Being female-assigned, female-presenting nonbinary on International Women’s Day just highlights how much our language fails people with liminal identities.
There aren’t easy words to describe people whose identities are tied together by our external experiences. We’ve got acronyms– FAAB or AFAB– to describe our physiology, but that feels blank and statistical, and assuming external experience is associated only with physiology is flawed and gender-essentialist in its own way. “Woman” and “female” both belong to people who share an internal identity I don’t share. Female-presenting centers the absence of identity, makes me feel as if the only way to describe myself is as an empty facade. Femme is inaccurate; femme is a word that belongs to a different type of identity that I don’t inhabit.
Self-describing “as a woman” not only erases my own nonbinary identity, but also does a great discredit to transgender women by suggesting that “woman” is a descriptor tied to physiology or external experience rather than identity or expression.
What we don’t have is a word that ties together all of us who share an external experience based on how we are perceived because of our gender assignment and/or perceived presentation. That’s not womanhood, not for all of us, and it’s not the only kind of womanhood. Womanhood, our understanding of womanhood, needs to belong both to women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned female and women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned male.
I share a kinship based on experience with both cis women and trans women, and some things I share more with cis women, and other things I share more with trans women, and some things I share with both and other things I share with neither. But we have no language that lets me relate simply and accurately, because my internal identity isn’t theirs, and we have words to describe internal identity, but none to describe experiencing the same things as a group without truly being part of that group– none that feel right, none that feel inclusive rather than sidelining ourselves by definition. And it makes it hard to claim and relate experiences, even in places where I feel welcome, without feeling in some way deceitful or erased.
I want a word to describe internal identity, another to describe physiology, another to describe external experience, because all of those are valid things to identify with and to talk about in regard to their commonalities, but it needs to be very clear in our language that they’re all different things, and that they’re not mutually inclusive in the way our society still generally implies they must be.
So, anyway. I’m feeling very much on the outside looking in, feeling strong solidarity but no way to express it with the words I’ve got access to. But thanks to all the women out there and all the people our world defines as women for being yourselves and for doing the work you do.
oh my fucking god, thank you for writing this. mom called to wish me a happy 8th of march this morning and i felt like a total fraud. on the other hand, women’s right to vote, to abortion, to contraception – in short, everything that concerns me as someone assigned female and with a ‘female’ on my ID still concerns me and will possibly concern me for a very long time.
that’s the problem you get if you generalise and scream how only women’s experiences are valid in feminism – what about people who get some of the women’s experiences because we are assigned female?
Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
All my books are centered around 15th century England and the Hundred Years War. Let me grab a photo of the lot on my bookshelf, and send it along, and if you want to pick my brain about any of it, I’ll gladly pull anything. (Especially since right now my brain/muses have plopped themselves down in the early 15th century and are cheerfully refusing to go anywhere else, so research bits get to happen around writing.)
eeeeee! that would be awesome! thank u 🙂
Alright, so have gotten several pictures, the better to show off the titles. Some of these are older books, and anything that needs a more current view of history probably should look at newer books if there are any.
Everything is behind a cut because long post is long and image heavy.
The entire set. Almost, anyway. There’s some spinning/weaving books off the end that aren’t showing up too well. I will admit, too many of these are books I have either not read, or haven’t read recently, and bugger if I can remember the details of what’s in them. They’re also mostly, if I remember correctly, from the collection of a dear friend whose judgement I’d trust. Those that aren’t are all but one bought at SCA events, and I tend to trust those to have at least decent information for a place to start from or to use for general world-building purposes.
The Pastons and Their England, H.S. Bennett – Haven’t cracked this one yet, but I got it because the Pastons left a treasure trove of correspondence from the 15th century, and though they’re a little later than my usual period, it’s still useful information.
Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies, and Women In the Middle Ages, same authors – I’m still processing some of this, but got those because they were (a) from a collection someone else was getting rid of, and thus very inexpensive, and (b) very useful overviews of things in the period I’m writing. They’re a bit broader in scope, but that’s pretty good for a general sense of what would make sense in period and what wouldn’t. (I need to reread some of this, because the information is not fresh in my head, so.)
This Sun of York, Mary Clive – late 15th century, War of the Roses period. Definitely after my preferred period of history, but still potential to be useful. Haven’t read it yet.
Arms, Armies, and Fortifications In the Hundred Years War, Curry Hughes – *very big grin* Hello, useful information to make anything I’m writing about for my early-to-mid 15th century alternate history sound more real around battles and sieges.
Edward IV, Charles Ross – Another book I haven’t cracked, about the king in the title. I grabbed it from the same collection a lot of these came out of* because eventually a couple of alternate histories are going to get to him, and I need information about him where I can find it that isn’t strictly wikipedia and online so it’s easier to spread my research around me.
The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting, John Cummins – This is one of the most recommended books to me about the subject. At some point while I’m writing Spirit All Compact of Fire, this book will be one of those spread around me for research on the fly.
Henry V, Christopher Allmand – This is my primary book for research for Admit Me, Chorus to This History. It has proven wonderfully useful for the period between 1413 and 1422. I may, in fact, be more than a little gleeful about it when I am not trying to mind my length of post and it’s not late.
The First Elizabeth, Carolly Erickson – not cracked it yet, but it’s Elizabeth Tudor, of course I snagged it. I have plans in my alternate histories for her, because I am not having a history where she doesn’t exist at all.
A Dictionary of Medieval Terms and Phrases, Christopher Corèdon with Ann Williams – Want to know archaic terminology, old means of measurements, and other interesting words to use in writing fiction set from approx. the 9th century through the 15th.? *points at book*
Pirates of Barbary, Adrian Tinniswood – Haven’t looked at this yet, but book on pirates. I thought it looked like it might be interesting. Also looks like it may or may not involve twitching, because fuck if I know what sort of bias the author is bringing to things, and also, what bias I’m bringing into things when I get to reading it. It’s also 17th century, so a bit later than my usual period.
And these are mostly more modern or specialized by subject rather than time.
Cooking Without a Kitchen, Marshall Berland – from 1978, haven’t read it through, do trust the person it ultimately came from to have picked up a decent book about cooking. She was an excellent cook.
In Grandmother’s Day, Jean Cross – Informative on a broad spectrum for the late 1800s, primarily the US. Haven’t read it yet because it’s definitely not something to read straight through, and it’s the 1800s. I was given this one rather than getting it.
Learn to Spin, Anne Field – decent book about spinning, excellent photos, has some projects to do with the yarn after. Not so useful for me, because it talks about yarn and I spin embroidery thread, but I enjoy poking through it anyway.
Spin to Weave, Sara Lamb – Interesting, haven’t gotten through much of it yet because I keep getting distracted by other things, like writing.
The Complete Guide to Spinning Yarn, Brenda Gibson – I… still have this because I haven’t remembered to get rid of it, actually. The temptation to throw it across the room is high. Not because it’s necessarily a bad book, but because I am so much not the intended audience. If anyone wants this, feel free to ping my inbox about it, we can discuss details.
The binders at the edge of the last picture are very old Stargate fic that is probably going through the shredder once I figure out if I have digital copies and/or hate it too much to want to type it back in, and a binder full of “watch how someone not a linguist flails their way through making vocabulary for a conlang”. I might someday be convinced to share the latter somewhere that is not actually tumblr and thus gives me a little more control over who sees it.
*ok, if I remember correctly, most of these were from the collection of a dear friend, but it’s been a few years, and my brain is refusing to play nice about remembering where I got them, other than cheap/free. If they are from said friend, I’m not at all surprised my brain refuses to cooperate, because grief is weird.
most of those I knew……except that last one…..what the hell is a “pang”?
A pain and a pang are like those smiley faces in hospitals asking you to rate your discomfort levels, with pain being a constant and a pang being sudden sharp burst that can either be mild or debilitating–like the kind of muscular spasms that can be caused by hunger.
I think it may be more commonly used in British English than American tbh, I rarely see it in work I’m editing for US writers but it crops up among Canadians and the Aussies a fair bit.
*tilts head* Two of those, I’m pretty sure I know where the version labeled incorrect comes from, and it’s not from directly mis-spelling things, it’s from mangled phonetic writing.
One in the same = one ‘n the same
Beckon call = beck ‘n call
Both shortening the ‘and’ to a single letter, and that’s something I do in speech.
Also, ‘nip it in the butt’ could very well be correct, depending on the context. It’s just… not the same context as ‘nip it in the bud’.
As for ‘extract revenge’ vs. ‘exact revenge’ – I can see the former, again, depending on context. Like how much the person being cranky and revenge-minded is inclined to puns and what they’re doing for their revenge.
And now I’m tempted to find ways to use all the incorrect versions, just to watch people twitch.
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone – so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture
Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science
27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish:
Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
Things that, as a mentally ill person, I do not find offensive:
Using the words “crazy” or “nuts” or “insane” to describe something unexpected or incredible, such as “Mars has two moons?! That’s crazy!” or “Wow, those Westboro Baptists sure believe some crazy shit” or “that party was insane!” or “You really think you can have unlimited chocolate by cutting it a certain way? Are you insane?” or “One Direction’s fans went nuts when they stepped out of that chariot.”
Using words like “lunatic” or “madman” to describe someone who’s behavior is fanatical, like “Why is that raving lunatic shouting about abortion at this soldier’s funeral?”
Things that, as a mentally ill person, I find incredibly offensive:
When you use the words “crazy” or “nuts” or “insane” or “lunatic” or “madman” or any variant as a way of dismissing me or people like me and acting like we’re not full people
The portrayal in the media of mentally ill people as not existing beyond their illness on the rare occasion we’re shown as existing at all
The portrayal of mentally ill people as dangerous, or more violent than mentally healthy people, or less intelligent and competent to run their own lives than mentally healthy people, and the fact that a lot of writers don’t seem to understand that “mentally ill” is not a motivation.
The fact that every time there’s a mass shooting or a bombing or an attack and they can’t scapegoat a religion or race for the crime, the perpetrator seems to grow a mental illness just in time for the trial, and people think that explains (or in some cases excuses) what they did
The fact that when people push for not allowing people who can’t use them responsibly to own weapons, they always seem to start at “mentally ill people” on the list of people who shouldn’t be allowed handle weapons, even though there’s no correlation between mental illness and violence.
When people say “you’d have to be crazy to (commit atrocity)” even though no, sane people commit atrocities all the time. In fact, most violent crime is committed by people with no mental illness.
The fact that I have literally seen otherwise-progressive people suggest that all mentally ill people be registered by the government, and perhaps required to identify themselves, and maybe imprisoned for public safety if the need arises. How would you have us identify ourselves? Should we wear a patch on our clothes, or just present our papers upon request?
But I think what really gets me the most:
When mentally healthy people call others out on our behalf when it comes to things on the first list, but remain completely silent about, or even actively complicit in, everything on the second list.
When mentally healthy people call others out on our behalf when it comes to things on the first list, but remain completely silent about, or even actively complicit in, everything on the second list.
Boom.
(I am fully understanding of people who are not okay with the first couple of things up there; I personally am not really bothered by it though.)
I’m in this category too, with a sidebar of “because I make my living with words, I am trying very hard not to use those words casually, even though a look at my older work makes it clear that they don’t bother me–I’ve been living with a diagnosed mental illness since I was nine, I am harder to bother than that–because there is no good reason to use a word that hurts someone if an alternative that works just as well can be found.”
NOMINI MI BOS DVM NOX ORITVR CAELOQUE LVNA PROGREDITVR VIRIQUE LECTICVLOS QVAERONT EGO PERVIGILO PANEM LAMBO
oh dear god how have we reached this point
To clarify:
Tut, tut, tut. Classical Latin? Really? No, no, no. This meme, though it originated in a story of a reconstruction of an 18C French village, is itself firmly associated with 14C English. Therefore if you’re going to put it in Latin, it needs to look more medieval – ie, fewer majuscules, more flexibility with u/v. And, of course, a more vernacular word order, plus more emphasis on the tail-rhyme.
May I suggest:
nomini mi bos dum nox oritur caeloque luna progreditur et viri lectos quaerunt panes mihi lincti sunt
… no, still not right
what is missing I KNOW
it is the ABBREVIATIONS
okay here we go (and I shan’t even attempt the correct script since I can’t write neatly even nowadays):
(i know, i know, i can’t even keep my letters a consistent size.)
1) THEY MADE IT SO MUCH BETTER
2) saving this for reference re: paleography
3) @annleckie this might have reached sufficient absurdity to be ready for you to see now
I also remain unconvinced of the 14thC English connection. I think it’s pareidolia in action.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 