In recent years it's become accepted wisdom in social justice circles that one is to describe individuals as "transgender", never "transgendered". Now, to a substantial extent, this doesn't really matter. I mean, who cares what word you use, right? The phenomenon being described is the same. I don't particularly care about the word used. But I do care about the reasoning that has led to this consensus, because, well, it's not correct. And I think that this bad reasoning is revealing about pathologies of human thought. And when I say that, I do mean pathologies of human thought in general; but I also mean problems of the social justice community in particular.
So what is the reasoning, and why is it wrong? Well, the reasoning goes that one should not say that a person is "transgendered" because to say this implies that this is something that was done to them -- i.e., that "transgender" in this context is a verb in the past tense, that somebody "transgendered" them, and since that's not correct, the word is misleading.
The problem with this argument is that this is not a correct description of how the "-ed" suffix functions in the English language. It's simply not; I want to emphasize that this argument is not merely wrong but in fact catastrophically wrong. Let's begin with some counterexamples. If I say that spiders are eight-legged creatures, am I implying that some external force eight-legged each spider? Or if I say that zebras are striped, am I implying that some external force striped them? What if I say I encountered a six-fingered person? A bushy-tailed rabbit? I could easily go on -- a four-wheeled vehicle; a dark-colored sheet; a pint-sized glass... hell, most of these aren't even verbs, or at least not with that meaning; you certainly can't eight-leg something, nor bushy-tail something. The linguistic claim underlying this argument -- that the "-ed" suffix in English denotes and only denotes the past tense -- is not true.
Now I'm hardly prepared to give a full analysis of the "-ed" suffix in English, but let's just make some basic notes about it. Yes, it can be applied to verbs to form the past tense or past participle, but it can also be applied to a noun N to make an adjective meaning "having an N". Moreover -- and this part I am definitely not going to try to analyze properly -- you can also modify the word to modify the meaning, as in the "eight-legged" or "bushy-tailed" or "pint-sized" examples above. "Eight-legged": Having eight legs. "Bushy-tailed": Having a bushy tail. "Pint-sized": Having a size which is that of a pint. Etc.
The word "transgendered" is simply an instance of this use. We start with "gendered" -- possessing of a gender. Gendered how? In a trans manner. "Transgendered"; it's no more unusual a construction than "pint-sized". No verbs or past tenses involved!
Now if that were all there were to it, then perhaps I could leave it there, but, of course, that's not the case. Because I think I need to emphasize here that this is not an isolated example.
Let's take a look at another similarly incorrect linguistic argument: The claim that one should not use the phrase "illegal immigrant" because it implies that the people thus described are somehow inherently illegal. Now, I've seen arguments as to other reasons why one should avoid this phrase, and they may be correct but I'm not addressing them here. I want to address this particular, distinctly incorrect, argument, which you nonetheless see made all over the place.
The argument seems to be that if one describes a thing X as an "<adjective> <noun>", then one is saying that that thing X is <adjective>. But, once again, the English language does not work that way. Again, we begin with counterexamples. If I say that someone is a nuclear physicist, am I saying that they're nuclear? If I say that they're a mechanical engineer, am I saying that they're mechanical? Is an algebraic geometer algebraic? Or if I say that they're a bad actor, am I saying that they're bad? Or how about this -- is an inveterate gambler inveterate? Try to make sense of that one!
The error, I hope, should be clear. Adjectives in such constructions must be interpreted in context. Again, I am not about to provide any sort of full analysis, but you see what's going on here. A nuclear physicist isn't a physicist who is nuclear, they're someone who studies nuclear physics. An inveterate gambler isn't a gambler who is an inveterate person, they're someone who gambles inveterately. A bad actor isn't an actor who is a bad person, they're someone who is bad at acting. And an illegal immigrant isn't an immigrant who is illegal as a person, but rather is someone who has immigrated illegally.
Now, again, there may be other problems with the phrase "illegal immigrant" -- I mean if you just would prefer something that doesn't sound so negative in connotation that's fine, ideally we wouldn't have such immigration restrictions in the first place but that's a different topic -- but whether the phrase itself is a good one or not is not my point; my point is about the reasoning so commonly seen for decrying it. And that reasoning is bad.
Of course, there's a long history of people making unfounded linguistic claims like this, isn't there? And these examples fit right into that. Those of you who are familiar with it can probably skip this next section, but for those of you who aren't, let's discuss...
So, for those of you who are not familiar, let's talk about linguistic prescriptivism. The study of linguistics is ordinarily done from a descriptive perspective -- studying how language works according to how it is actually used. However, much writing about language from outside the field is from a prescriptive perspective, as in, here are the right and wrong ways to speak or right.
Now, notionally, there could be such a thing as prescriptivism done well, the empirically-grounded study of how to use language clearly; and, indeed, some of that exists. There's also just a lot of writing advice out there, some of it good, which doesn't purport to be anything more than, y'know, advice. But when we talk about prescriptivism, that's usually not what we're talking about. Oh no. We're talking about the tradition of unfounded prescriptivist poppycock and peeving.
Whereas much writing advice doesn't purport to be anything more than advice, the archetypical case of prescriptivism asserts that these are the rules of English (or your preferred language), and that anything else is wrong. These wholly invented rules are not based in actual usage, but rather in... well, typically very little. The examples you're most likely to have come across are the "rule" against ending a sentence with a preposition, and the "rule" against splitting an infinitive. Both of these rules were invented on the basis that these constructions are impermissible (in the former case) or impossible (in the latter case) in Latin -- a language, which, you may have noticed, is distinct from English. Frequently the basis is "I only noticed this recently, therefore it's recent and therefore wrong" (because any change to language is an error, see -- or rather, such a person would not admit that language changes in the first place). These so-called rules are then often backed up by spurious justifications that have no basis in empirical linguistic relality; e.g., people once objected to sentence-initial "hopefully" on the basis that adverbs had to modify verbs or adjectives, not whole sentences... despite the fact that adverbs, including both "hopefully" and others, have been doing just that for a long time, and yet oddly only the word "hopefully" seems to have ever garnered any negative attention for this.
Now to be clear, I do not think every change to language is a good or neutral one! I think many language changes, that result in the loss of various useful distinctions, are detrimental and to be opposed. But we must speak of language changes as what they are -- changes to a language, which may be for good or for ill; not errors in the speaking of some immutable standard.
One more particular case which I think is worth explicitly calling out is the frequent unfounded objection to the use of the passive voice. Now this case is a bit different from what's discussed above, as people don't actually claim that the use of the passive is incorrect English; they just claim that, for various reasons, it's bad writing. (Although this case is not unique in this regard -- a similar case would be the occasionally-seen claims that use of adverbs is bad writing.) But I think it's still worth discussing here on the basis that the people making such objections frequently cannot identify what is and is not a passive clause. Seriously, Geoff Pullum wrote a paper on it, with plenty of examples to illustrate that those complaining about passives typically don't know what they're talking about. One of the most common criticisms is that passive sentences are vague about what agent performed the action described; but in fact, a clause being in the passive, and it being vague about agency, are almost entirely unrelated. I'm not going to argue this point at length here; I would just encourage you to read Pullum's paper about it if this claim is new to you.
There are so many further examples of unfounded prescriptivist peeving, some well-known (insisting that "which" not be used to introduce restrictive relative clauses), some having faded into obscurity (the case of sentence-initial "hopefully" mentioned above), and some totally idiosyncratic. But I hope it's clear how the objections to "transgendered" (as well as the arguments mentioned above against the phrase "illegal immigrant") fit right into this tradition of made-up rules justified by bad reasoning about language. One social-justice-flavored I saw recently (which I won't link, to protect the guilty) was the claim that one shouldn't say "my students", on the account that one's students are not one's possessions. Of course by that standard one should also never say "my parents" or "the book's author" or "your time zone"... you get the idea. Truly, none of this is anything new, fundamentally.
So -- given that the argument against "transgendered", and other similar arguments, are actually nothing but classic prescriptivist peeving -- what lessons can we draw from this?
If you've looked into linguistics at all, it's hard not to notice this. People who have not studied any linguistics, whether formally or informally, are terrible at thinking about language.
The thing about language is that, because people can fluently use language, they they understand how it works. The problem is that the use of language is done intuitively, and the contents of one's intuitions are not available for direct review. This leads to a number of intuitions about it that are very wrong; if you want to study linguistics, you have to unlearn these. It's a field where lay intuition can be actively misleading to a large degree.
One way that this can happen is what happened in the examples above -- people reflect on language without bothering to do the empirical work of checking how it's actually used. And so they end up making claims like, aha, "-ed" indicates past tense, so "transgendered" must be the past tense of a notional verb "transgender". If you want to do linguistics, you can't go rushing to simple claims like this; language is messy and you have to be prepared for it to be messy.
But that's not the only way that people's intuition gets in the way in linguistics. People who only speak one language especially will often make the mistake of thinking that that one language just transparently reflects the world -- in its vocabulary, in its structure, etc. Thus you get claims like "faith is a verb" -- an example I didn't discuss above because it comes from a rather different set of people than those I'm focusing on here. In short: No, it isn't. "Verb" is a syntactic category, not a claim about something's ontological status. And, of course, all the mistaken claims about passive voice discussed above also belong here. These are I would say also both examples of the more general phenomenon of linguification, where a claim about language is substituted for a claim about the world. Of course, linguification also happens for another reason, due to another, somewhat opposite, mistake: Imagining that language transparently reflects (or controls) how people think, rather than the external world. That sort of mistake seems to be related to the objects to "transgendered" discussed above.
Really, I would recommend that everyone read Eliezer Yudkowsky's 37 Ways that Words Can Be Wrong -- though even he makes some of the mistakes discussed here, particularly regarding the passive voice! So I might also suggest just casually learning some basic linguistics. Maybe go read Language Log. Or maybe some conlanging websites -- why not start with Zompist's Language Construction Kit? Or hey, you can learn a fair bit from how Justin B. Rye has taken apart the flaws of Esperanto. Go read!
And yet, for all my talk about people being bad at thinking about language, that's not the whole of the problem, is it? Because in addition...
I mean, it sounds like a joke when I put it like that, but it's the truth to a substantial extent. Let's consider Peter Wason's classic 2-4-6 experiment.
In this experiment, Wason told subjects that he was thinking of a set of ordered triples of numbers -- so, there was some rule that elements in this set had to follow -- and that (2,4,6) was in this set. He also said that each subject could ask him about particular triples, and he'd confirm whether they were in the set or not. After testing as many triples as they liked, they were to try to guess the rule. The actual rule was simply that the sequence had to be increasing, but -- despite being allowed unlimited tests -- only 1/5 of the 29 subjects got it right on their first attempt, and only 1/2 did within the first two attempts. And in almost all cases, incorrect statements of the rule were subsets of the real rule. What went wrong here? Simply that most people only tested triples that they hypothesized to be in the set, rather than ones they hypothesized to be outside it.
Now to anyone who has to routinely make and test hypotheses, this mistake may seem kind of incredible -- testing both positive and negative examples is one of the most basic requirements for doing that well -- and yet there you go. This is in fact a mistake that untrained people will make. It's often attributed to confirmation bias, but I don't think that's really an accurate description; after all, if your hypothesis were correct, both positive and negative example would help confirm it. Eliezer Yudkowsky instead calls it positive bias, but I don't know if that term is standard. Regardless, it's a substantial error in most people's thinking, something people have to learn not to do.
Still, even if individuals are often bad at testing their own hypotheses, a group ought to be better, right? Any healthy discourse community will have arguments, where when a person makes an argument, others will respond with refutations, so that any argument as blatantly wrong as the one discussed here will be quickly discarded as erroneous, right? Well, there's really only one conclusion we can draw here...
This point has kind of been made to death, but it's worth reiterating. These mistakes happen because the social justice community has extremely bad espistemic practices, and has largely devolved into pure ingroup/outgroup tribalism and shibboleths at this point (when they're not being explicitly anti-realist). And when that happens, you end up disconnected from reality. This mistake, thankfully, is a fairly harmless one; but bad epistemic practices should not be excused on such a basis.