fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2329 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2329 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 083 secrets from Secret Submission Post #333.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
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Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Trannie's pejorative? I gathered that it wasn't exactly the most friendly word ever but I didn't think it was actually that offensive.

Lol, you might want to chill the hell out and maybe educate and take into account the fact that some people don't know that it is (I didn't, until I read your comment...still doesn't strike me as terribly offensive anyway) instead of pitch a bitchfit.

From what I've gathered online and in real life, it used to be that in some areas it was just a slang or colloquial term for someone who is transsexual, whereas in others it was an out-and-out pejorative. These days it's predominantly the latter - the problem being that the connotation seems to have changed so fast that not everyone got the memo.

I am curious, has there been any kind of confrontation with RDJ about that term/did anyone publicly point out the offensiveness to him (with him reacting equally publicly)?

Are we sure there WAS a memo and not just a group of people ~~probably on tumblr~~ deciding it was offensive like some sort of secret handshake?

Because people seem to be doing that an awful lot recently, regardless of the wishes of sometimes large portions of the population in question. o.o

Maybe? As far as I know, "tranny" has always had negative connotations, the only variation was really just how negative and whether it should stay negative (as in, did the negativity come from the term itself or did the negativity come from the fact it meant some kind of trans* person?)

That said, I wouldn't be surprised about the secret-handshake aspect of it. My jaw nearly hit the floor the first time I saw "person of color" in a fandom context, and I cringed when I realized this is the term I'm supposed to refer to myself by in a collective manner to be politically correct. If it were just chosen on the basis of being "the least offensive to the least amount of people possible", I wouldn't be nearly so bothered by it because I know that sometimes you have to settle for something in the name of expediency. I tend to be more bothered by the attitude that a.) this is something all 'people of color' are supposed to be happy about and b.) the idea that using "non-white" is offensive, and if you are an ethnic minority and use that term you're somehow doing...minority-ness wrong, or something like that. This stuff changes so fast I'm not sure which part of my ethnic identity/terminology I'm supposed to feel guilty about. Especially since increasingly I'm not sure if it's supposed to refer to ALL ethnic minorities or just those of African descent. >.<

It's one thing to say "this term does have negative connotations, but it has the least amount so let's all just get over our hang-ups and use it, and maybe reclaim it in the process". It's another thing entirely to imply "you shouldn't be so upset about this term in the first place, it's a lot better than how you are already referring to yourself as/defining yourself by". Or worst of all, "Oh, you don't like that term? Then clearly you're just a white person pretending to be [insert ethnicity here]!" (which is something I had lobbied at me once, though hilariously enough this one happened in real life, and none of this person's friends took it seriously considering I was standing right there and am very clearly not white).

/rant

No, that last part about "how you define yourself is offensive" is truly staggering to me. Because...no.

Yes, there is a chance that, say, a gay individual that refers to him/herself as "faggot" has institutionalized the negative connotations of the word, but I have also known one or two men who were very confident and very secure in their identities and sexuality who referred to themselves ass faggot in a tongue-in-cheek sense.

So, yeah. I am firmly of the opinion that NOBODY has the right to determine how people identify themselves. If I want to refer to myself as a "hysteric fit-prone cunt" (referring to my depression, epilepsy and ovaries respectively) then nobody should get to say I can't. I'm not about to, but I feel that if I felt like it, I should be able to. If it came from a place of self-hatred, then perhaps I could be directed to seek help, but if it doesn't....well....yeah. End of story.

I've never felt offended at being called a tranny. Frankly, just for me, I find tran* to be far more grating. I know my experience is not everyones experience, but in my world at least I wouldn't have said tranny was a massive slur. It's a fun sort of bouncy sounding word.

Obviously, context matters and this is clearly not the case for everyone, but given the grey-area nature of the term, I think we can give the straights the benefit of the doubt every now and then, right? ~~Or are we all going to be faggots about it?~~

I commented a few comments up about feeling this way about a movement to classify "gay" as a pejorative term.

See, the thing is that ANY word can be an insult. I have heard gentleman used as an insult for a man who was extremely polite in casual situations. Lady. Studious. Smart. Girl. Boy. Beautiful. I've heard all of them used to hurt. The very clinical word of "homosexual", when said by a white evangelist preacher, is about as insulting as they come, for that matter.

It depends on the intention of the speaker. Certainly some words were invented by outsiders purely to be derogatory (nigger, faggot, chink, etc). Others have taken on primarily negative meaning (cunt, retarded). But I don't think tranny and gay are among them.

Who is trying to get "gay" classified as a pejorative term? Because I'm pretty sure half the issue is that it's being used as a pejorative term for a group of people involved in a worldwide battle for civil rights while also being pretty much the only versatile, casual non-pejorative for the same people. It's not inherently pejorative, it's just being used that way while we still need it.

Tumblr, of course. Re: the group of people who have classified it as a negative adjective ("it's so gay that it rained on my birthday"). Apparently as soon as a word takes on a negative connotation it is automatically negative.

As I stated. I think it is more outsider words that are negatives. Any word that a group chose for themselves seems like it can't be negative, no matter HOW many people outside of that group choose to use it. I don't actually know the history of the word tranny, so I can't say if it is such a word, but I do know that most people who are transphobic tend to not know it's even a separate thing from being gay, and almost every transexual I've known (granted, that is three out of four) has used it to describe themselves and held no animosity towards non-trans* folks who did the same.

You know, I have to say that from my experience having grown up in Midwestern America through the eighties and nineties, it sure as heck wasn't Tumblr that classified gay as a pejorative. It's all the people who insist on using it as a pejorative. Tumblr's been around since 2007. I know that I personally heard people using gay to call someone or something bad or distasteful or awful or whatever other negative connotation you want to assign back at least as far as the eighties, so it sure as heck didn't come from Tumblr.

People who are [whatever questionable term] that want to call themselves [said questionable term] aren't using it as a pejorative. People who aren't [questionable term] using it simply as an identifier for someone who is [questionable term] aren't using it as a perjorative - unless of course said person finds the word offensive and doesn't want it used to refer to them. However, people using it to describe something as inherently bad are using it as a pejorative and deserve to be at least side-eyed if not called out on it, imo.

It gets more problematic when you have words that have a far longer history of being used as a pejorative (nigger and gypsy/gipsy for example, since those really shouldn't be used by non-members of those groups unless with people from said group that are okay with it due to the long standing negative history of those words), but that's always been the rule of thumb I've gone by. Calling someone out for the use of a word when it's pretty obviously not being used as a pejorative just makes you a white knight asshole. Context is key.

[ SECRET POST #2329 ]

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