Translator: Léa Pigeau Reviewer: Amanda Chu
Are you a boy or a girl?
That's the question I got all the time when I was a little kid.
Are you a boy or a girl?
It was a question that delighted me
and scared me and confused me and annoyed me,
pretty much in equal measure.
It delighted me because if someone was asking me that question,
it meant at least I didn't look totally like a girl.
But it scared me because I wasn't sure what that meant.
Why didn't I look like other girls?
But mostly, it really just annoyed me
because I had no idea
how I was supposed to answer that question.
When I was a kid,
I just didn't have any words aside from "boy" or "girl."
The best answer I could give was, "Different,"
and that didn't begin to get at the depth or nuance of what I felt.
I mean, when we call something different or weird or strange,
it means we don't understand it.
When we know something, when we care about it, when we love it,
we give it a name.
I can remember being a really little kid
and going to bed at night and pulling the covers over my head
and praying to God to make me a boy.
It would take years and years for me to figure out
I didn't need to be made into someone else.
I just needed better words.
And it would be until I was 17
until I finally found the first right word,
and that word was "transgender."
And it showed me just the magic that the right word can accomplish,
how it can unlock something inside yourself,
how the right word can validate and permit, allow something to be.
The best thing about transgender?
It gave me the answer to that question: "Are you a boy or a girl?"
"Yes, I'm transgender."
(Laughter)
People don't always like that answer.
And in the 22 years since I came out as transgender,
I've spent a lot of time discussing and debating and thinking about that term.
So in 1995, when I came out,
transgender was pretty much a brand new word.
And it replaced language
like transsexual, transvestite, cross-dresser,
terms that now seem archaic and hopefully obsolete.
But in the years since then, as you may have noticed,
there's been a sort of explosion of terminology around gender.
We've got terms like non-binary, gender non-conforming, gender fluid,
gender queer, gender expansive, third gender, a-gender,
and probably a lot more that I haven't heard of.
As I go around the nation and give talks on gender identity,
I frequently encounter some hostility and resentment towards all these terms,
like the attitude of people is "Why can't you just make up your minds?
Why isn't 'transgender' good enough?
Do you really need more terms?"
People even say, "It makes you guys seem silly and frivolous
if you keep making up these new words."
I've given talks and heard an audible groan from the audience
when I add another letter to the LGBTQIAA+ acronym.
(Laughter)
And I can understand it can be confusing.
It can probably be annoying or even overwhelming.
But I hope I can convince you
that this proliferation of language is extremely important.
Language is so powerful.
Why is that?
I think it's because language is deeply tied to human nature.
Our brains are patterned to learn, use and acquire language.
And the flip of that is true as well.
As we learn, use, and acquire language, it patterns our brains,
it creates new mental grooves that we can think along.
And I love to think of this incredible feedback loop
working around gender identity,
the synergy of it.
We create all these new terms,
we employ them,
they become part of our daily vocabulary,
and they generate within us
a new perception and a new adaptability around gender identity.
And it doesn't just happen for each of us individual,
but collectively, as a society,
we use these new terms
and we start to have a new appreciation and understanding of gender.
I will admit that sometimes I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle
as I try to get people to adopt new terminology.
The pushback I most often hear
is, "Labels are terrible, they're really dangerous
and we shouldn't be trying to shove people into boxes."
OK, duly noted.
My position is this: labels are really great.
Labels actually save lives.
Let me give you a historical example of this.
If we go back to the Middle Ages,
we arrive at a time
when there is no word for homosexuality
and no understanding of gayness as an identity,
sexual orientation as a part of who we are as a human being.
There's the knowledge that sometimes men have sex with men
and, to a lesser extent, that sometimes women have sex with women.
But to the extent that this is even spoken or written about,
it's with such unhelpful terms as "that unspeakable sin"
or "the unmentionable vice."
If you had been a person who had slept with another man
and you went into the confession,
you would confess to the sin of "luxuria,"
which is a kind of catch-all broad term for a whole manner of sexual sins.
I'm telling you this because it's actually through the confessional
that we begin to see language around sexuality -
kind of strange.
But there was a problem in the Middle Ages.
These people would come in and confess to luxuria,
and the priest would be put in an extremely awkward position.
The priest would then have to ask a series of questions
in order to determine the right penance:
"What exactly did you do?"
"Who did you do it with?"
"Where were you?"
And if the person was not forthcoming, the priest would have to push a little:
"Look, I need to know: did you do this or that?"
You can see this would not only be an awkward line of questioning
for a priest
but might put ideas into the person's head:
"I didn't do that, but it sounds like a really good id -
Next time I'm going to try that."
(Laughter)
So, to circumvent this problem,
the priests made up a subdivision of this category, luxuria,
and one of the subdivisions was "sodomy."
It's a truly terrible word.
It's been used to condone a lot of violence against gay people,
but it also did something amazing and positive:
It made something out of nothing;
it put a word to a concept and made that concept exist,
where, prior to that, there had been this void
within our language and within our minds.
And pretty quickly after that word "sodomy" is invented,
we see people begin to use that to refer to themselves
and, actually, to collect and gather other people.
Labels create solidarity.
Labels allow communities to exist.
In my own life, that label was "transgender."
When I was a kid,
it felt like there was something wrong with me,
that I was the abnormal one
and there was no other explanation for it -
I was just weird.
But when I found that label "transgender"
and when I found other transgender people,
all of a sudden, I knew that word let me see
this is about much more than just me.
This is not something that's going on in my head.
So I hope we'll embrace the power of labels.
I hope that we'll see
that even though language carries this historical weight
and we feel that we have to follow the rules of grammar,
that, really, language serves our needs.
Language serves us,
and we should invent new words,
and we should change the rules if they're not fitting us.
I love how the LGBT+ community has repurposed old words,
how they've taken terms, like "queer," that used to have a negative connotation,
and turned it into something positive.
I love how they've pushed aside terms like "transsexual" and "homosexual,"
words that have been used to medicalize and "other" us.
And I love how the language around gender
has just exploded and taken on a whole new bunch of forms.
I'm optimistic that we can embrace that.
I think we need to recognize
that language doesn't just describe or explain reality,
it changes reality.
Language is revolutionary.
(Applause) (Cheering)