When Nouns Do the Work of Adjectives

You have a sister who keeps changing her mind. Last year, she was a liberal. The year before, she was a conservative. This year, she calls herself an independent. Is she still the same person? Is she still your sister?

She keeps flip-flopping about her identity, too. She identified as a girl one year, then as a boy, then as nonbinary, then as a boy again. Now is she your sister? Or has she become your brother? Is she still a girl, or is she now a boy?

And if she's a boy, was she always a boy, or was she at one point a girl? And if you're angry with me for misgendering—maybe you're misreading me. Maybe I'm talking about your assigned-male-at-birth sibling. You can't be sure, because on this topic alone, parts of speech no longer do their regular jobs. The word “sister” refers not to your sibling, or any other noun, but to an adjective of sorts—your sibling's current identification.

Now I'd like you to imagine my dad. Suppose I told you he was tall, and hard-working, and friendly, and funny. Can you imagine this man, after I've applied these adjectives? Suppose I told you he was a quiet man for a while, then he became a talkative man. How about now—can you imagine a man like this?

Suppose I tell you he's a trans man. Oops! Now you have to imagine a totally different person. This isn't who donated his sperm during my conception, or even some adoptive stand-in for that person. But why should you have to go back to the drawing board? “Man” is still the noun, and I've added only an adjective: “trans.” In what other case does a noun fundamentally change when a modifier is added to it?

It gets worse. Suppose I tell you my dad was a trans man, then he became a cis man. Now we're in trouble, because this isn't possible. When it comes to the phrase “trans man,” the word “man” no longer serves as a noun—that core thing we're describing when we add adjectives. If we were using nouns and adjectives as they're commonly used, a “trans man” would be a man who identifies as a woman—or as something else—not a woman who identifies as a man.

To complicate matters, we have no noun that refers to transgender people, at all. In a world full of homosexuals and homosexuality, Jews and Judiasm, lesbians and lesbianism, liberals and liberalism, atheists and atheism, we cannot name transgender people nor their practice. The words “Transgenders” and “transgenderism” have been deemed offensive.

Why has language been subverted on this topic, and at the cost of clarity? To advance the (observably incorrect) claim that transgender status is objective and immutable. Trans to cis? Literally inconceivable. No reason to have language for such a contingency, unless you're a bigot. Once a trans man, always a trans man, before and after transition. And once a trans man, always a regular 'ole man. There is no difference between the two, nor is possible for someone to make a mistake or change her mind about her “gender.” Throw pronouns into the mix, and it becomes impossible to discuss, at least without causing offense, the possibility of error in this belief system.

These language games have served, as designed, to confuse the masses into compliance with a set of ideas. But the effect is especially pernicious on children, who are still learning what persons, places and things exist. My ex-husband learned what men were long before he decided to reject that category. But Jazz Jennings was told at the age of two that girls, and boys who “act like girls,” are one and the same. Jazz's very apprehension of reality was impeded in early development. Then he was probably discouraged, as the rest of us are, from using the very language he needs to explore his plight. Could his parents and doctors have made a mistake? Is there more than one path forward? Or is Jazz on a one-way street, with no alternatives that can be named?