Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics

Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a
Trans Linguistics
Lal Zimman
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality
Edited by Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett
Subject: Linguistics, Sociolinguistics Online Publication Date: Sep 2020
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.013.45

Abstract and Keywords
This chapter sketches out trans linguistics as an emerging framework for research on lan­
guage in populations defined by their deviation from gender norms. Although queer lin­
guistics has always been concerned with both sexual and gender (non)normativity, someearly queer linguistic analyses of transgender or otherwise gender-variant populations
were limited by the absence of openly trans scholars and distinctively trans analytic per­spectives. Trans linguistics, by contrast, centers trans practices and subjectivities not asrare exceptions, but as central to any understanding of gender. Three domains of lan­
guage are discussed here, including grammatical gender, gender difference in the voice,and gender in discourse. In each case, trans linguistic research offers new perspectives
on gendered power, the nature of categories, the significance of embodiment, and the lin­
guistic navigation of persistent dehumanization. Crucially, trans linguistics is committed
not only to trans analytic lenses, but also to social and linguistic justice for gender nonnormative communities.
Keywords: transgender, queer linguistics, trans linguistics, grammatical gender, voice, discourse, embodiment,
power

Language and Trans Communities
For as long as scholars have written about gender, they have been concerned with indi­viduals who disrupt it by transforming accepted categories, creating new ones, or blur­ring and moving between them. Whether or not gender nonconforming groups are explic­
itly put in focus, nonconformity has remained just as central to the theorization of lan­
guage and gender as the gender binary has been, as Kira Hall’s (2003) review of “excep­
tional speakers” makes clear. Compared to other social sciences, however, sociocultural
linguists have been relatively slow to bring transgender speakers into the study of lan­
guage, gender, and sexuality. It was not until the rise of queer linguistics in the 1990s
that trans people and others who trouble the naturalized gender binary began to appear
in linguistically oriented research (e.g., Livia and Hall 1997; Leap 1995). Many of these
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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
studies centered on non-normatively gendered communities in the Global South (e.g.,
Manalansan 1995; Hall and O’Donovan 1996; Hall 1997; Gaudio 1997; Kulick 1998;
Besnier 2003; Jackson 2004), who became instrumental in demonstrating the intertwined
nature of gender and sexuality. However, it is primarily within the last decade that a dra­
matic growth can be seen in research on language among women, men, and nonbinary1
individuals who would describe themselves with a word like trans(gender). In this body ofwork, we can see an emerging set of theoretical orientations that constitute a new per­spective on language, gender, and sexuality: a trans linguistics.2
This chapter reviews research on language in trans and gender non-normative communi­ties in order to sketch out a theoretical base for continued studies in trans linguistics. It
begins with a critical discussion of who is understood to be transgender and how socio­
cultural linguists have implemented this social category, focusing on both limitations ofthe (often implicit) theorization of trans identities found in early queer linguistic researchand the ways a distinctively trans linguistic framework would implement different inter­pretive lenses than did its queer linguistic forebears. Following this discussion, I present
an overview of research on language in trans and gender non-normative communities
through which a trans linguistic framework has developed. Three levels of language are
addressed: grammatical gender, the embodied voice, and discursive practices. The chap­ter ends with a synthesis of the trans linguistics framework and a call for stronger coali­
tions between sociocultural linguists and trans communities.
It is worth noting that this review includes critical reflections on transphobic language
and thinking within the scholarly literature. Even where we may observe that authors’language or framing falls within acceptable standards at the time of their production, re­member that standards of acceptability were, until very recently, set by cis people. If lin­
guistics is to become a field that attracts trans students and scholars, we must reckon
with our disciplinary past as well as aspire toward a better future.

What—and Who—Is Trans?
Among the most harrowing challenges for a review of language in transgender communi­ties is defining its scope. Transgender has been variably used as an umbrella label encap­
sulating all those who depart from norms for their assigned sex and as a label for a spe­cific type of gender identity that emerged in the late 20th century within the UnitedStates, its close cultural allies, and burgeoning digital spaces (Valentine 2007). Today,transgender is often defined (by those who identify with the term) as referring to anyone
who does not self-identify with the sex/gender category assigned to them at birth, but thisdefinition may only be compatible with certain cultural perspectives and continues to un­dergo rapid change. This section provides a brief history of transgender, the ways it wasmobilized in the queer linguistics of the 1990s, and how this conceptualization must bereconsidered as part of a trans linguistics of the 21st century.

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics

A Brief History of Transgender
The concept of transsexuality gained widespread recognition in the English-speaking
world with the publication of Harry Benjamin’s (1966) book, The Transsexual Phenome­
non. The text defined a set of diagnostic criteria medical professionals could use to deter­mine who should obtain access to the hormones and surgery trans people sought. These
criteria were highly normative, requiring trans people seeking such access to embody
stereotypes for their self-identified gender, have a strictly heterosexual orientation, andexperience deep discomfort with their bodies. It was in the context of resistance to the
medical model of transsexuality that transgender first appeared. Virginia Prince, a self-de­
scribed heterosexual male cross-dresser who was a vocal activist and community organiz­er (Stryker 2008; Prince 2005[1978]), used transgender to refer to those who changed
their gender role or gender presentation without desiring medical intervention. Transgen­der thus served as a nonmedicalized alternative to transsexual, and it retains its populari­ty in part because of that status. However, major changes within trans communities in the
1980s and early 1990s resulted in a shift in transgender. Activists like Holly Boswell(1991), Sandy Stone (1992), and Leslie Feinberg (2006[1992]) presented a new vision oftransgender not as an alternative to the body modifications associated with transsexuali­ty, but as an alternative to its compulsory gender normativity and the single-track modelof a medical transition that culminates in genital surgery.
As the word transgender shifted in the ’90s, it also came to be defined as an “umbrella la­bel” referring to anyone who diverges from gender norms for their assigned sex: trans­
sexuals, drag performers, genderqueers, and even masculine women and feminine men.
This flexibility allowed transgender to be extended to include a range of identities in vari­
ous cultural contexts (but see Towle and Morgan 2002). In practical usage, however,transgender came to be used in self-reference primarily by people who transitioned fromone binary gender to the other. Decades later, transgender—and its more popular short­ened form trans—may be used in reference to trans women and men as well as nonbinary
people, and anyone else who does not identify with their assigned sex/gender. Indeed,
self-definition is central to contemporary understandings of transgender identity, which is
one indication that transgender identity is not a universal concept but rather rooted inparticular times and places in which self-determination is valued and a distinction be­
tween a “true” inner self and the visible body is intelligible (Zimman 2017b). The use of
the word trans(gender) to describe people who do not mobilize that category to describe
themselves thus has the potential to erase that cultural and historical context.

The Transgender Umbrella in Queer Linguistics
The inclusion of an array of global identities under the flag of queer linguistics estab­lished a field that attended to both non-normative sexualities and non-normative genders.
There are some notable differences, however, between the analyses of gender found inearly queer linguistics and those found in the emerging framework of trans linguistics.

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
The literature on non-normatively gendered communities from the 1990s highlights thestrong influence of anthropology on queer linguistics. Foundational queer linguistic work
was often ethnographic, engaging with communities of Hindi-speaking hijras in India,
who describe themselves as neither women nor men (e.g., Hall and O’Donovan 1996; Hall1997); Hausa-speaking ‘yan daudu in Nigeria known as “men who act like women” byvirtue of their feminine professions and styles of self-presentation (e.g., Gaudio 1997);(faka)leitis in Tonga, whose practices balance tensions between local and global selfhood(e.g., Besnier 2003); kathoey in Thailand, who embody the value of balancing femininity
and masculinity (e.g., Jackson 2004); diasporic Filipino bakla in the United States, gayidentified men who describe feminine practices as key to their identities (e.g., Man­
alansan 1995); and travestís in Brazil, whose bodily transformations are similar to thoseof trans women but whose discursive identity work is quite different (e.g., Kulick 1998).
It is often unclear which of these communities, if any, should be considered transgender.
Some were characterized by researchers as transgender or transgendered—the latter ofwhich is now considered problematic by many trans people—while others were actively
contrasted with that category. Niko Besnier describes leitis as “transgenderedmales” (e.g., 2002: 534), Peter A. Jackson refers to Thai kathoey as “male-to-female trans­
genders” (2004: 203), and Don Kulick (1998) showcases the word transgendered in the ti­
tle of his book, Travestí: Sex, Gender, and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prosti­
tutes, even as he maintains that travestís are not trans women. Kulick says travestís use“female names, clothing styles, hairstyles, cosmetic practices, and linguistic pro­nouns” (5) and dramatically feminize their bodies, but he concludes that travestís arefeminine gay men, rather than trans women, because they “do not self-identify as
women” (5) and “do not wish to remove their penis” (6). Other scholars have been moreconsistent in differentiating their communities of study from Western notions of transidentity. Rudolf P. Gaudio (1997) describes ‘yan daudu as “Hausa-speaking men who talkand act like women” (416), does not use the word transgender, and generally employs
masculine pronouns though ‘yan daudu “frequently use feminine names and grammaticalforms” (423) for one another. In later work, Gaudio (2009) notes that he elects not to re­fer to ‘yan daudu as trans(gendered) because they do not “choose or feel compelled toembrace a gender identity ‘opposite’ or merely different from their ascribed biologicalsex,” and never “tried to pass as a woman socially,” ultimately seeing themselves as “‘re­al’ men” (10). Hall (1997) also declines to characterize hijras as transgender, instead pro­viding a critical perspective on the various categories invoked in the anthropological liter­
ature, including eunuch and third sex, and employing the local term, hijra, when referring
to research participants.
Trans identities thus figure prominently in queer linguistics, even in cases where a nonnormatively gendered community is explicitly described as not transgender. The variety ofways these authors orient to trans identity is undoubtedly informed by the different cul­tural contexts of their research as well as the challenge of “translating” local identities
for a Western audience. However, the difficulty in pinning down who is—or isn’t—transseems driven in part by uncertainty among some authors regarding what transgender andtranssexual mean for those who identify with the terms. The characterizations just cited
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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
construct an image of a trans person as someone who self-identifies as a woman despite
being assigned male at birth—the existence of trans masculinities is rarely acknowledged—who wishes to be perceived as a (cisgender) woman, and who desires genital recon­
struction. Yet many of these publications appeared a decade or more after the majorchanges within trans communities described earlier had been laid out in published form,
including the emergence of Boswell’s (1991) “transgender alternative,” the blurring of
the transsexual/transgender distinction, the increasing visibility of female-assigned transpeople, and the emergence of new kinds of subjectivity among those who reject the gen­
der binary entirely. The image of a homogenously gender normative, essentialist, genitalfocused trans community consisting only of male-assigned individuals had been critiqued
for years and was becoming obsolete in the West, yet the characterization of global gen­der non-normativity in some queer linguistic literature had the impact of reifying thismodel of trans subjectivity.

Early Examinations of Trans-identified Speakers: Problems andPromises
The 1990s saw only a handful of publications on people who describe themselves as trans­
gender or transsexual (Knight 1992; Cromwell 1995; Livia 1997, 2001; White 1998; Moriel
1998). One primary theme of this early research was the negotiation of authenticity, se­crecy, and “passing,”3 which created space for the expression of problematic ideologies
about the authenticity of trans identities. A common set of questions concerned how welltrans people approximate the linguistic styles associated with cis people of the same gen­
der identity—but without necessarily questioning the empirical status of those associa­
tions. For example, C. Todd White’s (1998) case study of a trans woman’s use of a mixtureof purportedly “feminine” and “masculine” discursive strategies characterizes her as an­
drogynous, rather than feminine, because she uses assertive discursive techniques in her
work as a salesperson, which White describes as “distinctly un-ladylike” (221). Rather
than concluding that assertiveness is not necessarily a masculine trait, or that assertive
practices might be driven by factors like profession rather than gender per se, White sug­gests that his speaker must be vigilant to keep her natural masculinity from leaking
through her imperfect attempts to “maintain the illusion of femininity” (215). Liora Moriel(1998) takes an even more delegitimizing stance toward trans identities, describing transIsraeli pop star Dana International as someone who will never achieve the status of a “re­al” woman (1998: 226) and who is not fully licensed to use feminine grammatical forms in
Hebrew because she is forever “biologically male” (228) regardless of medical interven­tions. At times, the problematic language is subtler, as when trans identities are de­scribed as a “belief,” “insistence,” and “claim” (Livia 2001: 161, 172), while no such miti­
gators are used in reference to cis identities.
Anna Livia’s (1997, 2001) discussion of grammatical gender in a French autobiographicaltext by a transsexual woman, Georgine Noël, is particularly useful to illustrate the ways
trans linguistics may produce different interpretations of trans experience than those thatemerged early on in queer linguistics. Livia takes the possibility of gender-neutral andgender-subverting uses of grammatical gender seriously, but her analysis also takes a
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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
consistently problematizing stance toward trans identities, for instance framing transpeople’s desire for bodily transformation as inherently essentialist and contrary to therecognition that gender is a continuum (2001: 163). This strain of thought appears mostconcretely in Livia’s account of Noël’s occasional departures from her usual pattern of us­
ing masculine grammatical forms to talk about her life before she began her transition
and feminine forms for events occurring after. In one case, Noël refers to herself in thefeminine when describing the romantic feelings she had for a young man in her youth.
Whereas Livia examines this moment through a lens of same-sex attraction—interpretingNoël’s reluctance to refer to herself in the masculine as a sign of internalized homopho­
bic discomfort with her interest in boys—a trans-centering reading might stress the rela­tional aspects of sexuality and the importance of gender in negotiating eroticism for manytrans people. Invoking Monique Wittig, Livia draws a contrast between “women” as those“on the losing side of the gender binary” and “male-to-female transsexuals” as individuals
who are “invisible to it” (2001: 161) and for whom “a return to masculine gender presen­tation and masculine privilege is always possible” (175). By contrast, trans theorists haveworked extensively to document trans women’s experiences with both misogyny in gener­
al and with specific forms of transphobia that target trans feminine people (i.e., trans­
misogyny, per Serano 2007). As the next section reveals, recent trans linguistic work calls
attention to the ways trans people are very much on the/a “losing side” of gendered op­pression—and how trans people contest their marginal status.
Transmisogyny and other forms of transphobia can be seen in a number of other early
publications. H. Merle Knight (1992) is particularly critical of trans women whose gen­dered practices deviate from restrictive, misogynistic gender norms imposed upon
women—i.e., those who are not sufficiently feminine. He even goes as far as to actively
misgender (that is, misattribute the gender of) trans women whose “aggressive” interac­tional styles supposedly belie male privilege (314) rather than, perhaps, a way to be seen
and heard in the face of rampant dehumanization. Other authors display a preoccupation
with genital surgery (Moriel 1998) and feel entitled to reveal irrelevant and salacious de­tails about speakers’ bodies (Moriel 1998; White 1998). Trans women are described as“fool[ing]” people into thinking they are female (in both White 1998: 220; Moriel 1998:
227) and are contrasted with “‘real’ women” (Moriel 1998: 226). Trans speakers are fre­quently misgendered by authors, and White even feels the need to give an account for his
choice not to misgender his participant, conceding that the (presumably cisgender) read­er “may be uncomfortable with [White’s] use of feminine pronouns” (223, fn3). The com­
fort of the trans reader is apparently not considered, or perhaps even imagined.
Jason Cromwell’s (1995) study of trans people’s use of “protective” language in public
spaces diverges from the other publications from this period in a few ways. In addition to
being openly trans and the only scholar discussed in this section to use ethnographic
methods in a study of trans people in the Global North, Cromwell emphasizes the con­straints placed on trans people, who must carefully manage strangers’ access to informa­tion due to the ongoing threat of transphobic violence. Yet, Cromwell shows, trans people
do not remain silent but rather employ strategically vague language that draws on sharedknowledge to exclude cisgender eavesdroppers. Despite its limitations, Cromwell’s piece
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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
foreshadows the development of trans linguistics: rather than being evaluated on the ba­
sis of their authenticity or how well they serve cis people’s gender politics, trans people
are recognized for their creative engagement with the resources available to them in theface of overwhelming injustice.
Regardless of progress made, some of the problematic trends described earlier continue
in discussions of trans people’s linguistic practices. Kulick (2019), for example, questionstrans people’s objection to cisgender gay men’s appropriation of transphobic words likeshemale and critiques trans people’s status as “self-appointed arbiters of gendered lan­
guage.” He expresses disappointment that trans people “are not interested in unsettling
identity,” but rather “securing it,” echoing the objections made by late-20th-century schol­ars like Judith Lorber (1994), who lamented trans people’s failure to live up to their theo­
retical function of destroying the gender binary. Kulick characterizes these trans people
who want a say in what qualifies as transphobic language as just no fun; “we don’t laughas much anymore” (2), Kulick complains, as trans readers wonder who “we” includes. At
the same time, trans-exclusionary theories of gender are seeing a return among cis “femi­
nists”—including a few prominent scholars in language, gender, and sexuality—who re­ject trans women’s womanhood. These problems highlight the need for an explicitly artic­
ulated trans linguistics. It is not enough to live in an increasingly trans-affirming world or
to have a positive disposition toward trans people—we must actively devote ourselves todismantling transphobia in ourselves, our world, and our discipline.

Trans Linguistics: Grammar, Voices, and Dis­
courseWhile the previous section addressed some of the challenges and problems to be found inearly research on trans people’s linguistic practices, this section shifts to the insights of­fered by a trans linguistic framework.

Trans Grammar
One of the first and most prolific analytic foci on trans people’s language has been the
management of binary grammatical gender systems by speakers who disrupt the expecta­tion that each individual can be easily, naturally, and consistently placed within a binary
gender structure (see also Abe, this volume; Chen, this volume; Conrod, this volume).
Trans people’s divergence from this system presents a number of choices. One is how
speakers refer to an individual who has undergone a shift in gendered referring forms—
e.g., from masculine to feminine grammatical marking—when speaking about their life
before that shift took place. The strategies speakers employ, however, vary across com­munities. Some shift between gender markers to reflect whether they are referring to aperson’s current gender positionality or the gender role they occupied in the past, as doc­
umented in Kira Hall and Veronica O’Donovan’s (1996; also Hall 1997, inter alia) study of
hijras, Rodrigo Borba and Cristina Ostermann’s (2007) analysis of Brazilian travestís, andLivia’s (2001) treatment of Georgine Noël’s autobiography. By contrast, current norms inPage 7 of 23

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
many trans communities in the United States dictate the use of forms that reflect a transperson’s current identity even when referring to their pre-transition lives.
In addition to managing potential discontinuity over time, speakers also sometimes di­verge from the pattern they typically follow. In the studies just mentioned by Hall andO’Donovan (1996) and Borba and Ostermann (2007), hijras and travestís who typically re­
fer to themselves and one another in the feminine diverge from that pattern not only
when referring to their early lives, but also when indexing a referent’s status and power,
when talking about normative family structures, when voicing noncommunity members,
and when expressing negative feelings toward or distancing themselves from individual
hijras or travestís. Far from simply indexing gender identity, these practices reveal thecomplex interactional stances and indexical fields that are conjured by the choice of femi­nine or masculine forms.
A final key question is whether binary grammatical gender systems prevent the expres­sion of nonbinary gender identities. Orit Bershtling’s (2014) study of genderqueer He­
brew speakers demonstrates that nonbinary identities can be expressed in the context ofbinary grammatical gender systems. In addition to alternating between binary forms,
Bershtling’s speakers report using of the unexpected form (i.e., feminine forms for speak­ers perceived as male and vice versa); concatenation (stringing together both feminineand masculine morphemes); and avoidance through grammatical exceptions (e.g., use of
the first person plural or future tense, neither of which are gendered in Hebrew).
Bershtling’s study highlights an important tension: binary grammatical gender can belimiting, but it also provides fodder for its own subversion by allowing nonbinary speak­ers to signal their gender identities more directly than languages like English allow. Oth­er languages show similar signs of grammatical subversion, particularly in digital spaces.
Among these are blended forms, as when German speakers combine the pronouns sie(she) and er (he) into xier, and new morphemes, such as the use of -x or -e in place of -a or-o in Spanish words like amigom/amigaf, i.e. amigxnb/aˈmigɛks/or amiguenb/aˈmigɛ/. What­ever tactic is used, it is clear that speakers are capable of complicating, troubling, and re­figuring the grammatical, as well as social, structures to which they have access, though
the uptake of such practices by (cisgender) others remains underexplored.

Trans Voices
The gendered voice is of central importance to both linguists and trans people, but pub­lished sociophonetic research on trans voices remains sparse. Prior to the past decade,most of what was known about trans voices was based on the work of speech-language
pathologists, who tend to take a medicalized view of the gendered voice that pathologizes
non-normative styles (Azul 2013; Zimman 2012, ch. 4). Challenges to phoneticians’ natu­
ralization of the gendered voice were levied early on in language, gender, and sexuality(e.g., Sachs 1975), but linguists who do phonetic analysis still tend to maintain a conserv­
ative vision of sex/gender in which all speakers and voices can be categorized as either
female or male based on supposedly fixed physiological characteristics (i.e., “sex”).

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
Though the voice does inevitably foreground the body, it is unclear how trans voices
should be analyzed within a biological essentialist framework.
There are a number of important issues on which studies of trans voices can shed light(Zimman 2018). One is the identification of acoustic cues that lead listeners to categorize
the gender of a voice. Fundamental frequency (F0)—the primary acoustic correlate ofpitch—is the most intuitively obvious gender difference in the voice. Although the pitch
range a speaker employs is clearly influenced by the size of their larynx, which is sensi­
tive to testosterone (Azul 2015), my own multiyear study of ten trans masculine individu­
als during the early stages of hormone therapy (Zimman 2017c) highlights interspeakervariation in the degree and rate of change that seems to reflect differences in other fac­
tors like age, life history, transition path and speed, intersecting identities of various
types, and habitual use of high or low frequency phonation (e.g., falsetto or creaky voice,respectively). Given that most of the speakers reached a normatively masculine F0 range
after one to two years on hormones, it seems reasonable to characterize their voices as“male,” but doing so also raises a number of questions: what of the few speakers who
maintained a more ambiguous mean F0, or speakers who have no F0 change because
they do not take testosterone? At what point does a voice become female or male, andhow does this process apply to cisgender voices (Azul 2013)? If grounded in perception,
does the gender of a voice differ by listener? And what about features other than F0?
Some studies report that trans feminine speakers may be perceived as female even with avery low mean F0 (e.g., 119–128 Hz in Günzburger 1995) or perceived as male even witha very high mean F0 (e.g., 181 Hz in Gelfer and Schofield 2000),4 indicating that featuresother than mean F0 must contribute to the perceptual categorization of voices. Although
it might be tempting to determine the gender of a voice on the basis of characteristics
like pitch, the introduction of additional features complicates the process. In my analysesof the relationship between /s/ and F0 (Zimman 2017a, 2017d), I have found that the
speakers with the lowest pitch in these studies also have the most “feminine” (highest fre­quency) productions of /s/. This surprising pattern motivates my argument that the gen­dered voice is a set of multidimensional styles rather than a single, static, binary propertyof each speaker. Although my investigations of /s/ among trans people in San Francisco
and Portland, Oregon (Zimman 2017d, forthcoming) find a great deal of variability amongtrans speakers—especially those who identify as queer and/or nonbinary—research onother trans populations have found more gender-typical uses of /s/. Both Robert J. Podes­
va and Janneke Van Hofwegen’s (2016) study in rural Redding, California, and Evan
Hazenberg’s (2016) work in Ottawa, Canada, place trans women and men on a continuumof /s /productions relative to their cisgender counterparts, finding that the trans speakers
were similar to, but not quite as polarized as, cis people of the same gender identity.
Another important insight from this body of work concerns the role of stereotypes and ex­
pectations in the perception of the voice. Adrienne Hancock, Lindsey Colton, and Fiacre
Douglas (2014) demonstrate this through an analysis of trans women’s intonation in com­
parison to cis women and men. Despite no difference in rising intonation usage between
the cisgender women and men in the study, the researchers found that trans women who
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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
used more rising intonational counters were more likely to be perceived as female thanthose who used fewer. Hazenberg’s (2012) investigation of high rising terminal, or“uptalk,” among anglophone Canadian trans women and men points to contradictions inindexical values in which both groups express negative views toward uptalk, but transwomen in the study were more likely to use it because of its association with femininity.
Another issue explored in my work (Zimman 2016) is how ideologies about testosterone
creating a male voice limit the degree of agency that some trans men exert over their
voices, which helps to contextualize these speakers’ non-normative vocal styles.
In sum, trans speakers have many lessons to offer regarding the nature of the genderedvoice. They also highlight the need for a more nuanced approach to “vocal sex” that rec­ognizes the importance of the body without being limited by the ideology that human bod­
ies and voices come in two fully distinct, mutually exclusive types.

Trans Discourse
The majority of research on trans language is concerned not (only) with grammar andvoices, but also with the broader realm of discourse-level strategies that characterizetrans people’s place within structures of power. This section is organized around threethemes that reflect trans linguistics’ concern with the delegitimation, erasure, and struc­tural oppression that trans people experience: medical gatekeeping and narrative authen­ticity; the negotiation of legal and embodied selves; and globalizing forces. In addition to
identifying power hierarchies that harm trans people, much of this work also points to op­
portunities for resistance and trans agency.
(1) Gatekeeping and narratives of authenticity: One theme that pervades research ontrans discourse is the looming role of powerful institutions. The initial diagnostic cri­
teria for transsexuality created an intensive gatekeeping system that required transpeople to convince authority figures of the legitimacy of their identities in order toaccess medical care. Several studies have examined trans people’s interactions withgatekeepers, revealing what Rodrigo Borba and Tommaso Milani (2017) refer to as“crystallised structures of cisnormativity.” Susan Speer and Richard Green (2007) ex­
amine interactions between trans patients and gatekeepers in the British National
Health Service in which practitioners position themselves as neutral and necessary
arbiters of how “successful” a trans person will be in a new gender role such that apatient’s ability to “pass” as cisgender may be considered when judging their suit­ability for transition. In another study, Susan Speer and Ceri Parsons (2006) examine
hypothetical questions in gatekeeping interactions framed as “therapy.” Yet close
analysis of one psychiatrist’s questions about what patients would do if they were de­nied transition care reveals that these are not just any hypothetical questions, but
ones in which trans patients know that the asker has the power to make the hypo­thetical scenario come true—and that their answer may influence the psychologist’s
decision.

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
Borba (2015, 2017) and Borba and Milani (2017) consider the role of gatekeeping in a
Brazilian gender clinic, bringing up questions about cultural specificity, colonialism, andglobalization. Borba (2017) takes on the issue of “rehearsed narratives” in gatekeeping
encounters and describes how the clinic implements international standards of care aspart of a process of “discursive colonization.” In addition to the constraints gatekeeping
presents to all trans subjects, those attempting to access medical transition care in the
Global South must inhabit narratives produced in cultural contexts that are quite differ­ent from, and already exert colonial power over, local practices. Borba is also able to cap­
ture interactions that occur outside of the clinic, in which trans people share strategies
for making it through the gatekeeping process. In another context that also reflects theway trans people depend on one another’s expertise to navigate the power gatekeepers
wield, Avery Dame (2013) considers how trans expertise and knowledge is produced anddistributed among trans male video bloggers (vloggers) on YouTube. By focusing specifi­
cally on cases in which vloggers challenged their viewers’ behavior, Dame sheds light ona process whereby trans people position themselves as experts on trans experiencethrough an array of interactional strategies.
Exemplifying the shift to a trans linguistics framework, the analyses just describeddemonstrate how fraught trans people’s position is within institutions that serve them,
how high the stakes are, and how much trans people endure to gain agency over theirown bodies. At the same time, trans linguistic research does not stop at describing thevulnerability of non-normatively gendered communities; it also uncovers forms of resis­
tance that such communities enact.
The impositions placed on trans narratives within the gatekeeping context can often fol­
low trans speakers into other contexts, including research interviews. Trans people face adouble bind: presenting themselves as gender normative women or men may legitimize
their gender to skeptics, but adhering too closely to those norms may put them in the
crosshairs of feminist critique. Several studies of trans narratives (Mason-Schrock 1996;
Gagné, Tewksbury, and McGaughey 1997; Parsons 2005) bemoan the gender normativity
speakers invoke without considering how their narratives may have been shaped by thecontext of a research interview conducted by a psychologist, i.e., someone with the same
disciplinary affiliation as most gatekeepers. Other studies show signs of trans speakers
rejecting clinical norms. Speakers in my analysis of coming out narratives (Zimman 2009)
oriented to norms for trans identity only to call attention to the ways they did not fit thosenorms. These speakers legitimated their identities not through adherence to genderstereotypes, but through their well-being and satisfaction. Elijah Edelman (2014) similar­
ly highlights the ways his participants’ narratives challenged the homonormative frame of“coming out” that portrays those who fail to come out as politically repressive or re­pressed. Trans narratives thus contain signs of both resistance to normative discourses
and insistence on a distinctively trans politics of visibility.
In the few studies that consider how trans and gender nonconforming identities intersectwith other axes of subjectivity, we can see additional layers of resistance. This is the casein Jenny L. Davis’s (2014) account of an educational event organized by Two-Spirit indi­
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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
viduals, who are indigenous North Americans defined as spiritually both female and male
and who may also identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, etc. Davis empha­
sizes the way participants subverted the either/or designations that guide colonial models
of identity, in which one is either female or male; trans or gay/lesbian; LGBTQ or Two-Spir­it. The navigation between multiple competing identity frameworks is particularly salient
in indigenous populations, (post-)colonial contexts, and communities of color in diaspora.
(2) Legal and embodied selves: The law is another discursive domain of institutional
power that has a role in perpetuating transphobia (Hao 2017; Hutton 2017; McDon­
ald, Byrne, and Dickson 2017). Christopher Hutton (2017) considers the legal defini­tion of sex, particularly as it relates to marriage, and finds that definitions of legalsex have depended on “a covertly authoritarian understanding of ordinary mean­ing,” (55) that ultimately falls apart under attempts to make explicit a single logic or
set of criteria. The messiness of this system is of particular importance for the
carceral system, in which trans women are regularly jailed alongside cisgender men,making them highly vulnerable to exploitation, physical abuse, and sexual violence.
This vulnerability is made poignant by Elisabeth McDonald, Jack Byrne, and Sandra
Dickson’s (2017) discussion of the legal definition of rape in New Zealand, which re­veals how laws intended to address gendered violence can be used to perpetuatetransphobia. In 2005, the legal definition of rape in New Zealand was changed sothat it no longer referred to nonconsensual penetration of a woman by a man but
rather nonconsensual penetration of a person with “female genitals” by a personwith a penis, meaning trans women who have not had genital reconstruction cannot
be considered victims of rape from a legal perspective, and are instead framed as po­
tential perpetrators. Trans women face exceptionally high rates of sexual violence(Grant et al. 2012), yet here the legal language is matched by legal (in)action: the au­thors report that sexual assaults of trans women have almost never resulted in con­victions under New Zealand law.
Bodies, clearly, take center stage in negotiations of trans authenticity and(dis)empowerment, and trans linguistics has centered questions about embodied sexual
difference, beginning most clearly with Borba and Ostermann’s (2007) call for more at­tention to trans embodiment. Trans bodies, most basically, complicate the naturalizationof “biological sex.” Even if the fleshy body is not directly transformed by language, its so­cial meanings—including “female” and “male”—certainly are. This has been the central
argument of my and my collaborators’ examinations (Edelman and Zimman 2014; Zim­
man and Hall 2009; Zimman 2014) of the ways trans men exhibit linguistic agency in their
talk about their genitals, frequently invoking canonically “male” terms for their own sur­gically unmodified bodies. Brian King (2016, this volume) provides another perspective on
non-normative embodiment through an analysis of talk about intersex bodies in an educa­
tional setting. While the trans speakers I have written about are overtly critical of norma­tive language surrounding biological sex, the intersex activist King describes gently
guides high school students to imagine what might be possible as they learn about inter­sex bodies. King’s analysis is particularly useful in demonstrating the emergent process

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
through which linguistic norms about the body are troubled and shifted, laying the
groundwork for more creative ways of thinking and talking alike.
(3) Global flows: A final major theme in the study of trans discourse concerns trans­
formations in practice and meaning brought about by the increasing and increasing
rapidity of global flows of people, ideas, practices, and language (Kulick 1999). Ques­
tions about globalization have been central in queer linguistics as well (as in Leap
and Boellstorff 2004), with one key focus being how to interpret the global appear­
ance of identities like “gay” and “lesbian,” particularly as they stand in contrast withlocal forms of queer practice defined in terms of gender presentation rather thansexual practice alone (e.g., Hall 2005, 2009; Boellstorff 2004; Jackson 2004; Black­wood 2014).
We can see these tensions at work in Hall’s (2005, 2009) work with a New Delhi NGO(“the Center”) focused on education regarding sexuality and providing services to gays,
lesbians, and related communities. In analyses focused on several groups that might beconsidered transgender, Hall demonstrates how English usage, upper-classness, and cos­
mopolitan cultural orientation are mapped onto identification as lesbian/gay rather thanwith local categories, the latter of which are often viewed as low-brow, vulgar, and cultur­
ally regressive by lesbian-/gay-identified Indians. These local identities include hijras, ko­tis, who engage in parodic performances of hijra identity, and boys, who are masculine fe­
male-assigned individuals who feel drawn to transsexual body modifications. At the Cen­
ter where Hall’s fieldwork took place, a homonormative framework is imposed on gendercrossing groups; for instance, hijras and kotis must dress as men in order to work at theCenter, which the former group refused to do.
Importantly, homonormative gay identities emerged in the West in part through the rejec­tion of other forms of queerness, including trans identities (Stryker 2008). The globaliza­tion of homonormativity thus carries a transphobic history that is especially clear inHall’s (2009) analysis of a group conversation among a group of boys and Liz, a white
British expatriate who worked at the Center. Hall describes a discursive struggle through­out the interaction in which Liz aims to help the boys “understand” (143) that they can bemasculine without identifying as male or pursuing medical transition. While Liz sees her­self as preventing the boys from the “burdens” of “dangerous” surgeries, she places her­self and her interlocutors within a history of discourse from the Global North in which cis­
gender people express a preferential stance for gender non-conforming cisgender identi­
ties (e.g., “masculine woman”) over trans identities.5 The globalization of gay and lesbianidentity is thus not only a global movement of words, nor even of identities, but of entire
frameworks for understanding gender and sexual alterity (see also Thoreson 2013). As
Hall’s analysis shows, globalization transports not just lesbian and gay identities, but alsotrans identities and trans medical services. At the same time, Borba’s (2015, 2017) re­search centers the process of localizing these words, identities, and practices to theBrazilian context. Though discourses from the Global North are taken up enthusiasticallyby providers at the gender clinic where Borba worked, providers also work to ensure that

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
patients show no signs of being travestís rather than transsexuals, such as enjoying using
their genitals to penetrate others.
As part of the process of glocalization, categories traveling from the global “center” maybe remapped onto local distinctions in the global “periphery.” However, these categories
need not work as mutually exclusive orientations to global sexual modernity. Evelyn
Blackwood’s (2014) research in West Sumatra, Indonesia, reveals that masculine-present­
ing tomboys align themselves simultaneously with local gender-difference based sexual
dynamics, where masculine tomboys pair with feminine women who have no marked
identity, and a global lesbi (from lesbian) identity that applies without regard to gendernormativity or cultural locale. Besnier’s (2003) discussion of the Miss Galaxy Pageant in
Tonga similarly showcases the ability leitis have to move between the local and the glob­
al. Because contestants in the pageant are making claims to a global, cosmopolitan femi­
ninity, audience members may challenge them to speak English; if their English is notgood enough, however, the same audience will mock them. Yet Besnier, in capturing thisparadox, demonstrates how strategic claims on Tongan authenticity can be used to fore­
stall critiques of leitis’ acceptability on a global scale.
An important shift in current research on global gender non-normativity, as in globaliza­tion studies more generally, is toward examining local models of identification without
setting up a comparison with or assuming uni-directional flow from dominant Euro-Ameri­can models. Poiva Junior Ashleigh Feu’u (2017) exemplifies this approach through a com­
parison of Samoan fa’afafine and Maori whakawahine, both terms for feminine individuals
who were assigned male at birth. Focusing on the ways members of each group draw on
the history of their identities to position themselves within a gendered cultural tradition,Feu’u shows how colonialism impacts, but never fully determines, the way postcolonialsubjects understand themselves.

An Expanding Field of Inquiry
As trans linguistics has emerged, there has been a broadening in the identities and com­munities studied and in the research frameworks and methods employed. However, there
remain several significant gaps in the representation of trans and gender nonconforming
populations in language, gender, and sexuality. The early literature focused almost exclu­
sively on individuals who were assigned male at birth, many of whom represented indige­nous identities in postcolonial contexts. In recent years, more work has been done withfemale-assigned trans people, mostly in communities that speak English and other Euro­pean languages (save Hall 2009 and Blackwood 2014), leaving trans feminine people in
the Global North and trans masculine people in the Global South underrepresented. Non­binary people have much to offer sociocultural linguists, as recent studies have begun to
explore (Corwin 2017; Gratton 2016; Bershtling 2014; Conrod, this volume; Zimman forth­coming). These speakers are well-poised to answer questions about linguistic innovation,agency, and cognition, having introduced not only new labels (e.g., genderqueer, agender,
bigender, etc.) but also grammatical innovations in the form of new pronouns (e.g., ze andhir as gender-neutral third person singular forms), new scopes for old pronouns (e.g., ap­
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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
plication of singular they for specific individuals), and new interactional practices (e.g.,
explicitly asking people for their pronouns). This growing interest in binary-transcen­
dence should be extended to bodies, as much more work is needed on intersex subjectivi­
ty and bodies to build on King’s (2015) insights.
The most glaring form of underrepresentation, however, is trans communities of color.
While anthropological studies have often involved populations that are not white, race
has rarely been a central analysis. As Rusty Barrett’s (2017) examinations of perfor­
mances by African American drag queens suggest, race is frequently a critical element of
the critiques enacted through the gendered practices of queer people of color. We need abetter sense of the ways trans identity intersects with other important aspects of social
subjectivity, and how our current view of trans language may be heavily inflected bywhiteness. As the scope of trans linguistics is widened, it becomes particularly important
to attend to the political divides and hierarchies within gender non-normative popula­tions.

Conclusion: Toward a Trans Linguistics
With three decades of literature on trans language reviewed, it is now possible to sketch
out the theoretical perspective I have described as trans linguistics. Some of these char­acteristics are held in common with other interventions to reclaim linguistics as a tool of
empowerment for groups that have historically been excluded, erased, and harmed by thediscipline. A linguistics of the oppressed, more generally, is attentive to the processes ofresearch and writing and their ethical, political, and material implications (e.g., Leonard2017). It highlights the way researchers’ subjectivities and relationships with speakers
shape scholarly production. It challenges the discipline’s knowledge and demands ac­
countability to lived reality beyond academia. It depends on the wisdom of marginalized
communities. It is attuned not only to oppressive language but also to agency in, through,and beyond language.
Trans linguistics also possesses distinctive characteristics. Perhaps most centrally, thisframework regards transformation, fluidity, and movement as central aspects of both
identity and language. It is a framework in which deterministic and homogenizing ac­
counts of (non)normative social practice are approached with skepticism. Trans linguis­
tics centers trans people and others who occupy the margins of normative categories,
those who exceed them, and those who travel between them. It pushes us to consider how
other categories might be transcended or transversed. It prioritizes exceptional cases anddiscovering what is possible rather than privileging norms and generalizable claims.
Trans linguistics is both political and applied, participating in the critical reexaminationof its own intellectual histories. A central goal is to find ways to implement linguists’ ex­pertise in the empowerment of trans people and others at the margins (Zimman 2017d),
which trans communities need now as much as ever.

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics
Crucially, in trans linguistics, trans people are no longer objects to be evaluated for theirimplications to gender theories and politics developed by cis thinkers, but analytic agentswith unique capacity to inform the discipline. Key questions about the origins, flexibility,and political ramifications of gendered linguistic practices can be answered by consider­ing trans people’s practices and theories about language; cissexist assumptions about
how the body and identity relate to one another may be challenged by the embodied expe­
riences of trans linguists; challenging questions about the gender politics of our theories
will be posed by trans students; and useful theoretical and methodological tools are avail­able from trans theorists in other disciplines. Trans linguistics is not just about centeringtrans speakers, nor only about creating space for more trans people to become linguists.
It is about channeling the strength, creativity, beauty, and vitality of trans experience into
new ways of being a linguist that are as yet unknown.

Acknowledgments
My first acknowledgements go to the pioneering scholars who laid the groundwork fortrans linguistics, among them Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett, both of whom have leant enor­
mous support since my earliest days as a polemical trans linguist. The next set of thanks
are owed to the upcoming generation of trans+ scholars of language and culture, whocollectively form an inspiring new wave of radical thinking and action, as well as mypeers who supported my early attempts to challenge transphobia in linguistics. Finally,
thanks are due to students in my 2018 course on Language and Gender Transgression
and to members of the audience of an earlier version of this discussion at Lavender Lan­guages 25 at Rhode Island College. All remaining shortcomings are my own.

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Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics

Notes:(1.) Nonbinary is an umbrella label for anyone who does not identify as strictly female orstrictly male.
(2.) Though homophonous, the trans linguistics theorized here is distinct from thetranslinguistics outlined by Lee and Dovchin (2019). The two frameworks share an orien­
tation to the importance of thinking about blurring and moving between categories once
recognized as distinct (for Lee and Dovchin, different languages). However, they differ inthat the trans linguistics proposed here centers the experiences of trans people in addi­
tion to using transness as a theoretical device for thinking through language, embodi­
ment, and identity. Trans linguistics is thus necessarily grounded in a political commit­
ment to social and linguistic justice for gender non-normative communities.
(3.) Trans people often place scare quotes around the word “passing” to reflect its prob­
lematic nature, as referring to a trans person as “passing as a woman/man” implies thatthe person in question is not “really” a woman/man, just as someone who passes as white
is not really white, someone who passes as straight is not really straight, etc.
(4.) Averages reported for American English-speaking “men” tend to be 100–120 Hz andfor “women” 200–220 Hz. These numbers are based on speakers who are presumably as­
sumed to be cisgender, though their trans status is unknown to us.
(5.) Liz frames herself as arguing against biological essentialism and medical transition
specifically, but she notably does not suggest that the boys can be men without genital
surgery. As she presents it, the only alternative to a phalloplasty is womanhood.

Lal Zimman

University of California, Santa Barbara

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