Creating a trans narrative of hospitality
There is only so far any community can go in building bridges before it becomes supine before an oppressor; is this a truism, or a loaded assumption based on the fact that every minority community is forced to compromise when faced with oppression. Trans identities have long been forced to reckon with societal ill behaviour to gender non-conformity and subversion of sex-based assumptions of bodies. Much of the current transgender linguistics has been framed precisely because trans people have been forced to justify their existence by their communities and societies at large, and the narratives of hospitality they have created are for societies sake, not necessarily their own.
Richard Kearney’s Radical Hospitality lays out linguistic hospitality as an essential process all translation goes through, and I would suggest that when trans people speak to the world at large they are forced to translate their identities to the cisnormative communities they live in. This process requires patience on the part of both sides, as there is no perfect translation, only a better one down the line. Being trans is not something easily quantifiable for cisnormative people, so describing gender incongruence for cis folk requires reductive language that smooths away the edges of identity. This is the nature of translation, as any trans communal semantics require reframing to ensure meaning is…
