Earlier this year, I watched Transition Regret & the Fascism of Endings by Lily Alexandre. The essay focuses on complex ways that narratives and their endings describe our experience and how that relates to transition regret. While the whole video makes a lot of great points, one part really stood out to me. Alexandre says that the prevailing conversation around trans regret doesn’t aim to help the people experiencing it, but to paint transition as a metaphorical death that nothing can revive a person from, not even detransition. Transphobes project onto us a permanent, immutable misery. It makes our suffering predictable and our deaths hardly even count. To them, the defining tragedy has already taken place: transition is the choice that encloses all future possibilities. It is the last meaningful step before death. (24:03-24:33). It’s a small part of the video, but it's stuck with me because I’ve been thinking about the ways that cis people talk about “grieving” the “people that we used to be” since I started transitioning and people started to talk about me in this way. Seeing Lily’s video gave me the inspiration I needed to finally examine this metaphor, this “transition as a form of death” language. Where does it come from? Why is it so pervasive? Why do I get the impression that cis people use it far more often that trans people?

At the most basic level, metaphor is the mapping of some features of one thing onto something else. Take the phrases “spending time,” “it’s not worth my time,” “that task is a waste of time.” They talk about time as if time were money, or another precious resource. Money is finite, and conceptually so is time, therefore in English we often talk about time using metaphors for money. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson named this conceptual metaphor “TIME IS MONEY,” in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By. The core of this book is that metaphors like this, beyond being a poetic or rhetorical device, are actually a foundational element of human cognition. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003). Conceptual metaphors are typically written in all caps, and meant to encapsulate the core of the metaphor. For TIME IS MONEY, you can come up with tons of examples that we use in everyday speech that exemplify this metaphor, like “budgeting time,” “can you spare a minute,” (from chapter 2, The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts).

I read a few studies that examined transition-specific metaphors, and the authors focused on the metaphors that trans people use to describe themselves. The one I’ll focus on, “Exploring the Metaphorical Models of Transgenderism” by Dr. Jenny Lederer out of San Francisco State University, looks at corpus data to tease out the metaphors used in discussing transition, describe how those metaphors relate to cognition, and examine the political ramifications of those cognitive processes. She points out that “transition” itself is a metaphor: In English-speaking societies, the assignment of gender is discussed as if located in a bounded region; English speakers use terms like cross-dressing, transitioning, changing, male-to-female, coming out, intersex. This language is indicative of a dual or binary category model of gender assignment, in which each category is understood as a bounded region in space. (Lederer 2015, 96). Boundedness as it’s understood in cognitive linguistics, means that in our minds we perceive of some object (a noun) as having limits (a boundary), however rigidly or loosely defined (c.f. Frawley 2009, 81). An example of the way that boundedness affects English is the distinction between count nouns and mass nouns; they are treated differently grammatically in English because of the way we perceive their boundaries.

Using her corpus data, Lederer names the main metaphors in discussions of transition, “TRANSITION IS A JOURNEY,” and “DIVIDED SELF.” The journey metaphor is fairly clear, with the phrase “gender journey” itself being a primary example, but there are more abstract examples like “when I get to that point in my transition,” “I haven’t started transitioning,” or “how far along are you in your transition?” When I emailed Dr. Lederer about metaphors related to death and transition, she hypothesized that these metaphors would be related to the “divided self,” a conceptual metaphor in which there is a rift between the internal self (one’s gender identity), and the external self (one’s gender presentation)(Lederer 2015, 107). She suggested that when someone transitions, and people they know start to say things like “I’m grieving my daughter,” what they’re really referring to is the loss of this cognitive entity that exists as part of the divided self metaphor. Even if the person is still in their life, they’ll refer to them as if they had died, or are dying. The most egregious example of this is the community of women who refer to themselves as “trans widows,” after their husbands transition. It’s pervasive, especially in the way that transphobes bemoan the “loss of our girls to gender ideology,” and the way that parents talk about “mourning their child” who came out as non-binary.

I think the divided-self metaphor is a satisfying explanation for where this language of death comes from. I recommend reading Lederer’s articles for their systematic analysis, and Lakoff and Johnson’s book for background and context. Going forward, actively resisting these death metaphors and grieving language is imperative in the ongoing fight for queer and trans liberation.

I bring up the importance of resistance because of the way that metaphors can affect perception and understanding. To this end, Lakoff and Johnson don’t shy away from politics in their book. They say that metaphors “are among our principal vehicles for understanding. And they play a central role in the construction of social and political reality.” (Section 24, “Truth”). They go on to say that truths are based on understanding, and metaphors are an integral part of understanding, therefore there is a strong cognitive relationship between metaphor and truth. Their arguments here are complex, but ultimately they make the case that metaphor shapes our view of what our truths are. For example, people who use metaphors related to death when discussing transition are projecting the qualities of death in a physical sense onto the individual’s “internal self.” To rephrase this, they are projecting their belief that transition is a kind of death onto the trans person they are referring to.

For me, transitioning has nothing to do with death. My life has improved immesurably over these past 5 years. I know this isn't a universal experience for all trans people, but I know that a lot of trans people feel the same. While I don't have any evidence for this that isn't anecdotal, I'd be willing to bet that this is why it feels like cis people use these death metaphors more than trans people. For many trans people, it's transitioning that has given their life new meaning, but in this new meaning they are still the same people. They haven't died, they haven't gone anywhere. It's cis people who need to do the work.

Works Cited