A few weeks ago, WAVAW staff participated in a workshop around queer language in anticipation of opening our services to all Two Spirit, trans, and nonbinary survivors. We knew that being fluent in the language was an important step in our work, which absolutely needed to be taken in order to build safety for queer and trans survivors here.

As the trans inclusion coordinator, I took it as an opportunity to put together a glossary of words to learn – sectioned into words that our straight allies could say in green, and words they might want to be careful with in yellow. In red are words that pained me to write, the words which cis or straight people could never say.

I thought it would be a straightforward task. I should have known better, because nothing about queer language is simple.

When it was done, I had in front of me some sort of queer lexicon. Many of those words are like old friends to me, and it felt empty, sort of crude, to see them with a quick definition next to them.  All of them have a life, a breath, and a presence – all of them have been argued over in conferences, birthed and clung to in need, and all of them have been a home to someone.

None of our words are politically neutral, they are all electric. Especially since they were all in English, I wondered what words I was missing, what truths weren’t being named in the spaces between the ones I’d chosen. It felt a bit like stuffing a living thing into a museum.

I tried to explain the difference in connotation between ‘ftm’ and ‘trans man’, or between ‘genderqueer’ and ‘nonbinary’ – differences queer people know but might not be able to qualify. I explained that just because the words are new does not mean that the identities are; in fact, they are ancient. I explained that it’s very likely these words will change into something new before the ink is dry.

Take ‘queer’ for example. I’m queer. Over my life I’ve been straight, lesbian, bisexual, and even a gay man. In different combinations with those words, I’ve been a woman, a man, genderqueer, genderless, and today I am non binary. ‘Queer’ is home to me because it speaks to the mess of it, to the margins in between those things. It doesn’t make a promise that this is the end of the road. ‘Queer’ once was an adjective that meant ‘odd’, but we’ve made it a verb that means ‘subvert’.

But there are a lot of people in my community who don’t see it that way. My elders remember that word like broken bones. ‘Queer’ is a word that we’ve reclaimed, depending on who you ask, from a slur that usually accompanied violence, and it could be said that reclaiming it erases the realities of people still in our communities. I settled, uncomfortably, with writing it in yellow.

These complexities are not things I can capture in a glossary, or in a policy on who we serve. To attempt to is to trivialize them. It leaves us in the position of having to squeeze into one of them in order to access vital services that we have a right to. I’ve resisted the urge to make our inclusion project one that is about language, not because language isn’t important, but because it’s too important to live in policy.

I’ve focused instead on talking about systems that oppress all of us who aren’t cis men, who live with the threat of rape due to our gender. This is because I feel strongly about giving our queer words enough space to grow and change; like a lot of queer things, they don’t do well when they’re locked up.

This decision is a response to the neoliberal trend of replacing meaningful change with conspicuous specificity, and it’s an acknowledgement that updating our language is not enough to be inclusive. I don’t want queer and trans people to be visible here because our paperwork says so; I want us to be visible here because we’ve reimagined the space with you in mind.

Let  me be very specific for a moment: if you’re Two Spirit, queer, trans, trans feminine, trans masculine, non binary, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, gender diverse, if your gender doesn’t exist in English, if it changes, if we don’t have a word for it yet, or if you’re just tired of trying to give it name, WAVAW is here for you. If you have a word that is not ‘cis man’ that gives you that great, electric jolt of recognition, this space is for you and we will use it every time.

WAVAW was created in response to systems of gender that create rape culture, and we know that reality extends to people with genders far beyond what we’ve given language to. We’re willing to name that reality even when we don’t have perfect language for it, and we’re learning from queer survivors how to resist perfection that exists for its own sake and to love the mess, the truths in between.

-Felix