Tag Archives: Gender

Summer 2020 Issue XVI: Language Stories

Attempts to Exceed the Language Binary

August 19, 2020 Zoe Koeninger

I identify as nonbinary and use they/them pronouns, primarily because those are the most succinct ways to describe my current relationship with gender. That’s not to say they are the best or most accurate terms. No matter what the options are when I need to select my gender on a survey or form, I always end up feeling a bit uncomfortable, a bit unsatisfied. I can describe my gender as such: When I’m asked to choose between male and female, I choose female. When asked to choose between male, female, and nonbinary, I choose nonbinary. When I’m able to select one or more, I will select female and nonbinary. But, if given the option, I will always turn to my old friend, “Prefer not to say.” Because the truth is, I don’t know how to describe myself, at least not with one or two checkmarks. I’d rather just not say anything, than say something incomplete.

I was born in the United States and grew up speaking English with my family. When I was in first grade, I had to make the choice between learning French or learning Spanish for the foreseeable future. I chose French because my older sister had, and it became my second language as simply as that. I learned French in a classroom setting for twelve years, and I still try to review it from time to time in conversational settings to keep my skills sharp. Since I was about five years old when I started, I had absolutely no knowledge of nonbinary identities, much less my own. Therefore, I was fine with being referred to as elle and with the feminine forms of nouns and adjectives. This lasted throughout my formal education in French, as I did not start using they/them pronouns until around the end of my final year of French classes. However, my nonbinary identity has definitely affected my thoughts about returning to French in the future.

The possibility of taking more classes in French and developing my fluency in the language is tempting, but also fraught with complications. How will I ask others to refer to me? Neither elle nor il feels particularly comfortable, and both forms of they are gendered as well. There have been movements to create gender neutral pronouns in French, but none have become as widespread as they in English, and I have no guarantee that a future French teacher would respect my right to use them. Furthermore, it’s unclear how I could refer to myself using other words. I am aware of the new convention of nonbinary French speakers adding “(e)” to the ends of adjectives in order to demonstrate their gender fluidity, but this is not always something that can be translated into the spoken language. I also don’t know how it works for nouns or adjectives with more complex transformations from masculine to feminine. It’s an imperfect system at best. Ultimately, it feels as though I may have to choose between losing my French and being misgendered, and neither of these options is desirable.

My second foray into learning a new language gave me slightly different options. It happened during my sophomore year of high school, after I discovered the Norwegian TV show SKAM and decided to learn Norwegian on Duolingo. Norwegian is also a gendered language, with masculine, feminine, and neuter forms. However, there are a few dialects of the language that ignore the feminine markers and use masculine markers for both feminine and masculine nouns, distinguishing only between neuter and “common genders.” You can write the nouns using either form on Duolingo. Norwegian is also the only language that I’ve studied in which speakers have gathered around a single gender-neutral personal pronoun, hen. Unfortunately, this pronoun is neither widely used nor accepted. Similarly, according to a friend who is fluent in Norwegian, most speakers still use the traditional feminine, masculine, and neuter forms of nouns. The language is far from moving past its gendered structure, although it has taken more steps than French has. I never had enough experience speaking Norwegian to figure out which pronouns I prefer, as I dropped the language after about six months. However, the presence of a gender-neutral pronoun and less gendered language definitely makes the possibility of returning to it in the future feel more promising, less painful.

The most recent language I’ve decided to learn is German, and I recently completed the elementary German course at Smith College. I chose this language because my family is German, and I thought it would be a nice change from French. Like Norwegian, German has a gendered system with feminine, masculine, and neuter forms. Unlike Norwegian, however, there hasn’t been any movement to consolidate gendered nouns in German, and there is no unified movement around a single gender-neutral personal pronoun.

Fortunately, at this point I have not been in many situations in which someone has had to refer to me in the third person in German, or in which I’ve had to describe myself using adjectives or gendered nouns. When those situations do arise, I’ve adopted the French method of adding the feminine endings in parentheses. If people ask me how they should refer to me in the third person, I generally just tell them to use sie, which is the German word for she. However, the main reason I’m comfortable with this is because it’s also the German word for they, just with a different verb conjugation. This works well enough to address my complex relationship with nonbinary and female identities. It’s possible that this will change as my German develops, but that’s where I’m at now.

However, what I’ve realized throughout my journey is that no matter how many new words are created for me to use, or how many modifications of adjective endings I find, it’s only a temporary fix. Even if a language has begun to adopt more gender-neutral language, it’s only a small step towards trying to capture an experience that’s very difficult to pin down in such a simple way. I use the word nonbinary to describe myself, but there are many aspects of my life that have led to my decision to identify in that way, and that are inseparable from how I experience gender. One word cannot encapsulate the levels of self-reflection and personal history that have formed my gender identity, and therefore using only that word tells an incomplete story of myself.

Creating more inclusive terms is definitely an important step. But we need to go further. Changing language is one thing, but it means nothing if people are unwilling to put those changes into practice, or unable to do so without serious backlash. It is the beginning of acceptance, not the end. It does nothing if it is not accompanied by a distinct movement towards furthering the rights and voices of nonbinary people in other ways. Only by creating a safer, more open, and accepting environment will people feel the freedom and safety to be open about their experiences with gender and to tell their whole story.

Zoe Koeninger ’23 is a rising sophomore at Smith College, and hopes to double-major in theatre and Russian studies.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

TRANSITION, verb

April 15, 2016 tnehls

I remember the exact moment I realised that I wasn’t cisgender. It was on my way back home in Germany, a couple of weeks before I was going to leave for Smith. I was just getting off the train and as I climbed up the stairs from the platform, I thought, “I am not a woman.”

I wasn’t and still am not able to understand what exactly that means, and I have since realised that figuring out my gender identity is a process that is likely to be never-ending. This is often frustrating and scary, but ultimately I hope that I will be able to see it as freeing. The pressure to conform doesn’t stop with stepping outside of the gender binary. Even as I came to identify as trans, I was irritated at myself: how could I say I wasn’t one gender or another, when gender is a social construct? What would make the gender I identified with any more real than the one I was assigned at birth? I’ve never subscribed to gender roles anyways, so on what basis do I even define gender?

Coming to terms with questions like these is especially difficult in a society that generally doubts your gender identity even exists. I was fortunate to enter Smith and find a place where I could think about gender in a different way than I could have in Germany. It might seem ironic that I would distance myself from being female while at a women’s college, but it turns out that when you take gender out of the equation, there is more freedom to it.* Sure enough, Smith is far from representative of the rest of the United States (although I am not aware of any women’s colleges in Germany), but one part of the wider culture has been incredibly significant in my understanding of trans identity: the language.

While identifying as non-binary in Germany, the way I conceptualised it was to add a male alter ego to my established female identity. English, a language without grammatical gender that has the option of using they as a non-gendered singular pronoun (however frowned upon it might be stylistically, it is established), provided me with the resources to think and express myself outside of the gender binary. Our language shapes our thoughts and thus our worlds. A language without gendered pronouns, for example Turkish, would help us understand the world in yet another way.

Language is a fundamentally social phenomenon. It shapes our communities and they shape it. I understand now that while, yes, gender is a social construct, that doesn’t make us, as people living in society, free of it. As people who exist in relation to one another, the way we are perceived by others will always be a significant part of who we are. As an individual, I have no problem with my gender identity at this point; I just am who I am. It is when others perceive me in a certain way that does not conform to my self-image that the problems arise.

While transgender awareness is slowly growing when it comes to transgender women and men, most people are not aware that it is a spectrum, and even when non-binary is included, it is often as a third category in addition to the binary extremes. Defying gender roles and wanting to be recognised as non-binary/trans is a balancing act. Even though I know that neither activities, nor clothes, nor makeup, nor haircut have an inherent gender, presenting in a way that is socially construed as feminine will result in me being immediately read as female and erase my gender identity. It often feels that in order to disrupt this, I have to present in a way that is especially masculine, or even identify as a transman in order to not be assumed cis.

As long as we live in a society that upholds gender roles and the gender binary, not conforming to those will be a struggle. But even in this society we can find a community that supports us, in which we can discuss the issues and questions that arise out of this tension, and encourage each other to keep challenging the status quo.

Transition might be read as a noun, but for me it is a verb first and foremost. Life and all that comes with it is unfathomably complex, and there will always be more to discover and figure out. What stagnates will wither, and change is the only constant.

*I am aware that not everyone’s trans identity has been met with love and respect at Smith, but fortunately I have only come across encouragement.

TL Nehls is originally from Hamburg, Germany and has lived in Chile and Northern Ireland before coming to Northampton. Asking them about historical linguistics, memes, or local geology will likely result in a lenghty, albeit enthusiastic, discussion, so be prepared. When not sitting in front of mostly empty word documents, they can be found performing theatre or folk music, or both.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

Engaging with New Perspectives on Gender in Multilingual Space

April 15, 2016 dlensingsharp

During the fall semester of my year abroad in Hamburg, I took a class on the poetry of French Renaissance writer Louise Labé which involved readings in French and class time conducted in German. This made me nervous because I found it difficult to speak the two languages at once, but I hoped it would help me become more comfortable moving from one language to another. To be more confident switching between French and German, I would have to participate in class discussions in which both languages were spoken over the course of a single sentence. Though I had never taken a course conducted in two different foreign languages before, my experience in literature courses in French and German at Smith helped me to adapt to this new hybrid model.

lensing-sharp_2016-04-05-essay-image — Dompteuse, 1930. Hannah Höch. Photocollage.

As I navigated the course’s multiple languages, my command of German improved significantly more quickly, as it was the dominant language in the classroom. I gave an oral presentation on the introduction to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which I first read in English, then referred to the German translation in order to convey the concepts to my classmates. This constituted what was essentially my first engagement with theory in a literature course, although some of the basic concepts in Gender Trouble were familiar to me thanks to the open discourses about gender and sexuality at Smith. However, I was fairly surprised when most of my classmates had difficulty understanding the concepts I was discussing, such as the difference between gender identity and biological sex.

Part of the problem seemed to lie in the language itself—any vocabulary used to describe gender was either basic or borrowed from English. In German, Geschlecht means either gender or sex, unless you extend it to Geschlechtsidentität, which specifies gender identity. In a presentation for which I had to distinguish explicitly between gender and sex, I was advised simply to use the English terms as I explained the theory to my classmates in German. Explaining the different components of phallogocentrism (Phallogozentrismus), or the male-centered quality of language, resulted in more confusion. Having attended Smith for two years made me forget that not all or even very many universities encourage conversations about these issues the way Smith does. It surprised me, too, because we often assume that Europeans are much more progressive than Americans with regard to social and political issues. One might think that Germans in particular would have a more open view of gender based on the fact that their language includes a third, neutral grammatical gender. In our class discussions, however, it became clear to me that their engagement with the material began and ended with the theoretical.

This presentation was important to me as a linguistic and intellectual exercise, but was also personally meaningful in a way that didn’t seem to resonate with my classmates. While issues of gender identity have played a significant role in my own inner life and the lives of many of my friends at Smith, the concepts we discussed in this course seemed limited to the abstract for my classmates, who may have only been taking the course to fulfill a major requirement. In comparing discussions I’ve had in German with discussions in English on gender identity, it seems to me that English is a more inherently flexible language, particularly with regard to lexical invention and introduction of new words into everyday speech. This quality has made it easier to facilitate conversations about unique identities, pronoun usage, and other subjects for which a new vocabulary simply must be created.

In the end, it made me more grateful to return to Smith where I would be among like-minded classmates, but it reminded me, too, that there is much work to be done in other less welcoming spaces when I leave. Language certainly shapes the way we view the world, but I realized that that view might not always be more expansive simply because the grammar is. If I want to engage in deeper discussions of gender and sexuality in new cultural and linguistic environments, I’ll need to make the effort to search for the communities where these concepts are treated on a discursive level closer to my own.

Dinah Lensing-Sharp is currently a senior at Smith, enjoying the last few weeks of college with their friends. They are finishing up an honors thesis in Comparative Literature entitled “Sensational Internationals: Gender, Sexuality, and Foreignness in Ruth Landshoff-Yorck’s Die Vielen und der Eine,” which entails a partial translation of the novel as well as an interpretation of its themes informed by critical literary and queer theory. In Fall 2016, Dinah will begin studying for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.