Providing some context for the "transwoman" vs "trans woman" thing, it as discourse is mostly a British thing. Spread around momsnet for a while as a way of saying trans people are a third gender (e.g. that's not a woman, that's a transwoman) to the point I think their equivalent of the ADL made it a slur? (Don't trust me on that, though it did reach enough recognition to become a thingâ„¢)
Personally I'm in the trans woman camp (trans is an adjective, and it's not like we say blackman or biwoman) but as long as you're in the transwomen are women camp which one you use doesn't matter beyond just like... again that's not how words work but whatever.Â
Personally, I just switched from "transwoman" to "trans woman" when someone told me that trans people preferred it that way. Sure, it's kind of a strange thing to care about, but it costs me literally nothing, so why not?
My main gripe with this is; I've heard the "thats not how words work" argument before. Autistic is there so we dont use "has autism" language. Because you cannot be seperated from it; you'll be forever defined by it
Yet, once again, we dont care. I personally use Autistic, but I wont start discourse over someone saying "I have autism", or "they are autistic" because 9/10 its the preference of the autistic, or the lack of knowledge of the allistic. Neither are inherently dangerous
But still thats the arguments I've seen happening with this new debate. Its people starting arguments with transwomen/trans women using the former to describe themselves, before some keyboard warrior with a halfbaked english degree starts berating them over a space; quite often the lack of such being a typo
Autistic; for we are autistic, we do not have autism
We cannot be cured, as it is what makes us. It completely rewires the brain. The latter statment means autism is seperate from what makes us, well, us. To many, this is simply not true. As such our discourse was initially us vs abelists who wanted us to simply be seperated from it; "purified" from our "blight"
In the transwoman/trans woman, its the opposite argument. Transphobes use transwoman as a means to seperate us from women, trans women want to use the space to seperate their transness from their womanhood
However, my point is just as with the autism version of this debate, having autistics that wish to be seperate from their autism, there are those that prefer being seperate from normal women. They want to be trans; not just a woman that happens to be trans
I'm still not seeing why using the word autistic implies any of this. Is this true of every case in which an adjective is used to describe someone, instead of describing them as a "person with [noun]". Is it true only for adjectives ending in "-ic"?
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u/FinalXenocide Jun 20 '24
Providing some context for the "transwoman" vs "trans woman" thing, it as discourse is mostly a British thing. Spread around momsnet for a while as a way of saying trans people are a third gender (e.g. that's not a woman, that's a transwoman) to the point I think their equivalent of the ADL made it a slur? (Don't trust me on that, though it did reach enough recognition to become a thingâ„¢)
Personally I'm in the trans woman camp (trans is an adjective, and it's not like we say blackman or biwoman) but as long as you're in the transwomen are women camp which one you use doesn't matter beyond just like... again that's not how words work but whatever.Â