect on the general population of Star Wars fans.  It may serve as advertising to encourage people who have read these books and watched the animated series to talk with him about them. If it doesn’t turn them off too.

Indistinguishable from magic

You might be familiar with Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke tucked this away in a footnote without explanation, but it fits in with the discussion of magic in Chapter III of James Frazer’s magnum opus The Golden Bough. These two works have shaped a lot of my thoughts about science, technology and the way we interact with our world.

Frazer lays out two broad categories of magic, homeopathic magic and contagious magic. Homeopathic magic follows the Law of Similarity, and involves things like creating effigies of people in order to hurt them, and keeping red birds to cure fever. Contagious magic follows the Law of Contact, and involves things like throwing a child’s umbilical cord into water to improve the child’s swimming abilities later in life, or a young woman planting a marigold into dirt taken from a man’s footprint to help his love for her grow.

Frazer is careful to observe that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are widespread cognitive patterns that people use to understand their environments. In semantics we know them as the foundation of the processes of metaphor and metonymy, respectively. He notes that sympathetic magic’s “fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science: underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature.”

In this both science and magic stand in contrast to religion: “if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings who rule the world, and second, an attempt to win their favour, it clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events from the channel in which they would otherwise flow.” After this Frazer engages in some sloppy thinking, concluding that because religion seems to have arisen after magic it must be an improvement over what the “savages” do. He also fails to complete the fourth quadrant of his taxonomy: that as science is to magic, social sciences are to religion.

The key difference between magic and science (and between religion and social science) is the element of faith. The potion brewer doesn’t check to see that there is a logical explanation for the inclusion of certain ingredients. If the potion fails, she must have gotten impure ingredients, or misread the incantation. A scientist looks for explanations as to why a medicine works when it works, and why it fails when it fails.

Some of you may be thinking that Clarke’s quote was about technology, not science. I first learned of technology as “applied science,” which should mean that it’s no more faith-based than science itself. In practice, it is not possible to understand every tool we use. In fact, it’s not even possible for a human to completely understand a single tool, in all its complexity.

My stepfather was a carpenter. When I was first taught to hammer a nail, I started out by picking the hammer up and putting it down on the nail, vertically. I had to be shown how to swing the hammer to take advantage of the angular momentum of the hammer head. It took another layer of learning to know that I could swing from my wrist, elbow or shoulder to customize the force of the hammer blow to the task at hand, and then another to get a sense of the various types of hammers available, not to mention the various types of nails. In a home improvement project several years ago I discovered that, as electric screwdrivers have gotten smaller and lighter, practices have changed and people use screws in situations where nails used to be more common.

My stepfather might at some point have explained to me why his hammer heads were steel and not iron, and the handles were hardwood and not softwood, metal or fiberglass, but his explanations did not go to the molecular level, much less the atomic or quantum levels. To be honest, all I needed to know was “steel is solid, heavy and doesn’t rust” and “hardwood is solid but absorbs some of the impact.” The chance that the molecular or subatomic structure of the hammers would affect our work beyond that was so small that it wasn’t worth spending time on.

At the beginning I didn’t even need to know that much. All I needed to know was that my stepfather had handed me this hammer and these nails, and told me to nail those two boards together at that angle. I had to trust his expertise. As I began to get comfortable, I started asking him questions and trying things slightly different ways. Eventually people get to the point of saying, “Why not a fiberglass handle?” and even “Why not an electric screwdriver?” But at first it’s 99 percent faith-based.

That’s how the technology of hammers and nails and houses works, but the same principles apply to technologies that many people take for granted, like pencils (we know how to sharpen them, but how many of us know how to mine graphite?) and clothing (some of us can darn a sock, and some of us can knit a scarf, but how many of us have even seen any of the machines that produce shoelaces, or Spanx?). We take it on faith that the pencils will write like they’re supposed to, and that socks will keep our feet warm.

This, then, is what Clarke meant when he talked about technology being indistinguishable from magic. Yes, Sprague de Camp portrayed ancient Romans mistaking explosives for magic in his 1939 novel Lest Darkness Fall (which explicitly invokes the sympathetic and contagious forms of magic described by Frazer). And the magically moving photographs described by J.K. Rowling in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone have become real technology just twenty years later, omnipresent in the UK and the United States.

But beyond the simple resemblance between technology and magic, if someone is not inclined to be critical or scientific, their relationship to technology is functionally the same as it would be to magic. If the technology is sufficiently advanced, people can do the same things they’ve always done. They don’t need to “get under the hood” (now there’s an example of non-magical technology!) because it seems to work most of the time,

On the other hand, our faith is not blind. I had faith in my stepfather to teach me carpentry because my mother and I had lived with him and trusted him, and seen his work. I also learned to have faith in cars to get me places safely, but as I learned more about kinematics and human attention, and as I was confronted with more evidence of the dangers of this technology, I realized that my faith was misplaced and revised my habits.

Our faith in these technologies is based on a web of trust: I trusted my stepfather when he told me that if I hit the nails this way they would securely fasten the pieces of this house together and if properly maintained, it wouldn’t fall down on us. He in turn trusted his training from other carpenters and recommendations from other professionals in related fields, which were then corroborated, revised and extended by his experiences.

I want to stress here that these methods were also supported by scientific studies of materials and manufacturing. Over the millennia, carpenters, architects and other craftspeople have tried using different materials, different structures, different techniques. Some worked better, some didn’t work so well. They’ve taken the materials apart to figure out what makes them strong in some ways and flexible in other ways. This is an ongoing process: vinyl siding may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it can pollute if burned or discarded.

That is how you tell the difference between technology and magic: every aspect of the technology is open to question and revision. With magic, you may be able to try new things or test the existing methods, but beyond a certain point there is no more trying or testing, there is only faith.

Data science and data technology

The big buzz over the past few years has been Data Science. Corporations are opening Data Science departments and staffing them with PhDs, and universities have started Data Science programs to sell credentials for these jobs. As a linguist I’m particularly interested in this new field, because it includes research practices that I’ve been using for years, like corpus linguistics and natural language processing.

As a scientist I’m a bit skeptical of this field, because frankly I don’t see much science. Sure, the practitioners have labs and cool gadgets. But I rarely see anyone asking hard questions, doing careful observations, creating theories, formulating hypotheses, testing the hypotheses and examining the results.

The lack of careful observation and skeptical questioning is what really bothers me, because that’s what’s at the core of science. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of people in Data Science doing both. But these practices should permeate a field with this name, and they don’t.

If there’s so little science, why do we call it “science”? A glance through some of the uses of the term in the Google Books archive suggests that it was first used in the late twentieth century it did include hypothesis testing. In the early 2000s people began to use it as a synonym for “big data,” and I can understand why. “Big data” was a well-known buzzword associated with Silicon Valley tech hype.

I totally get why people replaced “big data” with “data science.” I’ve spent years doing science (with observations, theories, hypothesis testing, etc.). Occasionally I’ve been paid for doing science or teaching it, but only part time. Even after getting a PhD I had to conclude that science jobs that pay a living wage are scarce and in high demand, and I was probably not going to get one.

It was kind of exciting when I got a job with Scientist in the title. It helped to impress people at parties. At first it felt like a validation of all the time I spent learning how to do science. So I completely understand why people prefer to say they’re doing “data science” instead of “big data.”

The problem with being called a Scientist in that job was that I wasn’t working on experiments. I was just helping people optimize their tools. Those tools could possibly be used for science, but that was not why we were being paid to develop them. We have a word for a practice involving labs and gadgets, without requiring any observation or skepticism. That word is not science, it’s technology.

Technology is perfectly respectable; it’s what I do all day. For many years I’ve been well paid to maintain and expand the technology that sustains banks, lawyers, real estate agents, bakeries and universities. I’m currently building tools that help instructors at Columbia University with things like memorizing the names of their students and sending them emails. It’s okay to do technology. People love it.

If you really want to do science and you’re not one of the lucky ones, you can do what I do: I found a technology job that doesn’t demand all my time. Once in a while they need me to stay late or work on a weekend, but the vast majority of my time outside of 9-5 is mine. I spend a lot of that time taking care of my family and myself, and relaxing with friends. But I have time to do science.

Category fights: Splitting

Imagine that you belong to a category, like “tourist.” You fit all the necessary conditions for membership in that category: you are traveling to another part of the world for recreation. But that category has a bad reputation – literally a bad name. What do you do? You split the category.

In the past I’ve talked about other kinds of category fights: watchdogging alleged bait-and-switch tactics, or gatekeeping to prevent free-riding. Tonight I’m going to talk about splitting.

I grew up in the lovely arts colony of Woodstock, New York, which is crowded every summer and fall with tourists. They never bothered me too much, and they bought lots of stuff so that the merchants could afford to hire my parents, but my family and neighbors liked to complain about them. They drove too fast on our country roads, possibly contributing to the death of some of our dogs over the years. They filled up the parking lots and caused traffic jams on Mill Hill Road. They asked annoying questions – where was Yasgur’s farm? They were demanding and unreasonable to my sister and friends who worked in retail.

In terms of non-Platonic categories, there is a wide diversity of actual tourists, but the category is dominated in people’s minds by a stereotype of the Tourist, who is entitled, disrespectful, and lacks a proper appreciation for the people they are visiting and their culture. All tourists are tainted by the stereotype of the Tourist, but some people do pride themselves on being respectful, humble, open and curious. What can they do to advertise that to others?

As Lara Week documented in a study of several blogs in 2012, and described to Laurie Taylor on his Thinking Allowed podcast, one thing you can do is to split the category. A number of people have chosen to call themselves “travelers” instead of “tourists.” Week reports that they distinguish themselves by “doing what the locals do,” “respecting local cultures” and “being frugal,” and have added features like “seeking authenticity” and “going to ‘untraveled’ places.” She goes on to summarize critiques that argue that the self-styled travelers have “fail to address all of the problems created by tourism,” but that is not directly relevant to the linguistic issues here.

The travelers, notably, split the category of “tourist” so that they are outside of it. They have concluded that the category is irredeemably contaminated, and their only hope is to escape it. In contrast, as Ben Zimmer reported last year, a number of people have tried to split the category of “pedestrian,” keeping the stereotype of pedestrians clean by placing people who text while walking into subcategories of “petextrians,” or “wexters.”

The cleanliness of the stereotype is one factor in determining whether people choose to split themselves off into another category or to split others off. It also determines whether people try to split themselves (or others) into a subcategory or into a completely new category. Another factor is how rigidly the category is defined. It is very hard to leave the category of “men,” so some men who feel that the stereotype is contaminated have responded with the #notallmen hashtag, trying to reclaim it by splitting the bad men into a subcategory.

On being a public linguist

People say you should stand up for what you believe in. They say you should look out for those less fortunate, and speak up for those who don’t get heard. They say that those of us who come from marginalized backgrounds, like TBLG backgrounds for example, but have enough privilege to be out in relative safety should speak up for those who don’t have that privilege. They say that those of us who have undertaken in-depth study in the interest of society have a particular responsibility to share what we know with the world as “public intellectuals.” They say that we linguists need to do a better job of applying our knowledge to real-world problems and communicating solutions to the public at large.

They’re right of course, but there’s a reason more people don’t do these things. They’re hard to do, and even harder to do right. Lots of people are strongly invested in the status quo and in thinking of themselves as good people, and they don’t like to be told that what they’re doing at best ineffective and at worst harmful. Lots of people think that because they’re trans they know everything there is to know about trans issues, or that because they use language they know everything there is to know about language.

Case in point: after watching with increasing frustration for years as the word “cisgender” was invented and abused, back in December I wrote a series of blog posts about it. I know this is a controversial topic, and I was a bit apprehensive since I was on the job market, but my posts was not idle rants: as a linguist, a trans person, and someone who has observed trans politics for years, I had been trained to do this kind of analysis, and pursued these topics beyond my training.

I anticipated a number of potential objections to my argument and addressed them in the first three posts. As I published each one I was worried it would get a huge backlash, but there was barely a peep (more on that in another post). So for the title of the last one I went big: “The word “cisgender” is anti-trans.” Not much reaction.

A few weeks ago I came across a Facebook post by a gender therapist asking for opinions about “cisgender,” so I left a link to my blog post, identifying it as “my professional opinion as a linguist.” The therapist then shared my post without identifying me as either trans or a linguist.

Then there was a backlash. Several people immediately called my post “garbage” and “horse shit.” There were a handful of substantive disagreements, all of which I had anticipated in my post and previous ones that I had linked to. There was some support, but the vast majority of comments were negative. There were several similar comments made on my blog post itself, most of which I left unpublished since they were repetitive and unhelpful.

I know that plenty of people face far worse reactions to things they post. I didn’t receive any comments on my looks, rape threats or death threats. But it was still very upsetting, particularly as it was posted the same day I began my first full-time job since receiving my Ph.D. – an event that was positive on a number of levels, but upsetting on other levels.

The gender therapist, who presumably helps people with their mental states, showed no interest whatsoever in mine. They made no effort to moderate, did not intervene in the comments, and sent me no personal messages. The idea that a trans person might be losing sleep over these attacks on their page may not have even occurred to them.

The response my post has gotten from other public linguists has been minimal. A columnist who’s written about the issue and encouraged me to write gave my post a few tweets. A radical feminist whose writings about language and politics inspired me for years completely ignored it. It has not been picked up by any of the popular linguistics blogs, or by anyone talking about language, gender and sexuality.

It’s quite possible that these linguists disagree with me. There are some very specific linguistic questions at stake. But linguists love to argue, and I would welcome respectful, constructive engagement with these questions. So far there has been none.

I have also gotten very little support from other linguists. When I was first formulating these arguments a few years ago on Twitter, there were at least two linguists who explicitly denied that I had any standing to contest the arguments for “cis” that they were retweeting. They were satisfied with the flimsiest of pseudolinguistic rationales in pursuit of their political and social goals, and for whatever reasons I did not qualify as an authentic voice of the trans community in their eyes. I stopped following them on Twitter, and as far as I could tell they had no reaction whatsoever to my posts.

I know that a lot of people don’t want to get involved in flamewars on Twitter or Facebook. It’s really hard to know who’s right and who’s wrong. At first glance I look like just another white guy, and I project an image of success and confidence on social media because that’s what everyone tells me I need to do. Some people may disagree with my stance on a political basis.

I mostly came out of the Facebook flareup okay, although it’s hard to tell how much of my insomnia and touchiness relates to that as opposed to other stresses. Re-reading some of those comments just now was pretty upsetting. I made a decision to focus on the new job, and avoided reading comments, posts or links for a week or two. Now it’s blown over – but there’s no telling when it’ll get shared by someone else.

My main point is that being a public linguist isn’t easy. Speaking out isn’t easy. Fighting on your own behalf instead of some Little People somewhere isn’t easy – even if you’ve got a certain amount of privilege. If you’re wondering why people don’t fight for themselves more often, why they don’t speak up, why linguists don’t write more public posts about issues that matter – there’s your answer. It’s much easier to bury your nose in a book and write about grammaticization vs. reanalysis in Old Church Slavonic.

If we really want people to take a stand on these things, we need to support them. We need to stick up for linguists who speak out in public. We need principles that go beyond identity and political and social affiliation. And we need people who are willing to support linguists who speak out based on those principles. We need people who will make themselves available to back up other linguists on the Internet. Without real support, it’s all empty rhetoric.

On pet parents

I’m a parent. It doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else, it’s just a category that reflects some facts about me: I conceived a new human with my wife, we are raising and caring for that human, and we expect to have a relationship with him for the rest of our lives. Some people don’t take parenthood seriously, so it doesn’t impact their lives very much, but their kids suffer. We take it very seriously, and it’s a lot of work for us.

I also take care of pets. We own three cats, and sometimes I walk my mom’s dog or take him to be groomed. It can be a lot of work, and the relationships can be very intimate at times. “Ownership” is kind of a funny word for it. In some ways it can be like certain stages of parenting: we buy all the food and make sure the animals don’t get into danger. It makes sense when I hear people refer to their pets as their “baby” or put words in their pets calling themselves “daddy.” I even understand when I hear them refer to themselves as “pet moms.”

I understand this usage, but I do not agree with it. I have a kid, and I have pets. The relationships are similar, but different. When someone calls themself a “pet dad,” it trivializes my relationship with my kid and infantilizes my pets. It erases the work of the actual parents, and trivializes the hard work of humans who act as surrogate parents to infant pets. I am a dad: I am not a pet dad, and I am not my pets’ dad. Or their mom.

My kid will one day be an adult, and while I may always think of him as The Kid, he will be able to function as an autonomous member of society. (Note that the term “kid” itself is an animal metaphor – referring to a juvenile goat.) Only one of my cats can still be considered a juvenile by any standard; the others are five years old and twenty years old, respectively. They are adult males, and until the last century they would have been free to come and go as they wished.

If my cats are incapable of leaving our house unaccompanied it is more likely due to the fact that we have cars everywhere than anything else. When I was a kid we lost three dogs to car culture. When I was eleven I saw a neighbor’s cat crushed beneath the wheels of a car, and arrived just in time to see him take his last breath. We have indoor cats and dog leashes in part because we have made the outdoors inhospitable.

I suspect one reason we hear more about “pet parents” is that so few of our pets are parents themselves. I support universal neutering, and have only adopted neutered cats from shelters or feral rescuers. It’s the best response to the overpopulation of feral animals, but it does make the pets neuter – and childless.

When I was a kid we had a cat who had a litter of kittens. I watched one of our dogs give birth to eleven puppies, and then found homes for the ten that lived. Our male cats were aggressive, sexual toms. Again, not wise in retrospect, but it was hard to think of any of the humans in the house as “moms” or “dads” of our pets while they were themselves moms and dads.

There is one human I know who would qualify as a “cat mom” in my mind. She is the woman who leads the feral cat helpers in our neighborhood. Six years ago someone found a baby kitten near some railroad tracks in Manhattan. My neighbor fostered this kitten in her apartment for five months, feeding him with an eyedropper until he was old enough to eat. She posted his picture on her website and we adopted him. If he has a “pet mom” it’s her.

Prejudice and intelligibility

Last month I wrote about the fact that intelligibility – the ability of native speakers of one language or dialect to understand a closely related one – is not constant or automatic. A major factor in intelligibility is familiarity: when I was a kid, for example, I had a hard time understanding the Beatles until I got used to them. Having lived in North Carolina, I find it much easier to understand people from Ocracoke Island than my students do.

Prejudice can play a big role in intelligibility, as Donald Rubin showed in 1992. (I first heard about this study from Rosina Lippi-Green’s book English With an Accent.) At the time, American universities had recently increased the overall number of instructors from East Asia they employed, and some students complained that they had difficulty understanding the accents of their instructors.

In an ingenious experiment, Rubin demonstrated that much of this difficulty was due to prejudice. He recorded four-minute samples of “a native speaker of English raised in Central Ohio” reading a script for introductory-level lectures on two different subjects and played those samples to three groups of students.

For one group, a still photo of a “Caucasian” woman representing the instructor was projected on a screen while the audio sample was played. For the second group, a photo of “an Asian (Chinese)” woman was projected, with the same audio of the woman from central Ohio (presumably not of Asian ancestry) was played. The third group heard only the audio and was not shown a photo.

In a survey they took after hearing the clip, most of the students who saw the picture of an Asian woman reported that the speaker had “Oriental/Asian ethnicity.” That’s not surprising, because it’s essentially what they were told by being shown the photograph. But many of these students went further and reported that the person in the recording “speaks with a foreign accent.” In contrast, the vast majority of the students who were shown the “Caucasian” picture said that they heard “an American accent.”

The kicker is that immediately after they heard the recording (and before answering the survey), Rubin tested the students on their comprehension of the content of the excerpt, by giving them a transcript with every seventh word replaced by a blank. The students who saw a picture of an Asian woman not only thought they heard a “foreign accent,” but they did worse on the comprehension task! Rubin concluded that “listening comprehension seemed to be undermined simply by identifying (visually) the instructor as Asian.”

Rubin’s subjects may not have felt any particular hostility towards people from East Asia, but they had a preconceived notion that the instructor would have an accent, and they assumed that they would have difficulty understanding her, so they didn’t bother trying.

This study (and a previous one by Rubin with Kim Smith) connect back to what I was saying about familiarity, and I will discuss that and power imbalances in a future post, but this finding is striking enough to merit its own post.

Eclipsing

I’ve written about default assumptions before: how for example people in different parts of the English-speaking world have different assumptions about what they’ll get when they order “tea” or a “burger.” In the southern United States, the subcategory of “iced tea” has become the default, while in the northern US it’s “hot tea,” and in England it’s “hot tea with milk.” But even though iced tea is the default “tea” in the South, everyone there will still agree that hot tea is “tea.” In other cases, though, one subcategory can be so salient, so familiar as to crowd out all the other subcategories, essentially taking over the category.

An example of this eclipsing is the category of “concentration camp.” When you read those words, you probably imagined a Nazi death camp like Auschwitz, where my cousin Dora was imprisoned. (Unlike many of her fellow prisoners she survived the ordeal, and died peacefully earlier this year at the age of 101.) Almost every time we hear those words, they have referred to camps where our enemies killed millions of innocent civilians as part of a genocidal project, so that is what we expect.

This expectation is why so many people wrote in when National Public Radio’s Neal Conan referred to the camps where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in World War II as “concentration camps” in 2012. NPR ombudspeople Edward Schumacher-Matos and Lori Grisham observed that the word dates back to the Boer War. Dan Carlin goes into detail about how widely the word “campos de reconcentración” was used in the Spanish-American war. Last year, Aya Katz compared the use of “concentration camp” to that of “cage,” and earlier this year, reviewed the history of the word.

In general, the “concentration camps” of the Boer War and the Spanish American War, as well as the “camps de regroupement” used by the French in the wars of independence in Algeria and Indochina, were a counter-insurgency tactic, whereby the colonial power controlled the movements of the civilian population in an effort to prevent insurgents from hiding among noncombatants, and to prevent noncombatants from being used as human shields.

As Roger Daniels writes in his great article “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans” (PDF), the concept of “internment” refers to the process of separating “alien enemies” – nationals of an enemy power – from the general population, and was first practiced with British subjects during the War of 1812. While this was done for citizens of Japan (and other enemy powers) during World War II, Daniels objects to the use of “internment” to describe the incarceration of American citizens on the basis of Japanese ancestry. He notes that President Roosevelt used the term “concentration camp” to describe them, and asks people to use that word instead of “internment.”

In the case of the colonial wars, the camps were used to isolate colonized people from suspected insurgents. In the case of the Japanese-American incarceration, the camps were used to isolate suspected spies from the general population. In neither case were they used to exterminate people, or to commit genocide. They were inhumane, but they were very different from Nazi death camps.

It is not hard to understand why the Nazi death camps have come to eclipse all other kinds of concentration camps. They were so horrific, and have been so widely discussed and taught, that the inhumanity of relocating the populations of entire towns and rounding up people based on ethnicity pales by comparison. It makes complete sense to spend so much more time on them. As a result, if we have ever heard the term “concentration camp” used outside of the context of extermination and genocide it doesn’t stick in our memory.

For most English speakers, “concentration camp” means a Nazi death camp, or one equally horrific. This is why Daniels acknowledges, following Alice Yang Murray, that “it is clearly unrealistic to expect everyone to agree to use the contested term concentration camp.”

The word “cisgender” is anti-trans

The word “cisgender” was coined to refer to people who aren’t transgender, as an alternative to problematic terms like “normal,” “regular” and “real.” Some have gone beyond this and asked their allies to “identify as cis,” and even treat trans people as the default realization of their genders.

As a trans person and a linguist, I disagree with these last two for a number of reasons. As I wrote last month, it’s bad etymology, and there is no evidence it will work. You might ask, well, what’s the harm in trying? The problem is that there is a cost to using “cisgender”: it divides the trans community. This may seem surprising at first, but it hinges on the fact that there are at least four different but overlapping meanings of the word “transgender.”

tg-definitions1The original use of “transgender” was as an “umbrella” term including transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens, butch lesbians, genderqueer people and more. Another popular definition is based on “gender identity,” including everyone who believes that their essential gender is different from the one assigned to them at birth. A third sense is based on feelings like gender dysphoria, and a fourth is restricted to those trans people who transition. Trans people regularly argue about these definitions, but in my observations it is common for a single person to use more than one of these senses in the same conversation, and even the same sentence.

These overlapping meanings produce what I call the Transgender Bait and Switch. Intentionally or not, many trans people use the broader “umbrella” or “dysphoria” definitions to show the largest numbers, neediest cases or historical antecedents when they are looking to get funding, legitimacy, or political or social support, but then switch to narrower “identity” or “transition” senses when they are deciding how to allocate funding or space resources, or who is entitled to speak for the group, or who is an acceptable representation of trans people in the media.

This is a problem because the meaning of “cis” depends on the meaning of “trans.” Who are the “cis” people? Are they the opposite of “umbrella” trans – those who don’t belong to any of the categories under the umbrella? Are they the opposite of “identity” trans – those who do not believe they have a gender different from the one assigned them at birth? The opposite of “feeling” trans – those who do not feel gender dysphoria on a regular basis? Or are they the opposite of “transition” trans – those who don’t transition? I’ve heard all four uses.

For all their lofty claims about the goals of “cis,” when trans people use it they do so to exclude, and typically they focus on excluding the marginal cases as part of the Transgender Bait-and-Switch: people who fit in one definition of “trans” but not another. It has become commonplace to refer to drag queens as “cis gay men,” and gynophilic transvestites as “cis straight men.” Drag queens, transvestites, non-binary people and others are regularly challenged when we try to speak from our experiences as trans people, and the refrain is always: “You are cis, you have not transitioned, you do not have the same experience.” Meanwhile, the same people seem to have no problem presenting themselves as the representatives of the transgender umbrella when they want to, even when they do not have experiences of drag performance, fetishism or non-binary presentation.

The best known challenges to “cisgender” have come from people who are not trans under any definition: didn’t transition, don’t have a gender identity mismatch, don’t feel chronic gender dysphoria, and don’t fit in any of the identities under the umbrella. They claim that the word is used as a weapon against them. They have a point: many trans people blame “cis people” for oppressing them, conveniently ignoring the fact that we’re just as capable of oppressing each other as they are of oppressing us. And it is counterproductive: since almost all estimates – using any of the definitions – put us at less than one percent of the population, we can’t live without non-trans people.

But the reason I hate “cisgender,” the reason I’m asking you not to use it, is because it’s used as a weapon to exclude other trans people. When they want money, we’re trans. When they want to claim our legacy, we’re trans. But when we want some of the money, we’re “cis.” When we want representation, we’re “cis.” When we want to speak for the trans community, or even for our segment of the trans community, we’re “cis.”

“Cisgender” divides the trans community and reinforces a hierarchy with transitioned trans people on top and nonbinary people, drag queens and transvestites at the bottom. So next time your transgender buddy Kyle tells you to “identify as cis” to prove you’re a real ally and stay on the invite list to his parties, I’m asking you to tell him no. Tell him that your transgender buddy Angus said not to. And if he tells you that I don’t count because I’m not transitioning, tell him he just proved my point. And his parties suck anyway.

Will “cisgender” work?

Some people have come up with the word “cisgender” to refer to people who aren’t transgender, as an alternative to problematic terms like “normal,” “regular” and “real.” Some have gone beyond this and asked their allies to “identify as cis,” and even treat trans people as the default realization of their genders. As a trans person and a linguist, I disagree with these last two for a number of reasons.

One quick objection that I have to get out of the way: “cisgender” is bad etymology. It’s true that “cis” is the opposite of “trans,” but only in the sense of location, existing on this side or the other side of a boundary. We are “trans” in the sense of direction, crossing from one gender expression to the other. In Latin as far as I know there is no prefix for something that never crosses a boundary. Of course, that’s a silly objection. We have plenty of words based on inaccurate analogies and they work just fine. I just had to get it off my chest.

Now, for real: the simplest objection is that there is no evidence “cis” will work as advertised. First of all, default status is not necessary for acceptance or admiration. Blond hair is marked in the United States, and that can make some people with blond hair unhappy. But there is no real discrimination or harassment against people with blond hair, not like that against trans people. People with English accents are marked, but they tend to be admired.

Transgender people (under almost any definition) make up less than one percent of the population. Do we even have the right to ask to be the default? Why should everyone have to think about us a hundred percent of the time when they only deal with us one percent of the time? Why should we be the default and not, say, intersex people?

Let’s say we manage to convince everyone to make us the default and themselves the marked ones. How is that going to make them more tolerant or accepting of us? There are plenty of groups who are or were the default, and even the majority, but were oppressed anyway: Catholics in British Ireland, Muslims in French Algeria, French Canadians in Quebec before the Quiet Revolution. The people who tell everyone to say “cis” don’t mention any of this.

The proponents of “cisgender” do not point to any time that this strategy has succeeded in the past, because there is no evidence of it succeeding. There are in fact intentional language changes that have some record of success, like avoiding names with implied insults. Switching the marked subcategory of a contested category is not one of them.

The main reason to not say “cisgender” is that it probably won’t work. If it were easy to get everyone to say “cis,” and it had no negative consequences, I would say that we should all just go ahead and say it, knowing full well that it probably won’t work, to humor its proponents. But the fact of the matter is that it does have negative consequences, consequences that affect me directly. I’ll talk about them in the next post in this series.

In the meantime, if you want to do something to help us, I’ve got some suggestions for you on my Trans blog. You can ask your friends and family to take a pledge not to kill us, or not to beat trans teenagers. You can even write the missing hip-hop song where a guy treats a trans woman with something other than violent contempt.