Prescriptivism
http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=2966 (http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=2966)
9/3/10
One of the reasons I started QT was because so much of the Feminist writing about trans people was prescriptivist. It told us what our genders were, how we were allowed to express those genders, how we did everything wrong. How the .1-.2% of the population that may be transsexual somehow grants greater weight and gravity to the gender binary than the billions of cis men and cis women living on this planet.
But I think prescriptivism is creeping into our politics as well. We have a multiplicity of terms for every part of trans experiences, whether transitioning or not, whether binary or non-binary. Many of these terms were applied to us, created to define and limit us, to describe what our life courses are supposed to be. Essentialist language that describes us by privileging the wrong sex, the wrong gender. Dehumanizing language that reduces us to acronyms, surgeries and genitals, whether or surgeries or genitals are even important to us.