Trans femmes sont femmes?

[PetraDelphiki]

Ok so my french is atrocious (and other languages worse) but how is this being stated in non English speaking countries? I’m sure one of the things that has made language so contentious here (uk) is that everyone was too polite/ squeamish to use the word “sex” in public so they used gender instead which has lead to the whole confusion between the words.

The problem is not that we don’t have the two different words (sex/gender) but that we don’t (Haven’t historically )use them right. In languages where the word for sex (biological) can safely be used because it isn’t the same as sex ( intercourse) is there as much linguistic confusion? Do forms etc then genuinely request gender rather than sex? Or both?

Just random musing...

My French is rubbish but couldn't the title also translate to trans wives are wives?

Trying hard not to derail a fab question but I've always thought it interesting that the french have the same word for woman and wife.

I did say my French was rubbish!!!

The terms "transfemme" and "trans femme" are only rarely used in French. The usual term is "femme trans".

A French website translated Stephen King's recent tweet as "Les femmes transgenres sont des femmes" and also paraphrased it in their headline as "Une femme trans est une femme” ( stephenkingfrance.fr/2020/06/jk-rowling-transphobie-twitter/ ).

In French, you can't say "femmes trans sont femmes" - you need the article "les" (or "une") to make clear you are talking about trans women in general, the whole class of trans women. (Of course, in English, we don't use the word "the" in this way - we would use the word "the" to designate a subset.) And then, you can't say "...sont femmes", you have to include the partitive article "des".

Language is fun!

So are the French suffering the same TWAW as we are? Or do they distinguish better between sex and gender? Are there even different words? Do official forms ask for sex or gender (if there are different words)?

Ditto other countries ...

I'm always a bit baffled by people saying we mustn't conflate sex and gender. Because if gender isn't another word for sex, what does it really mean? Nothing much imo. There is biological sex (which people squeamishly started referring to as gender... and then there is a bunch of sexist stereotypes based social conditioning, and people seem to have now decided that's what 'gender' is. As far as I'm concerned, biological sex is real and gender isn't actually a thing.

It's certainly interesting from a foreign languages pov though - in particular the effect that having gendered nouns and adjective agreement has on discourse about the sexes, mixed sex groups and how difficult it is to refer to people in a 'gender neutral' way.

They use 'femme trans(genre)' (transwoman) and 'homme trans(genre)' (transman) , as far as I can tell from a quick Google session. The fact that they invert the adjective and noun, as is often the case in French, works much as the addition of the space does in English to legitimise them as their chosen gender - a woman who is trans rather than a transwoman as a whole noun in itself (there was a good Twitter thread about this). Much of the language they're using around this topic seems to be direct translations from the English - they talk about gender assigned at birth in the same way, and I even found them using the English shorthand MtF/FtM rather than bothering to translate. They have a noun 'transidentité', too, which I don't think we have in English (I couldn't think of the equivalent, anyway). In this, as in so many thing, French youth culture seems to follow English. I'm not sure how they'd be phrasing TWAW - I've only found it as a direct translation of the English in news reports, with no indication as to whether it is a slogan in the same way in French. I suspect they'd come up with something a bit pithier.

@transdimensional beat me to it!

It would be interesting to know how "latinx" is going down in Spanish speaking countries too, and what happens to adjective agreement when that's used.

Interesting thoughts.

In Chinese, a transgender person is a 變性人, literally a "change sex person". No mucking about there.

Gendered languages are very interesting. I wonder how being non binary and wanting to be called “they” works in French for example, because adjectives etc are all gendered, as far as I know. So if you said to someone “you are little” (Sorry, it’s one of the only adjectives I can think of in French) you either would have to be male - petit - or female - petite. Also if you want to change gender all your adjectives would need to change, not just your pronouns. I am learning Russian and that seems even more gendered so “I went to the park” would be a different word for went depending whether you are a man or a woman. Actually maybe that is the same in French. I am not great at languages!

I am learning Russian and that seems even more gendered so “I went to the park” would be a different word for went depending whether you are a man or a woman. Actually maybe that is the same in French.

Actually yes, if you're using the perfect tense: "je suis allé au parc" (masc) vs "je suis allée au parc" (fem) - although "allé" and "allée" are pronounced the same.

Because if gender isn't another word for sex, what does it really mean? Nothing much imo.

Quite right. Gender is merely the arbitrary classification of nouns into 2 or 3 inflection groupings.

English dropped these inflection groupings centuries ago. 'Gender' is irrelevant in the English language.

Why on Earth are nouns grouped into genders, anyway? I understand the point of inflecting nouns to represent their function in a sentence or their relationship to other words in a sentence, but why assign them gender?

I am not too sure why inanimate nouns are grouped into genders. But to some extent that's irrelevant. I mean, even if French had a third (neuter) gender to which it assigned all inanimates, and reserved masculine and feminine for what linguists call "natural gender" (gender that corresponds to biological sex), it could still be the case that adjectives in French have gender-markings that English doesn't (see TinyMetalBirds' example of "you are little" - "tu es petit(e)"), for example. Or again the absence of a third-person gender-neutral pronoun (how "they" is used in English) - this still might be the case even if French only applied gender to natural gender. (There would have to be words for "it" and "they"(the inanimate it-plural in this scenario - a narrower "they" than the English "they") but you couldn't use them for humans, any more than you could "it" in English.)

Dutch is a weird one gendered nouns use de as the definite article and adjectives often end in a (pronounced) e - they’re not separated into masculine and feminine though. All plurals are also de. Neuter nouns are het, as well as all diminutive words (you can make something small and/or cute by adding je or tje to the end of a noun).

Anyway, yes the madness has really started to hit here. Transvrouwen zijn vrouwen - though as I interact online in English (my Dutch is shite) I don’t know how prevalent that is as a slogan. I suspect they would use TWAW as English is adopted so much (like BLM).

German Frau can mean wife and also mean woman.

@BaronessBollyKnickers

Trying hard not to derail a fab question but I've always thought it interesting that the french have the same word for woman and wife.

Same in German -- but also the same word for man and husband so at least it's equal!

As far as I'm concerned, biological sex is real and gender isn't actually a thing.

Which is fine fine for you personally, much as an atheist rejects religion completely in their own life, it seems a natural logical progression for a feminist (someone who wishes women be liberated from oppression on the grounds of their sex) to reject gender (sex-based stereotypes and social expectations). Gender is the tool of female oppression IMO. That’s why I think women rejecting gender is such an effective act.

But I don’t think, even those of us who personally reject gender, don’t believe in it ourselves, are genderfree, gender critical, gender abolitionists etc.... we can’t say that gender doesn’t exist at all. Clearly there are other people who do believe in gender, who build their identities and live their lives based around their belief in gender. By no means just trans people or trans activists btw, I’d say this would perhaps describe the majority of people when you get down to it. Anyone that unthinkingly accepts sex-based stereotypes on any level, I’m not sure many of us are completely immune, I think even those of us who personally reject gender catch ourselves in the occasional sexist assumption. So gender clearly is a thing, it does exist, it’s just that not everyone believes in it nor accepts it. Much like religion.

Fine fine 😂 it’s really fine

Oh, this talk of rejecting gender and my use of ‘their’ as a neutral pronoun in that post has just twigged something in my mind - why as a feminist I find the concept of ‘non-binary’ so personally offensive and an affront to feminist principles - it’s because I personally reject gender and understand the significance of sex, whereas ‘non-binary’ is rejecting, even denying sex, which is quite incredible to me really, and at the same time wholesale affirming gender, the tool by which women are oppressed. Their must be a huge amount of cognitive dissonance experienced.

Sorry I’ve gone off topic massively.

Gah! I was looking for info on German use of trans-preferred pronouns and got sidetracked by a poll asking if Rowling was right to say transwomen are not women because they don't menstruate.

It's infuriating! The poll results so far are 50+ yes they are women and 40+ no they aren't; with a whole lot of comments saying how stupid she was for saying that. So I spent a lot of time and words setting them straight: that she NEVER said that, and what she actually said, and that most transwomen have intact penises (most comments seemed to think they'd had surgery).

I think that Germany is just at the start of this whole rigmarole. Very few people seem informed of what is actually going on and only in a very vague way. A friend of mine, a long time feminist, had no idea at all. There seems to be no women's rights movement fighting it.
German does have a third pronoun, it, and all nouns are all he, she or it.

The neutral one cannot usually be used for people (obviously), except when the word has certain suffixes (das Maedchen, girl), and certainly won't be employed by non-binary or whatever people there.

Germany has two words for sex, Sex and Geschlecht, and Geschlecht is probably the equivalent of gender, but does definitely mean biological sex as well. They are more or less synonymous, but Geschlecht cannot be used for the sexual act except as a double word, as in "Geschlechtsverkehr", sexual intercourse.

When a baby is born and on documents, you'd say Geschlecht, and it means biological sex.

Lamahaha my German is rubbish but I'm sure I've seen asterisks and capitalisation in the middle of a noun to denote both sexes. Eg Lehrer*in.

Is this purely pragmatic or is it anything to do with transgender issues?

Yes, that is a big thing. It's because there are separate words for a male and a female (whatever) the female always ends in -in. It used to be that the default was without the -in so that the masculine noun was inclusive. This is simple if it's just one person if you know their sex, but difficult for mixed sex groups.
So about 30 years ago feminists began demanding that they were also acknowledged. It's simple This led to what i known as the "inner I" which means adding -In to any noun where the sex was not clear. This led to a rather horrible awkwardness of language, at least when written. When spoken, you just use both, so when for instance politicians address an audience, they will say, dear citizens and female citizens, (Liebe Buerger und Buergerinnen). But written, it will be BuergerInnen. You have Student and StudentInnen, etc etc. In some cases replaced by an asterix. Some
I really hate this. I makes everything awkward and much longer instead of succinct, whether spoken or written. I would prefer it to be accepted that the male noun is truly inclusive of both, and we do away with the -in suffix. The pronoun should be enough... But I don't live there any more, so....

(forgot to mention that the plural of -in is -innen or Innen)

^^ Studenten ( all masc), Studentinnen, (all fem) or StudentInnen (mixed sex)

But I don’t think, even those of us who personally reject gender, don’t believe in it ourselves, are genderfree, gender critical, gender abolitionists etc.... we can’t say that gender doesn’t exist at all.

Yes, true. I guess that what I meant was that gender doesn't inherently exist in human beings in the way that biological sex does. Gender is really just a set of fairly arbitrary rules and expectations (which vary according to when and where in the world you happen to have been born).

For me, one of the most depressing things about gender ideology is that it promotes gender stereotypes and the idea that human beings should be changed to fit the stereotypes, rather than continuing to dismantle the stereotypes in order to allow humans to be how they are without feeling that their clothes, hobbies, jobs or personalities are incompatible with their (unchangeable) biological sex.