
The Trans History of the Wild West - pmcpinto
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trans-history-wild-west
======
BorRagnarok
It's so nice to learn that back then, as now, trans people at some point in
their live transitioned and then tried to live out their lives as the other
gender, and were successful at it. Some only being found out after death or by
becoming really ill. Luckily we're more open about it now. Also, now, as back
then, most trans people just want to fit in and not be labeled 'other', or
'trans' for that matter.

~~~
krapp
When society doesn't believe you exist, or that your existence is simply an
expression of mental illness or moral degradation, then such labels are useful
to establish an identity around which to build a cultural and political
movement, particularly to counteract and attempt to replace the typically
negative or hostile labels provided by that society.

But yes, it is also useful to be able to abandon those labels altogether, or
not have them define one's identity.

~~~
BorRagnarok
> such labels are useful to establish an identity around which to build a
> cultural and political movement, particularly to counteract and attempt to
> replace the typically negative or hostile labels

Ehm, does that actually work however? I see what you say happening, but does
it bring the desired goal?

I also kind of find it stroking with a way to broad of a brush to say that
"society" puts "hostile labels" on groups. This isn't always the case. I'm
part of society, but I for sure aint doing that, and I don't really want to be
put in the same box with people who do.

~~~
krapp
>Ehm, does that actually work however? I see what you say happening, but does
it bring the desired goal?

I think it does, albeit slowly and not necessarily without backlash. The
alternative to having LGBT people assert their own identity is to have their
identity asserted for them, by people who may not understand them or who may
be hostile to them, and that sort of thing never goes well.

And the desired goal is to remove the stigma of LGBT existence and have it be
accepted as being normal. One way to facilitate that normalization is for LGBT
people to simply not be hidden, and to participate in society, and the most
obvious way to do that is as part of a culture that can be easily recognized
by an outgroup.

It's progress for people to simply complain about there being too much gay
representation in the media, rather than for it to be illegal to represent it
as anything but an illness (as was the case under the Hayes code.)

>I'm part of society, but I for sure aint doing that, and I don't really want
to be put in the same box with people who do.

This seems to trip a lot of people up when discussions about the intersections
of race, gender and culture come up. It's difficult to argue that, for
instance, toxic aspects of masculinity can exist without people interpreting
that as a claim that all masculinity is toxic and that, therefore, all men are
toxic. Likewise, discussing rape culture leads to people dismissing the
concept entirely because they, themselves, are not rapists. Yet both are
criticisms of group dynamics, systems of power and identity politics, not of
individuals or of all members of a class.

Individuals can differ in the way they respond to the influences of society,
but its influence still exists. Speaking at the level of abstractions rather
than individuals is important because those abstractions are what form
people's concepts of normality, decency and justice, and because people act
both as individuals and as conformist (or non-conformist) members of a group.
Men who don't display toxic masculinity are still participants in the culture
of masculinity, and men who don't rape are still participants in rape culture.
Women participate in both as well.

Likewise, it's entirely possible to correctly claim that society puts hostile
labels on LGBT groups, and for that not to apply to you personally. If so,
that's fine, but not relevant, and there's no need to be defensive about the
premise.

------
always4getpass
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any
alternative? Everything seems to sound silly

~~~
signalsmith
It's kind of odd, because people seem to accept singular "they" for strangers,
but not once there's a name.

If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes,
apologised to them, and they apologised to me" \- generally (in normal spoken
conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using
singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of
years old.

The problem comes when we give someone a name. If I say: "I bumped into Julie
on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised
to me", people might think it sounds odd (if they're not used to it).

It's as if we have an order/hierarchy in which we expect to learn information
about people. Like, by the time we know someone's name, we assume we should
already have been told their gender, and we confused if hasn't happened yet.

~~~
weberc2
This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual
appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told.
If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked
anomaly NOT to know their gender.

~~~
geofft
I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I
say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite
likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And
nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe
said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's
races.

It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female
person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.

(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a
compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as
a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which
had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)

~~~
iguy
Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the
language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he"
vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talking about in
half, it's very informative, one bit! It will often let you omit the name, or
shorten the sentence elsewhere.

Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you
all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely
unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in
markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since
most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.

~~~
UncleMeat
This sounds like working backwards. Up this thread, people have suggested that
the reason is that gender matters more to society than height (this is why we
don't announce people's height). When this argument is defeated by race, it
switches again to what "seems reasonable".

What evidence, beyond "this seems reasonable" is there for this argument?

~~~
iguy
Sometimes multiple things are true, and none are "defeated". It seems beyond
obvious that our ancestors 1000 years ago did a lot more gossiping about who
was going to marry who, than about anything we'd today describe as racial
distinctions.

~~~
geofft
I'm not debating whether it was true 1000 years ago. I'm saying that _today_ ,
it is a linguistic quirk of English. Of course English is a language that was
in use in some form 1000 years ago - and we don't use all the same words we
did then, because some of them don't have value to us today. (Singular you,
for instance, was much rarer back then!)

~~~
iguy
Sure, but order 10^3 years is the right time scale to think about linguistic
features. People lived in villages and farmed. They speculated about other
people's sex lives a lot. Argued about legitimate descendants and inheritance.
Could not afford to ignore the difference between cows and bulls. And many
(though not all) of their languages have gender deeply built in.

None that I'm aware of have anything resembling our modern idea of race built
in. For the obvious reason that approximately nobody in said village had been
100 miles, nevermind to another continent. If a language had such a feature,
the next generation would probably never have heard it used, and thus would
not know what it meant. (I wonder whether any languages have grammatical
markers for slavery or caste? That would be the closest thing I could imagine,
divisions that many people would have talked about every day for millennia, in
some places.)

Forgetting features seems to happen much quicker than acquiring them.
Post-1066 English lost a lot of complication which German retained (including
grammatical gender of nouns, IIRC). As you say, singular you is much younger
than that, but importantly it's about forgetting a distinction we used to
make. I'm not an expert on why this happened, but I didn't think it was some
great shift in what needed to be communicated, just a mutation/simplification.

