#fumbling with metaphorical and non-literal language.

[brittlebutch]

i kind of hate to say it because i feel like i'll get pushback for it,,, but i kind of feel like if you're going to be making informational posts about autism online you do need to be reading actual autism research and literature. at least some of the times. like you can't just make things up and then present them as fact.

[cloisteredpoet]

I don’t really like the label ‘trans masc’ but I use it, because that’s the label for people who are like me, and I’m building community with people who are like me. I don’t know how I feel about ‘transandrophobia’ as a term, but it doesn’t matter: it’s a word, a symbol for something real, and its usefulness matters more.

I don’t know how to play this game of boundaries, this precision and absolutes of language. I call myself non-binary, trans masc, ftm, a trans man, a non-binary trans masc, bigender, a man who is a woman, a woman who is a man, I relate to the kinds of trans people who call themselves a ‘butch dyke trans masc’ even though I’m not one, I once read a book that used the phrase ‘trans male’ I was thrilled to see myself in it.

In real life, I fumble over my words. I am a poet who has to say, ‘if you know what I mean’ a lot, I am a poet because words are imprecise and poetry loves that imprecision.

I love that, though. Don’t we all? All the metaphors we use just to finish with ‘if you know what I mean’ and then the other person says, ‘I know what you mean’ and they use their own metaphors! And then you have more—more, and more, and more language, concepts, ideas, lit up in your brain, helping you churn through and piece together the world.

Gender is not all the words in me, and not all the stories that make me up. I don’t need to see myself one-to-one in everything; I only find myself alienated by others when they tell me that there *are* these absolutes. That a trans man can only be 100 percent a man and nothing else, or when they define the experiences of trans masculinity that are directly different than my own, and declare those essential. And then, then, I feel as though I sit in some kind of no-man’s land, staring at signs and names for places I yearn for but the door has been shut against me.

Sometimes people have told me, apologetically, ‘I relate to these words, these feelings you describe, some aspect of this experience even though it is not literally mine,’ and I hate that we’ve made that an apology. I want to tell them, please, my life is open source, please, human pain and joy is so vast, of course we are going to find ourselves in the almosts of other people. I want to always find myself in the almosts of other people, that’s how we talk to each other.

I don’t have to like a word to see myself in its definition, I don’t have to pick apart a word to hold it accountable to some ‘essentialized’ definition just to find it a useful descriptor. Language is so much more than the individual components of words themselves.

Sometimes I come up with my own words. Words I like. And you may not like them. But maybe you’ll use them too, because you’ll see yourself in them. And maybe we won’t even agree exactly on what these words mean. But we’ll say: I get what you mean. I get what you mean. And if we get what each other means—then we’ve built something real.