When is an Adjective a Label?

[steepholm]

A few years ago, John Boyne had a hit book, later a film, in which he told the story of an oppressed group from the point of view of a member of the group doing the oppressing, and made the latter's suffering the centre of the story.

This device clearly worked so well for him that he has apparently done it again, in a different arena. His latest novel (which I won't name here, because even the title is pretty horribly transphobic) has caused quite a flurry on Twitter, I gather. I suppose I'll have to read it at some point, because I'm meant to be giving a lecture on this kind of fiction later in the summer, but it can certainly wait until I get back to England.

What I want to mull about in this post isn't his novel, which sounds terrible, so much as an article he recently published to promote it, in which he joins the ranks of those disavowing the word "cis." The reason he gives is a familiar one, and one that has some superficial plausibility: one shouldn't foist labels onto people who don't wish to accept them. He doesn't "identify as" a cis man, but simply as a man.

The obvious riposte is a tu quoque: how would Boyne (who is gay) feel if straight men refused to be described as such, despite being attracted exclusively to the opposite sex? If they said, "How dare you call me a straight man - I'm just a man!"? At best, it would seem a rather strange thing to say. More likely, he would hear it as a way of dividing the world into gay people and "normal" people.

Or, let's take a different kind of case. How would Boyne feel if someone described him as six feet tall? (Let's assume for the sake of argument that that is his height.) Would he say, "I'm not a six-foot man, I'm just a man! How dare you foist that label onto me when I don't identify with it?"

I very much doubt he would protest in those terms. But why not? What is the difference between that and calling him cis?

It's an obvious point, and trans people and allies have been painstakingly making it for years, but otherwise-sensible people have been curiously resistant to it. Somehow, it seems that certain things (being six feet tall, being Irish) are harmless adjectives, the use of which, assuming they are true, would cause no one to feel infringed upon, even where - as in the case of nationality - they might have a real connection to one's sense of personal identity. Other things, no less accurate, are regarded as "labels", the application of which is "foisting". For an adjective to be applied felicitously, it just has to be consistent with fact; a label, by contrast, also has to be something one "identifies with."

Trans people tend to use the word "cis" as an adjective, but many cis people hear it as a label - as a political act, not a neutral description. The reason, I suspect, is that this is also the way they hear the word "trans." Just as any trans person who opens their mouth is automatically called a "trans activist," so to mention that one is trans is to be parsed as making a kind of political point. That, I think, is why disavowal of "cis" is basically transphobic.

Still, all that said, the distinction between "adjective" and "label" is not a sharp one, any more than that between constantive and performative language generally. If I had time, and were not on a train to Kobe, I would spend a couple of hours maundering that, but for now I will refer you to my friend Mr Derrida.

Comments

[redbird]

Using the word "cis" can be political, but the people who are objecting to it are pretending that doing so, insisting on being "just a man," is not a political statement.

Part of what we're doing when we say "this is the word for 'not-trans'" is denying that the opposite of trans is "normal" or "real." I like the word "cis" in part because the easiest definition is "not trans," and because of the etymology.

More prosaically, I like it because I like having a short, easy way of labeling myself in this context, which can be useful.

[steepholm]

Yes, all these statements gain or loss political edge depending on framing/context, and you’re right that the argument can be turned around in that way too: to say “just a man” can be (and is in this case) certainly political.

[calimac]

I think that when investigating these implications, you can get some headway out of considering how national identifiers such as "Irish" may be used as both "neutral" adjectives and as "political" labels. Here in the US, for instance, it can be entirely neutral to say that you're Irish in the sense that your ancestors came from Ireland, but to identify as Irish means an affiliation with a particular culture, and that culture is specifically derived from the Catholic Irish culture. Someone of Ulster Protestant ancestry would emphatically not call themselves "Irish" in the US, whatever they might do in the UK. (The usual genealogical term here is "Scotch-Irish", which however does not designate a "political" ethnic group. Most people here I think don't even know what it means.)

Or take the word "Jewish" ... but then I could go on even longer.

[steepholm]

This is of course true, and had I had time to expand on what I vaguely gestured at in my final paragraph I would have mentioned that, according to context, statements about nationality and even height can turn from being neutral to highly political ones. Whether they would be disputed in quite the same way may be a different matter. I can imagine someone saying, “What do you mean by mentioning that I’m Irish/six feet tall?”, but not so easily that they’d deny being those things (though the former is of course the more contestable of the two).

[lilliburlero]

As regards cis in particular, I think there's been quite a successful attempt by TERFs to convince people it means 'someone who accepts regressive gender stereotypes', part of the wider strategy of insisting that 'gender' itself is just stereotypes, and 'sex' is reality. The TERFs are doing it disingenuously, but I think for a fair few basically well-meaning, liberal-ish but under-informed people that's been the first definition of cis that they're heard. It doesn't help that such people tend to regard all but the most egregious gender stereotypes as virtually laws of nature, and therefore manifestations of 'sex'.

[steepholm]

Yes, it's easy to forget that most people don't devote huge amounts of energy to thinking about this stuff. Not that that's any excuse for someone who takes it on himself to write about in a novel and a national newspaper.

[lilliburlero]

There is no excuse for John Boyne, full stop; I came to that conclusion a while ago.