Words, Words, Words

My grandmother means well, but I have to grit my teeth when the topic of dating comes up. I recently dated someone for sixteen months, and he visited my rural hometown after we had been together for a year. Afterwards, she e-mailed to say that she enjoyed meeting my “friend.” I’m not quite sure where the quotes came from, since she’s fairly tolerant and fully aware that we had been dating for a while. It’s not that big of a deal, but it grates on your nerves when you have to fight these types of semantic battles on a daily basis. It’s especially tiresome when the same grandma refers to the girl that your thirteen-year-old brother has been seeing for two weeks—one movie date, chaperoned by parents, no kissing—as his girlfriend. She doesn’t include quotes there, either.

Arguably, the term “homophobia” lacks semantic accuracy when it merely refers to an aversion to gays and lesbians instead of out-and-out fear. The queer rights movement has attempted to introduce more accurate terms—for example, heterosexism, which suggests a bias against queer people similar to the bias that sexism directs toward one sex. “Heteronormativity,” “biphobia,” and “transphobia” have been dismissed as products of a progressive movement with too much time on its collective hands—the words are criticized for being too academic, too clumsy, or too alienating to people who might not be familiar with their underlying concepts. They mean something very real, though, to those of us who are sick of air quotes.

Terminology matters, and it matters to a lot of people. It helps us define ourselves at a time when minority groups—fags, dykes, queers—are often defined, whether we like it or not, by others. The proliferation of terms in the queer rights movement—especially “queer” itself—is due, in part, to a reclamation of the words that proceed or accompany fear and physical violence. Moving beyond these imposed terms, we invent new words like homophobia and heterosexism because these inventions prove more accurate, useful tools in an ongoing battle for fairness and recognition, maybe not for everyone, but in strategic situations. Other groups, marginalized and otherwise, have done the same. The terms that the black civil rights movement used to identify its members in the 1960s aren’t the same as the ones that it employs today; even Republicans differentiate the paleoconservatives from the neoconservatives from the compassionate conservatives. It might be nice to pick a whole new slate of accurate terminology, but society at large doesn’t give us that option.

The issue is particularly salient for the transgender community on campus, which has been publicly ridiculed for using gender-neutral pronouns like ze and hir and bringing speakers to campus who wax poetic about boydykes, genderqueers, and butch fairies. Pronouns and terminology that express personal identity are not just about semantics. Words are more than words. Ze and hir are necessary pronouns for people who may not identify in a binary structure of male and female, and calling these pronouns ridiculous fundamentally means that you think living outside of that binary is equally ridiculous. It’s not just a linguistic distinction, it’s a question of real, lived experiences of Harvard students who have been harassed, beaten up, chased, and threatened because they don’t conform to their attackers’ conceptions of “maleness” or “femaleness.” You don’t even have to be transgender to be a victim; you just have to look different than the stereotypical male or female gender norm. It absolutely happens at Harvard, and those who would feign blindness on the issue need to realize that people they know are victims.

The semantic debate is an arena in which it’s easy to lampoon the fundamental concerns of the queer community, a community where verbal, physical, and sexual assault are not uncommon and frequently go unreported. We can debate words and make fun of pronouns, but there’s no real reason why we can’t respect each individual’s right to define gender and sexuality. It doesn’t hurt anyone, and it’s literally a matter of life and death for some students. The semantic debate is important, but it insults our intelligence when words like ze and hir are paraded around by people whose sole intent is to ridicule or belittle them to distract us from real problems of discrimination and physical violence that happen each and every day. It might be a bit much for my grandmother, but we’ve got a real opportunity to make a difference, here and now—and it starts with our language.

Ryan R. Thoreson ’07 is a government and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Lowell House. He is co-Chair of the Harvard Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance.