Ok, misunderstanding : ) I guess Joss's childhood best friend (who's name I don't recall, heh) just effected me more - perhaps she didn't seem as happy with the life she'd lived as Edith. Or maybe I find it easier to sympathize with an abandoned friend - I'm 24, and can't imagine being someone's parent at all.
Thank you for making the change : ) However, "biological woman" is problematic to because it implies that gender and sex are the same thing. Simply saying "female" is better - one can be female and not be a woman, and describes Joss's situation more accurately. I sometimes use the term FAAB (female-assigned at birth; or MAAB for trans women), but that's very very contemporary.
So far as the language Joss would have used, yeah, it's a tricky question deciding how to refer to people who lived before terms like transgender existed or who just didn't/don't use the terminology which is mainstream in the trans community (I have a friend like that, and I feel weird using female pronouns for her bc I suspect they're not very accurate, but, well *shrug*). If all you have is a photograph from the 1900s or whatever of a female person wearing men's clothing - what do you call her? And does that change if she's got her arm around the waist of a female in women's clothing? And so on. But we know enough about Joss for it to be clear that he was a man, and so if I don't just call him a man then I feel pretty comfortable calling him a trans man.
(I feel sort of derailing, since we're talking about trans issues in a general sense, but Joss considered himself a black man ... but I know fuckall about how being black and trans plays itself out for men.)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 11:16 pm (UTC)Thank you for making the change : ) However, "biological woman" is problematic to because it implies that gender and sex are the same thing. Simply saying "female" is better - one can be female and not be a woman, and describes Joss's situation more accurately. I sometimes use the term FAAB (female-assigned at birth; or MAAB for trans women), but that's very very contemporary.
So far as the language Joss would have used, yeah, it's a tricky question deciding how to refer to people who lived before terms like transgender existed or who just didn't/don't use the terminology which is mainstream in the trans community (I have a friend like that, and I feel weird using female pronouns for her bc I suspect they're not very accurate, but, well *shrug*). If all you have is a photograph from the 1900s or whatever of a female person wearing men's clothing - what do you call her? And does that change if she's got her arm around the waist of a female in women's clothing? And so on. But we know enough about Joss for it to be clear that he was a man, and so if I don't just call him a man then I feel pretty comfortable calling him a trans man.
(I feel sort of derailing, since we're talking about trans issues in a general sense, but Joss considered himself a black man ... but I know fuckall about how being black and trans plays itself out for men.)