IJSL 2019; 256: 147–175

Lal Zimman*

Trans self-identification and the languageof neoliberal selfhood: Agency, power,
and the limits of monologic discourse
https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2018-2016

Abstract: Sociocultural linguists share with transgender communities a strong
interest in the power of individuals to assert agency over linguistic patterns. For
trans people, a key principle of activism is gender self-determination, which treats
each individual as the ultimate authority on their own gender identity. This article
explores some of the ways gender self-determination and self-identification
surface in transgender people’s linguistic practices. Three particular manifestations are highlighted: gendered identity labels, third person pronouns, and bodypart terminology. The observations offered on these subjects are based on a seriesof ethnographic projects carried out from 2006–2016 in transgender communities
across several metropolitan areas in the United States and in online spaces
frequented by trans people. However, the analysis goes beyond mere description
by treating this kind of individualized linguistic agency as the product of cultural
practice rather than an asocial given. Such a perspective introduces questions
concerning why this form of agency arose in the time and place that it has.
This article frames gender self-identification as an enactment of neoliberalpersonhood, in which individuals are framed as the driver of their destiny.
What the ideology of neoliberal agency obscures, however, is that agency is notan equally distributed resource.
Keywords: transgender, identity, agency, self-identification, neoliberalism

1 Introduction
One thing that sociocultural linguists share with transgender communities is astrong interest in the power of individuals to assert agency over linguistic
patterns. For trans people, one of the key guiding principles of everyday politicalwork is the practice of gender self-determination, in which each individual is the*Corresponding author: Lal Zimman, Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA,
USA, E-mail: zimman@ucsb.edu

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ultimate authority on their own gender identity.1 Faced with an often hostile anddangerous world, gender self-determination constitutes “a collective praxis
against the brutal pragmatism of the present, the liquidation of the past, andthe austerity of the future” (Stanley 2014: 89). In this sense, it is a form of
resistance to normative structures of genital-based gender assignment. As aradical alternative to those normative systems, gender self-determination isrealized first and foremost through the linguistic practice of self-identification,
which is the focus of this article.
There are clear connections between the principles espoused by sociocultural
linguists and the ways language is understood in transgender communities. The
core ideology of linguistics – descriptivism – itself provides a ground of commonality as the linguist’s challenge to the power of intellectual authorities to dictate
lexical meaning and grammatical correctness. Actual speakers’ actual usage is of
critical importance, particularly in functionalist theories of language, but sociocultural linguists are particularly attentive to the question of whose usage will beconsidered determinative in the process of describing a language. This is precisely
where trans language ideologies pick up and offer a potential response. Though
linguists situate meaning as distributed across a (generally undefined) group of
language users, trans people place definitional authority in each individual, atleast when it comes to gender. From this perspective, each person determines how
their identity should be spoken about and understood.
The role of individual agency in sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz and Hall2008) has varied over time and across disciplinary traditions. It was manifested inearly sociolinguistic research in the form of a preoccupation with the degree towhich speakers are aware of their sociolinguistic behavior (Labov 1972). More recent
research continues the interest in the sociolinguistic reflexes of agency, such as thechapters of Babel’s (2016) volume, which take a variety of experimental, variationist, and discursive perspectives on sociolinguistic awareness and control. Linguistic
anthropologists, on the other hand, have tended to focus on the sociocultural andpolitical contexts that produce different agencies and how linguistic resources likegrammatical or thematic role, for instance, can be appropriated, as well as the limits
on those appropriations (e.g. Duranti 2004; Ahearn 2001).
This article explores some of the ways self-identification surfaces in the
linguistic practices common across many trans communities in order to makesense of the gap between trans people’s theories of gender and those imposed bypowerful institutions and discourses. Three particular manifestations of linguistic
self-determination are highlighted here: the use of gendered identity category
1 I use singular they as a generic pronoun in this piece in solidarity with those advocating for
more inclusive gender-neutral language.

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labels, third person pronouns, and body part terminology. The observations
offered on these subjects are based on a series of ethnographic projects carriedout between 2006 and 2016 in trans communities across several metropolitan
areas in the United States, including the San Francisco Bay Area; Portland,
Oregon; Denver, Colorado; and in several online spaces frequented by transpeople. However, the analysis below goes beyond mere description by treating
this kind of individualized linguistic agency as the product of cultural practicerather than an asocial cognitive given. Such a perspective introduces anotherquestion, which concerns why this form of agency arose in the particular time andplace that it has.
This question is one focus of this article, which investigates gender self-identification as an enactment of neoliberal personhood – a model of the social subject
without which trans identification as we know it would not be possible. The highly
individualistic view of the self that is packaged into neoliberal cultural formations
constructs each person as a solitary actor, driven by pursuits like self-knowledge
and self-improvement, which have become moral imperatives in a world where
one’s most valuable commodity is the self (Cameron 2005; Inoue 2007). The key
contribution of neoliberalism as an idea for understanding late modern subjectivity,
at least for the purposes of this discussion, is how the same system that produces
subjects who are free to act agentively in their own self-interest – including whenthat interest leads them to identify with non-normative gender categories – also
invisibilizes the structural inequalities that constrain certain individuals’ agencies
far more than others’. Thus, while mindful of the critical function of self-definitionin the creation of newly possible gender subjectivities, this article shines light on
the inequities that are glossed over by an exclusive focus on the inner self as thesource of authentic identity. The article closes with a discussion of privilege andhierarchy within trans communities through examination of the interpolative callpresented with Caitlyn Jenner’s iconic coming out moment on the cover of Vanity
Fair in 2015. The textual element of Jenner’s glamorous covershoot, in which she
entreats the reader, “Call me Caitlyn,” illustrates the inescapably dialogic nature ofidentification – an element appropriated by less privileged trans women on social
media who wanted to know, “Where’s my Vanity Fair cover?”2 Self-determination, self-identification,and trans agencies
Self-identification is a lynchpin of transgender identity politics in the UnitedStates and, increasingly, throughout the globalizing world. In everyday transBrought to you by | University of California - Santa Barbara
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discourse, as well as much of the new literature on trans experience, trans people
are often characterized as individuals who do not identify with the genderassigned to them at birth (e.g. Serano 2007; Stryker 2008). Identification astrans, in this model, does not require identification with a particular gender
identity, but it does require some form of disidentification from one’s assigned
sex. Trans identities must be articulated against the force of normative genderassignment and socialization and in the face of cultural hostility, violence, anddelegitimation. In this context, self-determination delivers a means of working
against these pressures and articulating an alternative vision of how gender
identity could be authorized and legitimized (Spade 2011; Stanley 2014).
In past waves of research on trans identities, trans people have often been
evaluated in terms of their success at dismantling the gender binary. The 1990s
brought on a new wave of research on non-normative gender identities andpractices in which the political implications of trans existence were a matter ofvociferous debate. Generally, disputes were over normativity and subversion –that is, the extent to which trans people’s very being inherently disrupts or
dismantles normative gender roles. Scholars like Hooks (1992), Butler (1993),
Lorber (1994), Gagné et al. (1997), and Hubbard (1998), among many others,
disagreed about the subversive potential of trans people’s gender transitions.
Notably, trans people themselves were generally not included in these academic
conversations, and it is only through the more recent establishment of transstudies as a distinctive field that less objectifying perspectives have been represented. Research like that by Speer and Green (2007), Edelman (2009), andZimman (2009) emphasizes the ways trans people strategically deploy gendernormativities in order to maintain physical safety, obtain access to medical care,or receive gender recognition, while at other times dispensing with those norms.
Though completely dismantling gender is the goal of some trans people, a moreconsistently shared political project of trans communities in the United States is
not one of destroying gender, but of undoing the idea that a person’s sex
characteristics should determine how others should interact with or talk about
them. In the absence of the expectation that the body provides knowledge about
gendered subjectivity, self-identification takes center stage as a means of reframing gender categorization in ways that maintain individual agency. This shift
has intensified over the past few decades, as a comparison with Valentine (2007)
makes clear. Valentine describes the imposition of certain trans people’s ideas
about gender over those with less institutional privilege. For example, hediscusses one young trans woman of color who was castigated in a transsupport/discussion group for identifying herself simultaneously as a (trans)
woman and as gay (in reference to her attraction to men). The participants in
the research discussed below, by contrast, went to lengths to avoid policing

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other trans people’s identities in this way, instead insisting that anyone who
identifies as a woman is a woman and anyone who identifies as gay is gay, even
if those identities appear to be contradictory to others.
Agency also serves as a point of disjuncture between discourses about
identity in trans communities compared to those concerning mainstream lesbian
and gay identities. In homonormative discourses (Duggan 2003), agency andchoice are rejected as a potential part of the development of sexual orientation.
In the effort to blunt the impact of homophobic contentions that gay people canand should become straight, gay politics have converged around the idea of
sexual attraction as biologically predetermined by a characteristic like ahypothetical “gay gene” (Hamer and Copeland 1994; Allen 1997; Pillard 1997).
The etiology of trans identities has also been associated with physiologicalcharacteristics like “brain sex” (though cf. Fausto-Sterling 2000), but transcommunities maintain a more complex interest in individual choice because of
their sustained relationship with medical and legal gatekeeping structures.
Historically, and in many parts of the world today, trans people have faced an
intense series of trials and tests before being given access to body-changing
medical interventions like hormones and surgery and to institutional validationsof their self-identified genders like identification documents (see, for instance,
the evolving Standards of Care beginning with criteria laid out by Benjamin1966). Over the past few decades, many medical providers in the United States
have shifted to a system of informed consent, prompted in large part bydemands made by trans patients who have objected to having their identities
pathologized, controlled by cis (i.e. non-trans) people’s impressions of who will
have a “successful” transition, and forced to follow a singular path toward aparticular kind of embodiment irrespective of individual preferences. Informed
consent is the model in which most health care is practiced in the United States,
including some of the same procedures trans people make use of (e.g. hormone
replacement therapy, breast augmentation, other forms of plastic/reconstructive
surgery, etc.): patients are informed about the benefits and risks of the available
options and are then free to choose which of them they wish to employ, if any.
In places like the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the primary sites of theethnographic research discussed in this article, individuals are presented withthe option to select the hormonal and surgical procedures they would like topursue, and it is not uncommon to find people who have opted for somethingother than the traditionalist path of lifelong hormone therapy and a specificseries of surgeries including sterilization and genital reconstruction, which areoften prerequisites to changing a trans person’s legal sex (Aizura 2006; Hutton2011). Again, self-determination offers a powerful alternative mode of bodily andsocial transformation, of which individual agency is a critical component.

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Though feeling or identifying as trans is not generally portrayed as a choicein trans discourses, there is a recognition that a gender role transition involves
some degree of agency in a way that does not find a parallel in lesbian and gay
discourses. Trans activism has primarily focused on increasing and calling
attention to that agency, rather than minimizing its existence. Medical andlegal changes are not the only way in which trans agency is valued, however.
A critical part of gender self-identification is linguistic, as this model attempts tocreate a space for each individual to select what kinds of gendered language
others use to talk about them.

3 The language of sex assignment and genderself-identification
Normatively speaking, gender is assigned at birth, if not earlier. The genderassignment system is a complex one that draws on the authority of medical
figures like obstetricians, geneticists, and ultrasound technicians as well as on“common sense” cultural and moral notions about how genders and bodies
should be organized. By the time of birth, most infants are, or have alreadybeen, designated as female or male on the basis of external genitalia. This
performative declaration of gender (Livia and Hall 1997) carries lifelong consequences, as gender differences are thought to be closely connected to – if notdirectly caused by – “biological sex”. Of course, not all bodies fall so neatly into
the binary categories that constitute sex in contemporary Western thought, asother scholars have discussed in detail (Kessler 1998; Karkazis 2008; King 2016).
It is part of the culturally-bound construction of gender and sex that ambiguously sexed bodies are, at best, swept under the rug and, at worst, surgicallyreconfigured in potentially devastating ways so that the sexual variability of the
body can literally be erased.
The gender assignment process, however, is not limited to the moment ofbirth. Gender attributions ordinarily occur in nearly every interaction (Speer andGreen 2007), manifested linguistically through whatever gendered linguistic
forms a language maintains, such as terms of address or gender marked grammatical forms like pronouns, adjectives, or nouns. Though gender attributions
often derive from presumptions about a person’s physiology, they also depend
on socially learned gender practices, making clothing style, hair length, bodily
hexis, and similar factors a significant part of the process. However, particularlyin ambiguous cases, the body takes on special salience as the central authorization for the use of she or he, for instance. This practice of gender assignment is

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driven by the notion that there is one “correct” set of gendered forms to use foreach referent, and that this correctness is driven primarily by an individual’ssex.
The salience of the body thus proves to be a significant part of transexperience. A person with conventionally feminine dress and comportment
may be referred to as he by strangers if her body size, say, leads others toperceive her as “biologically male”. Likewise, someone who is initially read as
male based on style of presentation may be greeted with a Ma’am after he isheard speaking in a high-pitched voice. Of course, gender attribution happens intrans communities as well. In these contexts, however, they are handled in oneof two alternative ways. First, members of trans communities tend to prioritize
gender presentation over physiological cues such that a person in a dress andhigh heels is more likely to be referred to as she even if her physiologicalcharacteristics might suggest that she was assigned male at birth. However,trans communities have been moving in recent years toward another system of
selecting gendered linguistic forms, which is to ask individuals about theirgender identities and how they prefer to be talked about rather than making
assumptions on the basis of either physiology or gender presentation. Not alltrans communities, nor all individuals within such communities, engage in thispractice regularly, but it is increasingly seen by trans people as an ideal way ofmanaging gender assignment.
Asking individuals how they identify and treating their answer as authoritative places a high value on the production of self-knowledge in the identificationof an authentic self. This kind of discursive move is hardly unique to transexperience; Crapanzano’s (1996) analysis of Herculine Barbin’s autobiographicaltexts (Foucault 1980), for instance, identifies narratives of a unitary self as one of
the means by which modern subjecthood is achieved. The individual is not the
only potential source of knowledge about the self, but in a cultural context thatplaces individual self-determination at the zenith of American sociopolitical idealsof good citizenship, even a marginalized subject can be mobilized as its own
authentication. But the connection between individuality and trans subjectivities
goes deeper. The idea of self-knowledge depends on an understanding of aninternally-felt self – a discrete, invisible entity that may not be predictablebased on external presentation. In fact, it is this separation between inner andouter selves that makes contemporary understandings of trans identity possible,
driven as they are by a separation between the internal self/mind and the external
self/body. Without this separation, trans identity would be a different beast
entirely.
Only the individual can know, and hence define, their own gender in thissystem, and that individual determination is seen as far more important andBrought to you by | University of California - Santa Barbara
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truer than whatever institutions may say about a person’s legal or medical
status. Though this may appear to equalize trans people’s access to social
affirmation, I argue below that this apparent equality masks a deeper disparityof access to self-identified genders. Trans people’s understandings of gender andsex thus represent a push-back against powerful discourses around genital- or
genetics-based essentialism (Stryker 2008), but there are also problematic elements of the ways gender self-determination is framed, which I will explore at
length in the discussion below. First, however, I will discuss several ways inwhich the ethos of self-identification is manifested linguistically. Importantly,
these linguistic strategies are found not just in the speech of trans individuals,
but are also presented as a call to others to join in the process of linguistic
affirmation. The dialogic aspect of linguistic self-identification will be discussed
further in the final section of this article.

3.1 Gender and the lexicon
The most obvious ways in which gender self-identification takes shape linguistically is through overtly gendered lexical items like the words that mark an
individual as a woman, man, or simply person; a sister, brother, or sibling; amother, father, or parent; a waiter, waitress, or server; and so on. Language thus
plays an inescapable role for trans people in the process of coming out andtransitioning (see also Kulick 1999). Because language is pervasively genderedeven in languages like English, which lacks a grammatical gender system inmost respects, some consideration of language is necessary whenever a transperson seeks validation from the cis world.
The connection between gender and language is generally understood to
be indirect – an idea owed to theorists of indexicality like Silverstein (1985),
Ochs (1992) and Eckert (2008). Ochs explains that linguistic practices associated with women and men typically form not because linguistic strategies
like politeness or the use of rising intonation in declaratives actually mean
femininity, but because these linguistic resources are linked to stances thatwomen in certain communities might take more often than their malecounterparts. This kind of indirect indexicality, to use Ochs’ terminology,
accounts for most of linguistic practices that might be referred to as “feminine” or “masculine”. Direct indexes of gender are those relatively rare
instances in which a linguistic form refers directly and exclusively to members of one gender or another. The primary examples of direct indexes ofgender in English are precisely the words referenced above: woman orman, daughter or son, and so on, as well as the third person pronouns she

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or he.2 Silverstein (1985) refers to these kinds of forms as having a presupposed indexicality. That is, referring to someone as, say, “the woman in thehat”, or even simply as “her”, presupposes (rather than overtly claims) thatthe person being referred to is a woman. These presuppositions are tested in
the case of transgender people and this is why direct indexes of gender areso critically important as either affirmation or rejection of trans identities. As
Livia (2000) points out, it is more difficult to argue about the legitimacy of aperson’s gender identification when the claim to that identity is presupposed
rather than overtly asserted.3 Exploiting presupposed indexicalities of thissort is one strategy for trans persons to validate their own and one another’s
gender identities.
In this way, trans people question the systems through which a person is
assigned language like woman/man or she/he; moreover, they are asking cis
people to question the logic as well. Rather than looking for a “correct definition” or objectively identified criteria for using these direct indexes of gender, atrans-affirming system of lexical meaning treats direct indexes of gender as open
to self-identification and self-definition. Because the individual is framed inthese discourses as the ultimate source of authority about their own gender,
gender identity itself can only be defined in terms of the categories with which aperson overtly aligns. The practice is common enough that I have encountered it
across all of the communities in which I have worked,4 including the online
spaces that form a critical part of many trans people’s community-building
process. Indeed, these expectations are clearest when they are violated, whichsometimes leads to extremely caustic interactions. The spread of these ideas is
no doubt catalyzed by the role of technologically-mediated communication in
forging connections across geographically separated trans communities.

2 In practice, even direct indexes of gender can be transformed into indirect, or creative,indexes, as when gay men appropriate the pronoun she to refer to one another despite not
identifying as women, or when sports coaches refer to male athletes as she to insult them.
3 While a statement like “that person is a woman” can be a matter of dispute (e.g. “no, that
person is a man”), disputing a statement like “I spoke with her” (e.g. “no you didn’t”) would beinterpreted with respect whether the speaker spoke to the person in question, not to whether
that person should be referred to as “her” to begin with (Livia 2000).
4 This is not universally true, however. There is a subset of the trans community who aresometimes referred to as proponents of the “Harry Benjamin syndrome” as a condition that isreflected by the diagnostic criteria laid out by Benjamin (1966) for identification of the “truetranssexual”. Some who see themselves as having Harry Benjamin syndrome advocate for a
return to older standards of care in which only certain segments of the trans-identifying
personality receive medical validation.

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There are several linguistic strategies through which the importance oflexical self-determination is constructed in trans communities, all of which are
grounded in a performative theory of identity. First, community members are
generally expected to talk only about their own identifications, and to avoid
labeling others’ identities unless they have indicated how they want to be
described. Within trans communities, people are said to have free reign toclaim labels like woman, man, or genderqueer, without respect to their transition
history, current embodiment, or gender expression. All that is required is that an
overt, verbal claim be made – a classic performative utterance (Austin 1962; Hall
2000). By the same token, it could be a potentially serious faux pas to assume
that someone identifies as a woman or man based on factors other than overt
claims, such as their bodies or mode of gender presentation. At times, these
expectations are violated, and the tension that can arise from such violations isperhaps best exemplified by the use of politically and emotionally loaded
identity labels.
For instance, Jessica, a white trans woman in her early twenties from
Portland, Oregon who split her time between studying math and science andoccasionally doing online camwork (i.e. webcam-mediated sex work), told me
about an interaction in which she was reprimanded by friends for using theword tranny, a term she regularly employs in reference to herself. Her mistake
was not in referring to herself as a tranny, but in describing an entire group ofpeople consisting of herself and several other trans women as a “bunch oftrannies”. Tranny is an intensely charged word that has received much attention
and debate within trans communities because of its history as a slur and thediscomfort it elicits for many trans women in particular. If there is a consensus
on how to address this tension, it is the principle that even within the community, people should be cautious when using this word and take care to apply it
only to themselves. While it is largely acceptable to use it as a self-identifiedlabel, at least for trans feminine individuals, it is not acceptable to apply thatword to others without knowledge of their feelings toward it. However, otheridentification is seen as problematic even when the language in question is notconsidered potentially offensive (e.g. describing someone as a woman without
knowing that they identify with the term). To deal with this issue, many transcommunities have established the norm of directly asking how an individual
identifies or how they would like to be referred to. It is now a frequent occurrence for trans individuals meeting for the first time to ask one another whatkinds of gendered language – especially pronouns – should be used.
There is another significant way this orientation to self-definition persists intrans discourse, which is evident when speakers are asked to delineate themeaning of gender identity labels. The gender scholars I cited above as having

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critiqued trans people for reinforcing gender norms often focus their criticism on
the way trans people invoke gender stereotypes to validate their identities. For
example, Gagné et al. (1997) analyze identity narratives elicited from participants in a psychological support group for trans people and find that participants validated their gender identities by referring to their childhood playpreferences, the gender of close friends and other intimates, or the degree towhich they felt they fit in with norms for each gender. Findings of studies of thissort are questionable from the start because they fail to interrogate the power
dynamics between cis researchers and those of trans participants, especiallywhere medicine and psychology are involved. Whether due to the dynamics ofthe research encounter or changes in the trans community over time, it is clearthat these patterns diverge significantly from the narratives produced by theapproximately 100 trans people I have interviewed over the past 10 years.
Instead, I find that few of these interviewees felt compelled to defend thevalidity of their experiences in the way other authors describe. When pressedon the matter, few appealed to any kind of fixed criteria, let alone stereotypes ornormative expectations. Instead, when I ask participants to define words likewoman or man, by far the most common response is a direct appeal to selfidentification. That is, when asked about the meaning and scope of gender
identity labels like woman or man, feminine or masculinie, trans or cis, thetypical response maintains that a woman is a person who self-identifies as awoman, a man is a person who self-identifies as a man, and so on down the line.
This strategy creates a decentralized understanding of gender in which one
person’s idea of womanhood may have little to do with the next’s.
The typical approach to self-identification is for an individual to identify thewords they want others to use in reference to them. However, it is equally possible
to resist self-identification as an alternate way of enacting self determination. The
practice of resisting identity labels is exemplified by one the participants in my
two year ethnographic project on the changing voices of trans masculine people
who were just beginning testosterone therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area in
2010–2012. Devin, as I call him, was at the time of the project a 24 year old whitegenderqueer5 trans person who grew up in a middle-class San Francisco Bay Area
suburb and worked as an educator for an environmental organization. Although
he did use the words genderqueer and trans to label himself, my attempts at
discovering the other words he aligned himself with proved frustrating for both ofus, as Devin felt a deep dissatisfaction with all of the other gender labels to which
5 Genderqueer usually refers to those who do not identify as strictly female or strictly male. In
the years since these data were collected, non-binary has become a more frequently used term
for this group of identities at the time of this writing.

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he had access. It may seem at first blush that this refusal to self-identify undermines the discourse of individual self-determination. Yet nothing could be further
from the truth, because the way Devin and other trans people who avoid labels
situate themselves actually heightens their status as individuals whose path will
be defined by them alone. When Devin tells me that he does not see himself as aman or woman, but rather as just a person or simply as himself, he is rejecting theentire enterprise of sharing gender identities with others and instead situateshimself as a unique individual whose particularities should be seen as separate
from any kind of social structure like gender. What appears as a radical rejectionof the system of self-identification is in this case still grounded in that same
system’s core principles.
The ideal of self-identification, however, is not absolute.6 This is reflected by
the coining of the word cisgender. Derived from the Latin prefix cis-, meaning‘on the same side’, cisgender emerged as a term within trans communities as away to refer to those who are not transgender. The word parallels the marking ofother unmarked social categories, like being white, male, or straight. Membersof normative categories may object to being categorized as such because they
don’t see their race, gender, sexuality, etc. as important. Most cis people areunaware of the word, and so couldn’t possibly identify with it; it certainly isn’t aword that cis people came up with to describe themselves. Furthermore, somecis people who do know the word don’t like to apply it to themselves because
they think of themselves as simply women or men. Cis people occasionally eveninterpret the word as an insult. For trans people, though, identifying cis people
as simply “women” or “men” without modification suggests that trans womenand men don’t fully qualify for those descriptors – not far off from calling cis
people “real women” and “real men”. It is therefore a vital component ofcontemporary trans activism to have a symmetrical way of distinguishing aperson’s status as trans or cis. Despite the wide reach of self-identification
discourses, then, it’s clear that there are circumstances in which individuals’
self-identification is seen as reinforcing transphobia rather than destabilizing it.
Such exceptions do not undermine the validity of self-identification among transpeople, but it does suggest that there is a complexity to identification that is not
captured by the notion of gender self-determination.

6 An anonymous reviewer inquired as to whether this community sees other identities, such as
age and race, as open to self-identification. Because this comparison can be extremely inflammatory (in part because of the way it is mobilized to deauthenticate trans people’s identities), it
deserves a deeper and more careful examination than I can provide in this space. For thisreason, I leave the topic for discussion in other spaces.

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To understand the meanings of self-identification, we have to think about
the immediate sociocultural context in which such practices occur. I havealready discussed how self-identification can be seen as pushing back against
hegemonic ideologies about the power of genitals or genetics to determine aperson’s sex or gender. However, the emphasis on individual self-definition
described in this section should also be seen in relation to the politics withintrans communities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. At least
since the late 1990s, when I first came in contact with trans politics in the San
Francisco Bay Area and online, certain factions of the trans and gender nonconforming population, broadly defined, have spoken out about being marginalized, delegitimized, and excluded from more mainstream trans spaces.
Specifically, non-binary trans people – i.e. individuals who situate themselvesin between, or entirely outside of, the gender binary – have historically beenerased or delegitimized and generally treated as “not trans enough” to belong(Catalano 2015). This notion of being “not trans enough” persists as a source ofanxiety and exclusion, and the shift toward a model of gender identity that is
entirely individually-determined should be seen as emanating in part from
efforts to address these problems (however successfully or unsuccessfully; see
Jones, this issue).

3.2 Pronouns
Along with words that carry gendered semantics like man, mother and Miss,
Ochs identifies gendered pronouns as another type of direct index of gender tobe found in languages like English. In a language without much in the way ofgrammatical gender, the third person singular pronouns he/him/his and she/her/hers are the most frequently occurring linguistic clues about how speakers
perceive one another’s genders. For trans people, the occasions on which one
hears an interlocutor use a singular third person pronoun in the referent’s
presence are enormously significant. Asking others to change the pronouns
they use is often a milestone of a person’s transition, and being “pronouned”
correctly (to use the community’s own language) marks the moment in which agender identity leaves the mind of a trans person and enters a new reality on thelips of an interlocutor.
Though they lack semantic meaning, pronouns carry indexical meaning,which is to say their referent is determined by context. They also represent anelement of grammar that seems to be processed without much conscious
thought, at least in contrast with lexical choices that require more self-conscious
deliberation. When an English speaker selects a third person singular pronoun,

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this choice typically happens in lock-step with the assessment of the referent’s
gender: “this person appears female, so I will say she,” or else “this person
appears male, so I will say he.” These assessments are supposed to be instantaneous and uncomplicated, accomplished on the basis of clear and unambiguous
markers of sex. The automaticity of pronouns is a big part of why pronouns carryso much import for trans people: someone might be saying all the right things toaffirm trans identities when they are putting thought into their language, but the
pronouns they use have the potential to reveal more deeply ingrained patternsof thought; simply put, pronouns can reveal what you really think about someone’s gender. At the same time, the automaticity and frequency of pronouns isprecisely what makes the use of new pronouns like ze and hir more cognitively
challenging than, say, switching from one binary pronoun to another.
The fact that interactants are supposed to be able to make gender assignments immediately based on bodily cues is evidenced by the strong anxiety many(cis) people experience at the thought of not knowing how to make sense ofsomeone’s gender and, by extension, not knowing whether to refer to them as sheor he. This fear is driven by the ideology that there are two sexes, which arenaturally distinct, objectively identifiable, and non-overlapping and that thesesexes correspond with gender roles. Expectations of this sort make unanticipatedcombinations of sex/gender characteristics confusing, if not disconcerting. The
idea that someone’s sex or gender might be unclear threatens the very foundationof this framework, but when confusion arises, the problem can be framed as asign of aberrance on the part of the ambiguous individual rather than a sign offailure of the gender attribution system.
As I mentioned above, trans-inclusive language practices are not just about thelanguage trans people use – they also challenge the way cis people talk. Cis people
may find it challenging to negotiate the use of gendered pronouns in reference totrans people, as several new practices may be involved: using pronouns in waysthat may work against speakers’ gut reactions on how to gender someone; changing
the pronouns used in reference to someone as they progress through a transition(sometimes more than once!); and even using new, unfamiliar pronouns (such as
the gender neutral ze and hir) or using familiar pronouns in new ways (such as
singular they to index a singular referent). Of course, trans people have to deal withthe same challenges, and have developed strategies for these challenges accordingly, including one aimed specifically at resolving pronoun ambiguity: seeking the
input of the person to whom you are referring. For many cis people, the idea ofasking someone whether they prefer to be called she, he, they, or some otherpronoun may sound something like a nightmare come to life, but it has become astandard practice in many trans communities, where the question can be incorporated into ordinary interactions without any threat to interactional harmony.

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It is possible for trans people to ask one another about pronoun preferences
without causing offense because gendered pronoun usage in trans communities isdriven by a fundamentally different logic than that governing more normative usesof these forms. Rather than deriving from the referent’s appearance, pronouns areframed as a matter of individual choice. This may seem like a simple extension of
the principles described above: if the definition of man is open for self-definitionand self-selection, then pronouns will go along for the ride. This is the way transcommunities have been operating for decades, after all – people who self-identified
as women would be called she and those who self-identified as men would be called
he. Yet the growing diversification of gender identities included under the “trans”
umbrella label has meant that linking pronouns to specific gender identities is notnecessarily any more effective for divining someone’s pronouns preferences than isreliance on physical appearance. For this reason, there has been a further shift
underway in trans communities over the last several years, in which pronouns havebeen reconceptualized as their own distinct arena for linguistic self-identification,
separate from gender identity.
In other words, pronoun preference is not something that can be deduced
from knowing a person’s gender identity. Someone who self-identifies as awoman is likely to prefer she/her/hers pronouns, but it is entirely possiblethat such an individual would prefer to be referred to with singular they/them/
their(s), for instance. Someone who identifies as non-binary may have any
number of pronoun preferences, while people who are still making sense of
their relationship with gender, or perhaps just beginning to transition, may not
yet be ready to ask people to change their pronoun usage. Just as trans people
have long pushed to decouple pronouns from sex assignment at birth, nonbinary trans communities in particular are pushing to further decouple pronouns from gender presentation or identity. One reflection of this push can beobserved in efforts to change how we refer to gendered pronouns at a metalinguistic level. Conventionally, pronouns are labeled by reference to the genderwith which they are associated: she is referred to as a “female” or “feminine”
pronoun, while he is “male” or “masculine”. These linkages between identities
and linguistic forms proves problematic for trans people who may prefer to bereferred to as he, but who do not identify as male, for instance. Non-binaryidentified speakers have led this effort, which includes referring to pronouns interms of their form. For instance, I might introduce myself to a community
member by saying, “My name is Lal, and I use he/him/his pronouns”.7
7 Of course, this sense of use is not quite literal, since most speakers do not refer to themselves
consistently in the third person. However, phrases like “preferred pronouns” and questions like“what pronouns do you prefer?” have been critiqued by activists and scholars like Spade (2011),

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Because the logic of pronoun assignment decouples appearance and behavior
from gender, it is not just trans or ambiguously gendered people are asked about
pronoun preferences; the trans language activist’s goal in this case is to normalize such questions for any interaction.
The practices regarding pronouns that I have just described are a relatively
recent addition to the arsenal of linguistic tools for trans identity work. Though thepractice is not entirely novel, it is only within the last several years that asking for
pronoun preferences has become a common part of interacting in trans (or transfriendly) spaces. For instance, when I began my ethnographic fieldwork in San
Francisco in 2010, the community center groups I attended did not generally
prompt attendees to share their pronoun preferences during group introductions,even though each session began with people sharing their names and how theirweek has gone. By 2016, virtually every trans event I attend that involves selfintroductions will request people provide their pronouns along with their names
and by 2019 the practice can be found in non-trans-focused spaces. The shorttimeline on which such changes can be observed highlights the productivity ofself-identification as an approach to language use. In the next section of this article,
I discuss another approach to self-identification through language that promises aneven more radical departure from cis-normative theories of gender and sex.

3.3 Sexual embodiment
As I described above, attempts to define trans from inside trans communities
tend to focus on disalignment between a person’s self-defined gender identity
and the gender role assigned to them at birth. In characterizations coming fromoutside of trans communities, however, the emphasis is often on a disalignment
between gender identity and “biological sex” (see Prosser 1998; Solomon 2010
for in-depth explorations of this concept). This kind of division reflects a wellworn distinction between sex, as a matter of objective, physiological reality,
versus gender, a social construction that is separate from the body. The sex/
gender split was a critical tool in second-wave feminism that allowed scholars
and activists to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of normative expectations
placed on women (and men). Decades later, the problematization of the sex/
gender distinction was a major part of how feminism shifted as it entered its
third wave. Influential theorists like Butler (1990, 1993), Delphy (1993), andNicholson (1994) have argued that sex, like gender, is a matter of social
who points out that the word preference could have the effect of downplaying the importance ofusing pronouns respectfully. Some people simply say “my pronouns are he/him/his”.

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construction. Evidence for this sentiment has been presented from fields ranging
from sociology (Kessler 1998), to anthropology (Herdt 1993), to biology (FaustoSterling 2000), to history (Laqueur 1990). Together, this literature underscoresthat different kinds of categorizations of bodily sex are entirely possible, andthat the dominant two-sex model should be seen as culturally- and historicallysituated.
The construction of sex has also been an area of keen interest from sociocultural linguists. Feminist perspectives like those presented by Cameron (1992)
and Braun and Kitzinger (2001) established the way genital terminology reflects
both misogynistic and heterosexist ideology. For instance, Cameron (1992) highlights the frequency with which metaphors for the penis draw on imagery of
weapons, war, and violence. Braun and Kitzinger (2001) investigate the presumption of heterosexuality in dictionary definitions for genital parts and show how thevagina is cast as passive, functioning primarily as a place for a man to put his
penis. More recently, discussions of queer and transgender embodiment has comeinto focus as well, as in Borba and Ostermann’s (2007) discussion of Brazilian
travestis bodies, King’s (2016) treatment of intersex embodiment, Zimman andHall’s (2009) and Zimman’s (2014) analyses of genital terminology among transmen, and Edelman and Zimman’s (2014) exploration of the role of language inestablishing the normativity and erotic value of trans bodies. Each of theseprojects demonstrates how talk about non-normatively sexed bodies reveals theimportance of language in constructing particular conceptualizations of sex. Far
from “natural” or strictly “biological” in nature, sex is variable, fluid, ideological,
and a matter of discursive practice.
The dataset that form the basis of Zimman and Hall (2009) and Zimman(2014) are also informative here. The data consist of posts and comments
collected from an online community for trans men and others who wereassigned female at birth but who do not identify as such.8 The group was
especially active between around 2003 and 2013, with hundreds of members
who participated regularly in discussion and several hundred more registeredmembers who rarely or never made their own posts. Talk about the body wasamong the most common pastimes in this community of practice, and at times
clashes arose between members concerning how trans bodies should be discussed. However, there was also a shared rejection of the idea that trans men are

8 The precise scope of community members’ identities is hard to specify. The group was overtly
dedicated to “FTMs” – female-to-male trans people. However, it had numerous participants who
did not identify with this label, most of whom would characterize themselves as non-binary or
as simply “men” (who may or may not identify with their trans experience), as well as transallies.

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Rather than treating certain bodies, or parts, as inherently female or male,members of this community deconstruct the elements of body part semantics
and reconstruct them in ways that reflect their self-identified genders. In thiscommunity, sex is seen as emanating from gender identity – a reversal of thenormative ideology that sex precedes, and in some sense causes, gender.
The reconstruction of trans masculine bodies as male bodies is most clearly
enacted through the use of traditionally “male” terminology, which is usually of
the colloquial rather than technical variety. Trans men in this community mostoften talk about their genitals with words like cock and dick, unambiguously
gendering themselves as male even if the body parts in question would beconsidered female by medico-scientific authorities. Drawing on their knowledgeof the continuum that exists between clitorises and penises (Fausto-Sterling
2000), trans men also frequently point to the genital growth testosterone causes
as placing their anatomy in a physiologically ambiguous grey area. The practiceof referring to trans men’s surgically unmodified genitals as dicks challenges thecore meaning of such a word, which presupposes contiguity between genitals
and gender. Zimman (2014) discusses how dictionary definitions for genital
terms typically include both a gendered component and a physiological component, which fuse each genital component to one, and only one, sex/gendercategory. Trans people thus face the task of developing identity-affirming ways
to deal with this conflation of gender and sex. One of the common ways thisrelationship is subverted in this community is by pairing commonplace bodypart language with unexpected referents (e.g. calling a body part a cock whenothers might call it a clitoris) and even blending seemingly contradictory elements (e.g. words like boypussy or mangina). If the connection between genitals
and genders is disrupted, a new understanding of sexual embodiment is necessary. When this topic is raised explicitly in this online community, members
explain that a male body is nothing more than the body of a male-identified
person, whatever that body might look like. Under this logic, a trans man canuse a word like cock because the word is associated with men’s genitals.
Biological sex is not determined by the body in this system, but by the subjectivity of the person who animates it.
This description is a truncated account of the ways trans men talk about theirbodies; Zimman (2014) provides a more in-depth discussion that emphasizes thepower of language to reformulate the gendered meanings of the body. However,
Edelman and Zimman (2014) take a different tack by investigating the power
structures that enable some trans people to have their gender identities andself-selected language affirmed while others are left without legitimation. So

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even as these practices show how far linguistic self-identification can go – farenough to disrupt what are thought to be basic “facts” about the natural world –to end the discussion there would be to miss the importance of the socioculturalcontext in which the notion of gendered self-identification has emerged.

4 The cultural context of self-identification:
Neoliberal selves in a monologic world
The picture I’ve painted of self-identification so far is a rather lonely one.
Identity emerges from the inside out, through the kind of self-knowledge thatcan only be produced, known, and verified by the individual. One question thatmight arise in the study of self-identification is how this set of practices arose in
the particular time and place that it has. The conditions of what has been called
late modernity (e.g. Harvey 2005) have often been characterized by the shift
toward neoliberalism, an economic philosophy that also functions as a mode ofcultural formation. Though some have argued that it has been overused as atheoretical frame, neoliberalism provides an incisive lens for examining thepractice of self-identification because it highlights a particular kind of agentive
individuality. Neoliberalism is girded in the idea that allowing individuals to act
freely, without restriction, produces a kind of trickle-down equality in which
action, rather than circumstance, determines each person’s fate. The “self” inthis theory of personhood is generic, without identity or circumstance, and inthat sense necessarily takes on all of the social characteristics of a “genericperson” – one unmarked by gender, race, class, or sexuality. This neoliberalsubject is constructed as free to act, unbidden, and in this way neoliberalism
erases the uneven circumstances in which individuals’ “free action” occurs. The
individual is solely responsible for his [sic] own successes and failures, and in
this way the realities of systemic inequality are denied.
Discussions of neoliberalism have also captured the irony of self-determination:
the same system that produces the free subject also erases the constraints over that
freedom. Inoue’s (2007) account of gendered self-making in a Tokyo corporation
captures this paradox quite perfectly. She describes how the corporation dealt withworkplace gender inequities by offering workshops for women that purported to train
attendees to more assertively express their professional ambitions to their (male)managers. The program was designed to “empower” women by giving them themeans to realize their own professional desires, but it also located the problem ofunderrepresentation of women in corporate leadership in the actions – or rather
inaction – of women themselves. In typical neoliberal form, success is attributed to

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individual agents who use their freedom to fulfill the moral imperative of selfimprovement. Lack of success, then, can only be attributed to personal shortcomingsof those who fail rather than their different degrees of access to various forms ofagency. The very process that creates free agents also erases the constraints actual
individuals face when they exercise that freedom.
In this context, the practice of gender self-identification takes on a newpolitical character that situates trans identity practices on a broader historicalarc toward greater and greater individual self-determination. As the earlier partsof this article have emphasized, self-identification can be understood as a form ofradical resistance to cissexism.9 It is a path that strikes a blow against hegemonic
gender assignments in which a person has no input into how their lives will
indelibly – even violently – be shaped to fit norms for their assigned sex. Yet what
is hidden behind this resistance are the disparities that exist within trans communities and the differential levels of access trans people have to empowerment
through linguistic self-determination. For instance, Edelman and Zimman (2015)
investigate discourses about gender differences in the voice that predominate ininterviews with trans masculine individuals who are experiencing hormoneinduced vocal masculinization (Zimman 2016). In this analysis of language ideologies about the voice, we highlight the ways that a more normatively masculine
body – and pitch range – provide greater freedom to engage in any kind of gender
expression without concern for the ways that employing normatively feminine
speech traits might undermine their access to gender recognition.
Embodiment, of course, serves as one of the most powerful authenticators ofa trans person’s identity (Speer and Green 2007). Trans women who lookunexceptionally female generally have little trouble getting others to identify
them as women, whereas trans men with very masculine bodies are likely to begendered as male with little-to-no effort. The trans men I recorded regularly
during the early phases of their transitions certainly experienced this contrast,
as those whose bodies masculinized rapidly and dramatically had far lesstrouble getting people in their lives to gender them in accordance with theiridentities than they had previously. Those with less normatively genderedbodies, by contrast, generally had to do much more semiotic work to receive
gender recognition. Non-binary individuals, meanwhile, are likely to be misgendered10 on a regular basis, regardless of their appearance, because of thestrength of the ideology that everyone can be categorized as either female or
9 Cissexism refers to the cultural mode of thinking in which everyone is presumed to be cis(unless they “look trans”) and cis experience is presumed to be normal and natural (Serano2007).
10 Being perceived as a gender one does not identify with (usually based on apparent sex).

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male. This means that within trans communities, there are several dimensions
on which access to gender affirmation is regulated. One is embodiment, where
the cultural value placed on physical sex is reproduced in ways that affirm theidentities of those who don’t “look trans”. Another is the type of identity
articulated, with more normative gender identities receiving far more acceptancethan those outside of the female/male binary. But it is important to rememberthat the reading of identity through the body is mediated by other aspects ofidentity, such as race and class. While racism elevates Eurocentric ideas about
what female and male embodiment look like, material wealth provides access toan array of body-changing technologies (including clothing, hair styling, and soon). These connections form the foundation for my final thoughts about privilege and gender acceptance below.
The tensions surrounding self-identification recall the debates over identity and desire that loomed large in the field of language and sexuality
following the turn of the century (Kulick 2000; Cameron and Kulick 2003;
Bucholtz and Hall 2004, 2005). The theory of identity that emerged from thisexchange stressed that identity is not a static property of individuals that preexists discourse but rather a dynamic accomplishment that is co-produced ininteraction. In other words, identity is dialogic. The way trans communities
frame self-identification may suggest that identity construction is a solidarity
endeavor, but the dialogic qualities of gendered language are not lost on transpeople. Self-identification is made on the basis of individual self-knowledge,
but the discursive implications of self-identification are far from solitary. Afterall, trans people don’t just use their self-identified pronouns and identity
labels in reference to themselves; they are also seeking for others to mirror
their linguistic practices. Few trans people receive gender validation without afight, at least at the beginning of their transitions, and the emotional pain ofbeing misgendered is a widely shared aspect of trans experience. The constant
struggle over linguistic agency trans people face creates a tension in which
they see gendered language as a matter of self-determination even as theyknow that at least some of the people they interact with do not acknowledge
any such right.

4.1 “Call me Caitlyn”
The question of differential degrees of privilege within the trans community canbe illustrated by attending to the performative moment in which Caitlyn Jennercame out as a trans woman on the cover of Vanity Fair in June of 2015. Jenner isa particularly useful example here because her appearance on this magazine

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cover sparked a response among both the general population and among transpeople whose coming out was not marked by an elegant and identity-affirming
photo shoot for a international glamor magazine.
Jenner first came to prominence in the 1970s as a gold medal-winning
Olympic athlete and maintained her fame over the decades since throughpost-Olympic sponsorships with brands like Wheaties cereal, her immediatefamily members’ reality television-fuelled fame, and by taking on a public
image as a conservative businessperson. Jenner’s coming out experience wasperhaps the most culturally transformative unveiling of this sort since Christine
Jorgensen’s famed transition in 1952, which constituted the American public’s
first contact with the modern transsexual (Meyerowitz 2002; Stryker 2008).
Though their experiences differed in many ways, there are also certain parallels
between Jorgenson and Jenner, both beautiful white women who had previously
occupied well-regarded masculine social roles (Jenner, an athlete, andJorgensen, an Army private) prior to coming out. They both possessed thefinancial means to transition medically without facing the extensive barriers
and waiting periods commonly faced by less economically privileged transpeople, and both made front-page news simply for being trans. Their beauty
and the profundity of the changes they experienced is undoubtedly part of theattention to their transitions when compared to, say, Chaz Bono, the son of Cherand Sonny Bono, who publically came out as a trans man in 2008 after being
known as masculine-presenting lesbian for many years (see also Serano 2007 on
the disparate attention paid to trans women versus trans men) or even Renee
Richards, whose transition was met with more negative attention than either
Jorgensen’s or Jenner’s.
The sentiment in the public response to Jenner’s transition can be represented
quantitatively, as she was recognized by Guinness for setting a time record thatrecalled her Olympic accomplishments: just four hours and three minutes after
opening a Twitter account under her new name on June 1, 2015, Jenner became
the fastest person to reach 1 million followers on that platform to date (Parkinson,
The Guardian, June 2, 2015). Though her support was far from universal, Jenner
herself has claimed that she has “gotten more flak for being a conservative
Republican than [she has] for being trans” (Jensen, USA Today, February 19,2016). Her dramatic transformation into a beautiful sophisticate, as captured byrenowned photographer Annie Leibovitz for a global magazine of fame andglamor, surely had something to do with the overall tenor of the response.
The cover of the July 2015 issue of Vanity Fair shows Caitlyn Jenner in a whitebustier, legs, arms, and shoulders exposed. Her legs are crossed slightly as sheleans onto a stool behind her, halfway seated, with her arms crossed demurely
behind her back. Long brown curls cascade over her right shoulder and her face

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displays a coy, knowing smile with a Mona Lisa quality. Though placing herself in
our own gaze, she seems to beckon us into hers. This call is intensified by the text
running across Jenner’s hourglass midsection, speaking in her voice: “Call me
Caitlyn”. Her imperative calls the reader into the role of intimate interlocutor who
is the recipient of this bald-faced command. The interpolation is unavoidable,
even for those who refuse it, as when a former child actor tweeted, without feelingthe need for further contextualization, “Sorry … .still calling you Bruce” (Jenner’s
former first name) on the day of her big reveal (Farberov, Daily Mail, June 2, 2015).
The Tweet was deleted, complete with apology, but not before being retweeted byat least 3,350 other users.
In the days and weeks that followed the Vanity Fair article, murmurs in thetrans community focused on the largely positive treatment Jenner seemed toreceive. Though the situation was taken as a mark of success for the community’s
political efforts, many also wondered why Jenner was being treated with so much
more respect than the majority trans women, who still face overwhelming rates of
discrimination, poverty, and violence (e.g. Grant et al. 2012). Soon after, templates
began to circulate on social media that allowed individual trans people – mostlytrans women and transfeminine individuals, as it turned out – to put their own
photo on a mock Vanity Fair cover, complete with the same phrase, “Call me[name]”. Well over 200 images were collected by one dedicated Tumblr accountentitled “My Vanity Fair Cover”. The popularity of this brief, yet powerful, movement reflects two aspects of the state of affairs for trans people in the United States.
On one hand, the positive responses to Jenner’s transition helped make 2015 a major
year of change for the public representation of trans experience. On the other, 2015
was a year of incredible violence for trans women of color, whose murders werereported at a higher rate than any previous year on record (Atkinson 2015).
The support that Jenner experienced suggested a significant change in the
response of a population that only a few years earlier might have been far more
hostile to the idea of a beloved sports figure transitioning. Indeed, only a few
months before Jenner officially came out, her increasingly feminine appearance
was widely mocked, particularly in sports news coverage. The quick turnaroundof this attitude once Jenner began presenting herself in a more conventionallyfeminine way points to the less positive side of the responses trans people had to
the Jenner media-storm. To summarize the heart of the critique that was
mounted against the attention she received, Jenner’s experience as a transwoman is far from typical, and the apparent ease of her transition fails torepresent the difficulties that the average trans woman experiences upon coming
out. For many trans people, the public focus on the acceptance that Jenner
experienced erases the brutal reality in which many trans women live. The gap isevident: some trans women are being photographed in luxury sports cars andBrought to you by | University of California - Santa Barbara
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starring on their own reality television programs while others make it into themedia’s eye only after a violent death, leaving no trace of the trans women who
thrive in spite of their subjugation. In short, Jenner’s success cannot be separated from her whiteness, her wealth, and her corresponding ability to present
herself as an exceptionally beautiful, stylish, sophisticated woman.
The #MyVanityFairCover meme can be understood as an attempt to capture
the smallest taste of what Jenner had when she claimed those words, “Call me
Caitlyn”. By appropriating her language, trans people whose self-identifications
generally go unheard could collectively revoice the power Jenner asserts. The
description of the Tumblr blog responsible for the hashtag includes the following text, which reveals the motivation behind the reproduction of Jenner’s cover:This is a trans pride blog made to showcase the wonderful variety that exists within thetransgender community above and beyond what we’re showing in the mainstream media.
Ever since Vanity Fair announced their Caitlyn Jenner’s [sic] cover story, many trans people
have voiced their concerns that the world only seems to embrace us if we’re wealthy
enough or lucky enough to adhere to white, cisnormative beauty standards. […] And
whether we fit those standards or not, we’re beautiful, and we all deserve to feel beautiful,and to be acknowledged by the world. […] As a good friend of mine said Monday ‘Where’s
my Vanity Fair cover?’Trans people’s efforts to instill pride in one another are a critical aspect of the roletrans communities play in their members’ lives. Yet it remains the case that thesetrans individuals were not on the cover of Vanity Fair, and few of them have hadaccess to the privileges Jenner enjoys. While Jenner has the institutional supportand material resources to instruct the reader to call her Caitlyn, her empowerment
was for many trans people a reminder of the power they lack.
Jenner’s ability to declare her identity and be received in the way she was
highlights the uneven effects of self-identification. Though all trans people
purportedly share an ability to define themselves linguistically, the responses
to those self-identifications are anything but equal. Structural privilege shapes
the body and thus provides a solid foundation on which individualistic claims
about identity can be made, but many trans people find themselves on unstableground. In the absence of a million followers on Twitter, who is listening to theself-identification in which trans people are engaged?

5 Conclusion
This article has traced the contours of gender self-identification as a linguistic
process within transgender community that is grounded in radical resistance to

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normative genital-based systems of gender assignment. However, to end theanalysis here would be to miss the larger significance of self-identification itself.
Self-identification is certainly not limited to trans subjects. A cursory Google
search of self-identified might include instances of this phrase followed by
Democrats, Republicans, or Independents; ethnicity or multiracial individuals;
Evangelicals, Christians, or Jews; veterans, virgins, and even vampires, in addition
to numerous identifiers related to gender and sexual orientation. Rather thanbeing uniquely characteristic of trans people’s identities, self-identification ismade possible by the larger cultural system from which it has emerged. One
critical element of the late modern cultural context is the tenant of neoliberalism, which functions not only as an economic and political philosophy, but also
as a theory of self. The neoliberal self is an autonomous individual who,
provided with a set of choices, will exercise agency in accordance with theirown self-interest, without regard for power relations or social subjectivity. What
this notion erases is that choice itself is an unevenly distributed resource, andthat even when two individuals are presented with the same choice, the results
may differ dramatically.
Neoliberal selfhood produces a subjectivity in which individuals who exercise
their autonomy can, at times, make choices that run counter to dominant cultural
ideologies like gender norms. Such is the case with gender self-identification,
which draws on the well-worn Western distinction between a true inner self versus
its outer bodily shell. For transgender identities to make sense, the inner self must
be able to exercise a certain agency – at least enough to say that the gender it was
assigned is in some way not desirable, comfortable, or authentic-feeling. The powerof self-identification is thus rooted in the determinations of a neoliberal subject. Yet
here, too, the freedom to act is not available to all, nor does that freedom guarantee
a warm reception. When each person is free to determine their own fate, and hence
responsible for its quality, unfulfilled goals suggest a failure of the person rather
than a failure of the processes that govern achievement. The same process that
produces the free subject also erases the power disparities it creates.
Recognizing the cultural basis of gender self-determination helps accountfor the disjunctures between self-identification as a linguistic practice and theway identification has been theorized in sociocultural linguistics. From theperspective of a theory like the tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall
2004, 2005), even self-identifications are always necessarily dialogic. If there is
one great shortcoming to the discourse of self-identification, it is that it does not
identify the role of the interlocutor. If gender is for each of us to define forourselves, at what point does the other step into the picture?
The goal of this discussion is not to undermine the elements of empowermentthat self-determination offers. As trans theorists like Stanley (2014) have

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described, gender self-determination is a matter of liberation in the face of brutality and trauma. Instead, this article contextualizes one set of trans self-identification practices in their sociopolitical context in order to highlight the erasure of
power dynamics within different segments of the trans population. The deployment of gender self-determination as a radical transformative politics carries
ideological baggage that must be acknowledged: an exclusive focus on thefreedom to self-identify masks the way power provides legitimation of some
identifications while denying that legitimacy to others. Identity is a dialogic
accomplishment, and a politics of trans liberation that sees beyond neoliberalsubjectivity requires more than trans monologues. Despite its subversive potential, self-identification runs the risk of promising access to a form of power that
ultimately proves out of reach. But it would be a mistake to conclude that thepower derived from self-identification is entirely illusory; after all, trans activists
have already effected a great deal of change in the language ordinarily used torefer to trans people, even if the acceptance of those changing norms is far fromuniversal. What may ultimately be necessary to further that success, however, is amore overt recognition of the dialogic aspects of gender identification. Such amodel of trans identity, with an explicit role for the interlocutor, would push forth
an interpolative call of its own: a call to consider the political implications of ourlanguage as we construct one another.

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