A guide to gender identities and pronouns in case you have questions after Elliot Page's announcement

"Hello friends.

I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he / elle and my name is Elliot ”, announced yesterday on Twitter the actor Elliot Page, known for his roles in the film

–for which he was nominated for the Oscars 2008– o series like

(Netflix).

Page's ad has become one of the most talked about topics on Twitter worldwide: the actor's own tweet has been retweeted more than 300,000 times and has reached a million and a half

in less than 24 hours.

pic.twitter.com/kwti60bZLw

- Elliot Page (@TheElliotPage) December 1, 2020

Following the announcement, some Twitter users have acknowledged their ignorance of some of the terms that the Canadian actor has used in his advertisement, such as trans or

.

Others have criticized Page's use of the

(old name of a trans person), something that from the LGTBI community and especially the trans community is considered disrespectful.

Here we go over some of these gender identities and their pronouns so that you are clear about what it means and how to use them correctly.

Trans and cis

As explained in this educational guide on affective-sexual diversity and gender identity, recently published by COGAM (LGTBI collective of Madrid), to understand these concepts it is necessary to differentiate between sex and gender.

The first refers to the biological characteristics of each person.

“Within biology, some traits have been classified as distinctive of one sex or another.

The genitalia, the gonads, the production of hormones or the chromosomes are some of them ”.

While gender are the social traits and behavior patterns that are associated with the feminine and the masculine.

"These are learned and internalized throughout socialization, they are different according to the sociocultural context and they change over time."

The document gives an example that for a period of time women could not wear pants and, however, it is currently the most common.

The educational guide defines a trans person as one who "identifies with a gender other than the one assigned at birth."

For example, a person who is born with a vulva, but who identifies with the male gender is a trans boy / boy / man.

Those people whose gender assignment matches their identification are "cisexual" or "cisgender" people, commonly abbreviated as "cis."

This concept arises from the spread of the term trans.

The LGTBI collective clarifies that “previously in Spain there was a difference between transgender and transsexual people, depending on how they wanted to transform their body with surgery.

The former do not feel the need to do so and the latter do.

"This trend was recognized as problematic, so this difference is not currently used."

From the LGTBI associations they recommend using the term trans to dry.

Non-binary persons and neutral pronouns

In the same way that there are trans women and trans men, and cis women and cis men, there are also people who do not feel identified with either the female or the male gender, or who prefer to flow from one to the other.

Their gender is then considered "non-binary" or "gender fluid."

In these cases, “elle” is used to refer to the person (or elles in the plural), a neutral pronoun whose use has become so widespread in recent times that the RAE itself recently decided to include it in its Observatory of Words, although it later withdrew it .

Neutrality is also used in the grammatical and traditional gender endings -ay -o, which are replaced by -e.

For example, "she is happy", instead of "she is happy" or "he is happy".

In his letter, Page says that his pronoun is “he / they” (he / elle), that is, he wants them to use the masculine pronoun (he) or the neuter pronoun (elle) with him, but never the feminine.

Queer

“I love being trans.

I love being

”, Elliot Page added at the end of his writing.

is an umbrella term currently used by people from the LGTBI collective to show their disagreement with sexual and gender norms, but it does not have to replace another gender identity.

You can be trans and queer, cis and queer, or non-binary and queer, there are even people who consider themselves trans non-binary.

The term

(which means weird in English), as this report by Verne recounted on communities that have historically challenged gender binaryism, emerged in the West in the second half of the 20th century.

Used as an insult towards non-normative people (who do not fit into the cisexual and heterosexual norm), it was reappropriated by sociological currents that questioned this idea of ​​sexual and gender binarism (that there are only two genders, male-female, or two sexual orientations , homosexual-heterosexual), giving rise to

theories

The American writer and activist Judit Butler is one of those who use this term the most in her thinking.

For Butler,

should be thought of as "an all-encompassing term to broaden this whole range of fluid forms and multiple identities" that have emerged in Western societies in recent years and of which we now have more knowledge due to the growing research in this field.

350 trans people murdered in the world in 2020

In his statement, Elliot Page also admits to being afraid of "the invasion, hatred, jokes and violence" due to the discrimination suffered by trans people, especially those "black and Latino."

He mentions the 40 trans people killed in 2020 in the United States, as denounced by the Human Rights Campaign platform.

In the world, this figure rises to 350, according to the international observatory Transrespect Versus Transphobia, of which 11 occurred in Europe, and half of them were migrants.

Page also criticizes politicians who "criminalize transgender healthcare" and deny their "right to exist."

"Your hands are stained with blood," writes the actor, who remarks that the difficulty of integration causes trans people to try to commit suicide.

In Spain, for example, associations such as FELGTB continue to denounce "the unemployment and precariousness suffered by trans people" and ask the government for urgent approval of the Comprehensive Trans and LGTBI Social Equality Law that guarantees the rights of the group.

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