[NSFW] The surprising profundity of how toki pona handles sex

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

[Obvious CW, this entire post is about human sexuality. Academic-ish terminology but yeah.]

As I was writing “There is no gender in toki pona.“, I kept thinking about how what I was saying applied to discussions of sexuality. But I didn’t want to meander too far from my main point, and didn’t want to turn an SFW post into an NSFW one.

In the previous post I talked about how gender-related words in toki pona are not exempt from subjectivity. That’s the idea that the words we choose depend on our own perspective. Some Penicillium roqueforti, for instance, might variously be jaki ‘grossness’ if found somewhere undesirable, namako ‘flavor’ if found as part of Roquefort cheese, soko ‘fungus’ to a mycologist, misikeke ‘medicine’ to a manufacturer of penicillin, and laso ‘blueness’ to an artist painting a slice of Roquefort and interested only in the color. None of these words is more or less correct than the other, even if some will statistically occur more often than others.

But I can’t think of a better way to explain the full depths of subjectivity in toki pona than by talking about how it applies to human sexuality. That’s because sex, as one of the most intimate and primal acts humans engage in, is one of the things most defined by the perception of the person doing it. And in toki pona, if we want to talk about sex in detail, we have to subjectively describe the things and acts involved.

Tokiponist readers can skip past this list, but for others: toki pona has several words for body parts. Of these:

  • uta means ‘mouth’ and lawa means ‘head’, both with little room for ambiguity.
  • luka means ‘hand’ or ‘arm’, but in a sexual context will almost always mean the former.
  • lukin1 ‘eye’, kute ‘ear’, and pilin ‘heart’ also have dedicated names. They are of little direct relevance to sex acts,2 but may come up incidentally.
  • Other words can refer to body parts used in sex, but are ambiguous without greater context. noka could mean thighs or feet. nena could mean breasts or buttocks. insa could mean vagina or rectum. monsi could mean back or buttocks. sinpin could mean chest or face. (None of these is an exhaustive list.)

However, for the body parts most associated with sex, toki pona has no words. And that is where a miracle of subjectivity arises.

Consider the vagina. When someone says ‘vagina’ in English, they do this accepting all the societal baggage associated with that word (including that it comes from the Latin word for ‘sheath’ and that many or even most English speakers think the word refers to the vulva). Someone describing their vagina in toki pona, however, can choose a phrase based on both how they perceive it and why it is being discussed:

  • lupa unpa ‘sex hole’ conceptualizes the vagina through the lens of sex, in a way that is interchangeable with other holes involved in sex.
  • lupa mama ‘parent hole’ conceptualizes the vagina through the lens of reproduction.
  • lupa anpa sinpin ‘front bottom hole’ (or just lupa anpa or lupa sinpin if one or the other is already clear from context) is entirely neutral as to any activity the vagina might be used for.
  • lupa meli uses a word that, as discussed in my previous essay, doesn’t have a direct translation in English, but can broadly be glossed as ‘feminine’. As also discussed there, using toki pona’s three gender words to refer to sexually dimorphic anatomy is somewhat controversial, but not incorrect. Or someone could be using meli not to convey that vaginas are a female body part, but that they associate theirs with femininity as a concept.
  • By the same token, the other two gender words—mije (broadly meaning ‘masculine’) and tonsi (broadly meaning ‘gender-variant’)—might be used after lupa by someone wishing specifically to convey that their vagina does not conform to a normative female or feminine standard, either in terms of physical appearance (e.g. from masculinizing medications or procedures), how they perceive it, or how they use it.3
  • lupa is not the only viable noun, either:
    • Someone emphasizing that their vagina is how sperm cells reach the uterus and how a newborn exits the uterus might say nasin mama ‘parent path’.
    • Someone emphasizing that objects go into their vagina might use poki ‘container’ or, perhaps in a kink context, ilo ‘tool’.
    • When speaking in a context where the vagina’s applicability to sex and childbearing is not particularly relevant—perhaps a doctor discussing it as an organ needing medical attention—someone might use insa ‘internal organ’.
    • Or someone might use a figurative term like uta anpa ‘lower mouth’.4

The range of meanings is even starker with penises. The differing states of vaginas primarily effects adjective choice. With penises, on the other hand, there is not even a universally accurate noun. Yes, in practice, many people use palisa ‘long hard thing; branch, rod, stick’ to refer to their penises. But if you, dear readers, will indulge some prescriptivism on my part: If you are routinely calling your penis a palisa, you are either using that word wrong or need to talk to a doctor immediately.

As the irreplaceable Mira Bellwether wrote in the legendary zine Fucking Trans Women,5 “almost all sexual discourse on penises” is “on erect penises, hard penises, penetrating penises”, with soft penises treated as defective.6 Yet penises spend the vast majority of their existences flaccid. A penis, usually, is a linja ‘long and flexible thing’ or nena ‘bump/protuberance’.7 If the most generic term for a vagina is probably lupa anpa sinpin, for penis it’s probably nena anpa sinpin.8 Notably, and very much not coincidentally, this is also a phrase that could describe a clitoris.

The full range of modifiers available for vaginas also apply to penises. The gender-related terms are of particular interest, as many transfeminine people may find their penis more masculine or feminine in different contexts, perhaps based on different erotic stimuli. So a nena tonsi could become a linja meli (longer but not fully hard, and thus smoother to the touch) or a palisa mije (fully erect, more similar to the normative erect male penis)—if those are the words that make sense to the person, of course. Penises, unlike vaginas, also have the second (arguably primary) role of excreting waste. In this context one might be a nasin jaki ‘path of grossness’, linja telo ‘rope-like thing of fluid’, or ilo weka ‘tool of removal’.9

Substances, too, benefit from subjectivity. Both ejaculate and vaginal discharge can be either telo ‘liquid’ or ko ‘goo/sticky stuff’ based both on the viscosity of the fluid (often correlating with testosterone levels) and/or the role the person sees it as fulfilling.

A common struggle for queer, kinky, and otherwise different people when speaking in English is that the words generally used for some sex-related thing don’t always match the way we see those things. Someone who uses a strap-on dildo may prefer to call it their penis. Someone who bottoms anally may not want to use a term for their anus that is more associated with decidedly unsexy10 functions. Someone who has a penis but prefers to finger their partners may feel like they are doing something wrong because that’s not “sex” according to mass media.

It would be easy enough to construct a language in which all of those things are called the things people want to call them. Have a word for any phallic object used for sex, have separate words for anus-as-GI-component and anus-as-erogenous-zone, etc. But toki pona does something much more audacious than that: It makes all these things the same. “mi palisa unpa e lupa” is the same sentence regardless of what palisa and lupa refer to.11 It could mean that you put your penis in someone’s vagina, your strap-on in someone’s anus, your finger in two people’s mouths, or even your tongue in someone’s nostril if that’s what you’re into. And it is up to you, the speaker, to decide what needs to be disambiguated. If you are a trans woman who wants to talk about sex without commenting on whether you’ve had bottom surgery, well, lupa unpa and lupa anpa can both mean either ‘vagina’ or ‘anus’. Meanwhile, your anus can be the lupa unpa in that context but the lupa jaki ‘gross hole’ in others, and your lupa monsi ‘back hole’ more generically. If you are a trans man who uses a packer, that is your nena anpa, and if it is of the pack-and-play variety, that nena anpa can become a palisa unpa. And if your preferred form of sex is with yourself, your “mi palisa unpa e lupa” to mean that you finger your own anus is just as valid as someone else’ “mi palisa unpa e lupa” to mean that they have procreative penis-in-vagina sex with their wife. None of these words mean only one thing.

This is the greatest beauty of toki pona. This is the reason I speak toki pona. Not just how this applies to sex, I mean. The fact that I can use words that convey my experience of reality, and they are not just “valid” in the sappy group-therapy sense; they are correct. I do not need to repurpose words. The words I use in toki pona are always correct as long as they are honest. Someone can describe being on the receiving end of toki utala ‘combative speech’, and all that matters is that that is a valid description of the speech to them; contrast the problem in English of “Stop yelling at me.” / “I’m not yelling.” Someone can talk about the misikeke ‘medicine’ they take daily, and that is an accurate term if they use that thing to treat maladies, whether the thing is a pharmaceutical, cannabis, or a spiritual exercise. The degree of information conveyed is based on what the speaker finds important to clarify, not what a societal expectation says you need to convey.

And so if someone says “supa lape la mi unpa palisa e lupa pi olin mi“, they have told you almost nothing that can be directly translated into English,12 and yet they have also told you everything that they think you need to know. That is beautiful.

  1. Also oko in some nasin (ways of speaking). ↩︎
  2. With apologies to Captain Disillusion, love with your heart, but don’t like… literally love with your heart. ↩︎
  3. I and fellow tokiponist lili Lawa wrote the Wikipedia article “Terminology of transgender identity“, which I recommend for further context on the way tonsi people talk about our bodies. ↩︎
  4. uta is, lowkey, probably the least useful word in pu other than pu itself. Like, I use it, because if it’s widely understood one might as well, but if someone were proposing it now as a nimi sin (new word) I think it’d get laughed out of the room as obviously redundant with lupa. Technically its definition includes a few related things like lips and jaw, but these can be said with other words and toki pona rarely takes you to that level of anatomical specificity. ↩︎
  5. Two more Wikipedia articles I wrote! ↩︎
  6. You can, and should, buy Fucking Trans Women for $10 through Payhip. The money goes to Mira’s widower, who I’ve been lucky enough to chat with briefly, and is a great person. ↩︎
  7. This lends itself to obvious jokes about penis size, but, at least in my opinion, “long” in the context of linja is more about length relative to width, and even most small penises are “long” in that way. The nena/linja distinction here depends more on how the penis is being conceptualized than its size. ↩︎
  8. sinpin ‘front’ to disambiguate from buttocks. As with lupa anpa sinpin, either anpa or sinpin might be dropped if the other is clear from context. ↩︎
  9. The former, and arguably the latter too, could also apply to a vagina in the context of menstruation. ↩︎
  10. To most! ↩︎
  11. Literally ‘I sexually apply a stick-like thing to a hole’, or variants thereof for different tenses and different quantities of the three nouns. ↩︎
  12. Sussing out the full range of potential meanings of this statement is left as an exercise to the reader. ↩︎

There is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

toki pona, as an isolating language with no gendered pronouns, is grammatically gender-neutral. End of post.

Okay but actually…

This is an adaptation of “There is no gender in toki pona.“, with added glosses and footnotes and reduced code-switching, so as not to assume toki pona proficiency on the part of the reader. If you understand at least basic toki pona, I would recommend reading the original instead. If there are things that are still not explained well enough for non-speakers, please leave a comment! If you are interested in learning toki pona, please see “Recommended learning resources” on sona.pona.la.

[CW: Very brief references to sexuality; discussion of what gendered terms to use for people.]

There are certain pitfalls ubiquitous to learners of toki pona. One early one many of us run into is hypermodification. We might translate “I drank some cold orange juice” as mi moku e telo lete pi kili suwi sike suli jelo loje, ‘I drank cold liquid of red yellow big spherical sweet fruit’. Eventually we realize we can just say mi moku e telo, ‘I drank liquid’.1 The next big hurdle is understanding the things we can’t translate directly because they represent views that clash with toki pona’s philosophy. Trying to say that you want something but don’t need it? Too bad; you’re going to have to learn to express differing kinds of wile instead.2

As we become more fluent, we internalize these pitfalls and learn to seamlessly navigate around them. This, in fact, is the essence of fluency. We learn to think not just how to translate the English words but instead the underlying, wordless concepts. But the toki-pona-incompatible worldviews closest to us are the ones that are hardest to let go of. And in my experience, the one I see toki pona speakers struggle with the most is the idea of gender. Discourse around gender in toki pona almost exclusively revolves around trying to twist the language to convey things that simply aren’t its nature to convey, any more than want-versus-need is.

Let’s start with this: There is no direct translation for “woman” and “man” in toki pona. “Hold on!”, you might say. “pu3 translates ‘woman’ as meli and ‘man’ as mije.” And yes, it does. But the translation doesn’t go both ways. If I say, “mi toki tawa mije,” ‘I speak to the mije,’ do you know the gender of the person I’m referring to? If you think you do, take another look at pu.

meli

noun woman, female, feminine person; wife
mije

noun man, male, masculine person; husband

The simplest form of this, that meli and mije do not refer exclusively to gender identity, can be proven pretty decisively. If I see someone in public with a funny joke on their T-shirt, and that person matches my local community’s definition of masculinity, I might say to my partner “o lukin e mije poka. len ona la sitelen li musi,” ‘Look at that mije over there. Their shirt is funny.’ I am not attempting to convey to my partner, in that moment, any commentary on the stranger’s gender identity. For all I know the person is a woman and takes she/her pronouns. Rather, I am using mije to describe their appearance, which will helpfully eliminate ~50% of the nearby people I might have been referring to.

If you have ever used toki pona to talk about strangers, there is a good chance you have used meli and mije in this purely presentation-based way. But the divergence between these two toki pona words and their frequent English mistranslations goes farther than that. Consider this scenario: A lesbian is at a lesbian bar. She is exclusively interested in women, and the friend beside her knows this. The lesbian says to her friend, “ike la mi taso,” ‘I hate being single.’ Her friend gestures to a fem at the end of the bar and says, “o toki tawa ona,” ‘Go talk to them.’ She shakes her head. “mi alasa e mije,” ‘I’m looking for a mije.’ In this context, it is unlikely that the lesbian is trying to communicate that she has suddenly become interested in men. Much more likely, she is saying, “I’m looking for someone butch.” Because a butch lesbian is—sometimes, in some regards—a “masculine person,” and thus mije is an appropriate (not the appropriate) term.

A different person, looking to convey the same meaning, might have said “mi alasa e tonsi” (where, by the same logic as here, tonsi can refer to any kind of gender-nonconformity) or narrowed her scope by saying something like “mi alasa e meli pi nasin mije,” ‘I’m looking for a meli with a mije vibe,’ or set gender aside and specified what precise attributes she sought. Context-sensitivity and subjectivity don’t stop mattering in toki pona as soon as gender is involved.

Perhaps most controversial is the application of meli and mije to anatomy. The use of these words in any prescriptive way to refer to anatomy would go against principles of speaking well (i.e. toki pona4). And yet, consider a woman who lacks a uterus and is suffering acute lower-left abdominal pain. An ER triage nurse asks her “ken ala ken la sina kama mama?“, ‘Is it possible you’re pregnant?’5 She responds, “ala. insa mama la mi meli ala,” ‘No. My internal reproductive organs aren’t meli.” meli, in this context, means female, in the normative medical understanding of that term. This is probably not the language that most people would choose; I would not recommend using such language to describe another person’s body unless one knows they prefer it. But it’s the language that some people would choose, and their choice is no more or less correct than that of a person whose phrasing does not mention meli.

toki pona is a subjective language. toki pona was originally made as a language for self-talk, and in that context words can mean anything. When writing things for only my own eyes, I refer to my noise-canceling headphones as ilo awen, ‘tool of safety,’ because those are the primary words I associate with them, and I know I will understand what I meant. When talking to someone else, I might make the concession of picking a more physically-rooted description like ilo pi weka kalama, ‘tool of getting rid of noise,’ so as to be understood. The other person might make a concession in the opposite direction, continuing to use my phrase to refer to that object even if they would normally call it, say, a poki kute pi kalama poka ala, ‘ear container of no nearby noise.’ This same approach of what I think of as shared subjectivity applies to gender conversations. Perhaps the friend at the bar would have used tonsi, not mije, in that context, but will stick with mije in that conversation as a micro-locale emerges specific to these two people and their time and place. If tonsi had come up before mije, maybe it would have been the other way around.

That said, another aspect of shared subjectivity is that sometimes a word really is ike6 to someone; if above I’ve described the push, this is the pull. Suppose a man shows up to coffee wearing a sarong. His friend says, “len meli sina li pona,” ‘I like your fem outfit.’ This may be, in the subjective experience of the friend, an accurate description of the garment. But to the man wearing it, who perceived it as an entirely gender-neutral clothing option, it chafes. (The word choice. Not the sarong.) So he says, “n. ni li len tonsi tawa mi,” ‘Eh, to me this is an androgynous outfit.’ His friend says “a. mi sona. len tonsi sina li pona,” ‘I see! I like your androgynous outfit.’ And all is well! toki pona literally means “good conversation,” after all; these back-and-forths are a crucial part of the language, with gender as much as anything else.

As with gender words, a lot has been made of the difficulty in talking about gender itself in toki pona. Various semi-lexicalized noun groups have been proposed to express it, like a supposed clear-cut distinction between meli tonsi and tonsi meli. (The two phrases do carry different connotations, but denotationally there’s nothing wrong with, for instance, calling a cis male drag queen a meli tonsi.)7 But what these approaches betray is that here, as is so often the case, toki pona is not the ambiguous language. English is. People use “gender” to mean many different things, and then conflate those things, intentionally or not. The English word “gender” could in different contexts be translated as kule kon ‘type of soul,’ nasin selo ‘nature of exterior,’ or kulupu jan ‘community of people.’ All three of these things mean things other than gender. kule kon can refer to personality type along any axis. nasin selo can refer to anything about how one presents oneself. kulupu jan can mean any community. This is a good thing. Gender is not special; politicians in the Anglosphere have just tried to convince us that it is. Fortunately, like many ike things, fixation on an arbitrary categorization system like gender is much harder to do in toki pona than in English.

And here I maybe have to tip my hand as a gender abolitionist. I think what frustrates people when talking about gender in toki pona is that it shows that gender was a bad idea.8 I’m not saying that every concept that can’t be easily expressed in toki pona is bad (hello, most of science and math), but generally, if it seems straightforward in English—and mind you, I’ve taught the identity/presentation/sex theory of gender to sixth graders using this cutesy teaching aid9—and is difficult to toki pona, that’s a good sign that there’s something ike about it. In English we create term after term for trans and nonbinary people to describe ourselves fully, but each is fundamentally limited by the need to in some way relate to a broader societal understanding of what gender is, and society ultimately has no fucking clue what gender is.

In English I wrestle with questions like whether I’m transgender. I have changed my appearance from masculine to feminine, but don’t consider myself a woman, and didn’t really consider myself a man before, so what gender have I transed? Am I even agender? That’s the gender label I identify with the most, and yet, to the vast majority of people seeing me on the street, I read as a woman, and if I don’t believe I have a gender identity, then wouldn’t “agender” refer only to my presentation, in which case… shit, am I a woman? This is ike. But I know what I am in toki pona. mi tonsi. selo en sijelo la mi meli tonsi. len la mi meli lon tenpo mute. kalama uta la mi tonsi. telo insa la mi meli tonsi. insa la mi mije. anpa la mi mije selo, li meli kepeken. nena la mi meli selo, li tonsi mije kepeken.10 I know what meli and mije and tonsi mean for me in these contexts. I am not labeling myself, just describing myself. This is pona.11

A personal note: I really dislike having breasts. I like everything else HRT has done for my body and brain, but the breasts, they get on my nerves. People look at them and assume I’m a woman. Most dresses feel like they show either too much of them or too little or somehow both. I forget that they’re there and knock over boardgame pieces when I lean over to roll. If I don’t wear a bra, people might be scandalized, but if I do wear a bra, I feel like I’m conceding the point that my chest is in some fundamental way different than it was 5 years ago, which I’m not ready to concede—after all, plenty of cis men have larger breasts than I have. And if I go to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and don’t put on my robe, it is the position of the State of New Jersey that if the wrong person strolls by my front window, I am to blame for them seeing my chest and having impure thoughts about it.12

I thought for a while about getting rid of them—truly the ultimate enby move, get gender-affirming medical care in both directions—but the thing is… People look at them and assume I’m a woman. And I’m not a woman, and kind of wish fewer people would see me as a woman, but at the same time getting a proper genderfucky look going takes work, and for a low-effort look I’d rather be seen as a woman than as a man, and breasts mean that if I throw on a dress, make sure my face is smooth, and step out the door, there’s no question which way my somewhat androgynous features will be read.

It’s hard, in English, to explain how I feel about my breasts. To explain that my biggest problem with them is the way society contextualizes them. But when I decided against mastectomy, I decided on something else instead, a chest tattoo that conveys my feelings perfectly and concisely, in toki pona:

nena ni la mi awen mije. Literally ‘regarding these lumps, I remain mije,’ but more idiomatically perhaps ‘these lumps don’t make me not mije.’
Yes, the nena and mije arcs will trace my areolae.

I am not a man. I am not masc-presenting. I am meli or tonsi as far as most sexually-differentiated physical attributes go. But I remain mije. All of us are mije and meli and tonsi.

  1. In most cases, the liquidity of the orange juice is all that needs to be conveyed to the listener. In some cases, however, it might make sense to include at least some of those modifiers. Someone describing the culinary palette of a meal might say telo kili, fruity liquid. A diabetic explaining when they last had sucrose might say telo suwi, sugary liquid. ↩︎
  2. toki pona uses a single word, wile, to mean both ‘want’ and ‘need’. To convey a thought like “I want it but I need to not have it”, one must instead conceptualize the conflicting desires through what motivates them, rather than an arbitrary want/need distinction. For instance, wanting to be with a romantic partner but knowing it’s not good could be “olin la mi wile lon poka ona. taso awen la mi o ni ala“, ‘In terms of love I want/need to be with this person, but in terms of safety I must not’. ↩︎
  3. toki pona name for Toki Pona: The Language of Good by Sonja Lang, an explanation of how toki pona’s creator uses the language, which is often treated as canonical. ↩︎
  4. There are a large number of ways to translate “toki pona.” ‘Speaking well’ is one of them. ↩︎
  5. Why is someone speaking toki pona with a nurse? I don’t know, she’s on vacation and it’s the only language they have in common. ↩︎
  6. Literally ‘bad, negative; non-essential, irrelevant’ per pu, but contextually ‘contrary to the purpose of toki pona.’ ↩︎
  7. toki pona uses noun–adjective order, and all nouns can also be used as adjectives or vice versa, so meli tonsi means a meli who is additionally tonsi, and tonsi meli means a tonsi who is additionally meli. Since meli and tonsi are both passive adjectives, anything that can be called tonsi meli also be called meli tonsi and vice versa. People are more likely to use the more essential word as the noun, just as in English you are more likely to say “Androgynous woman” than “Womanly androgyne,” but there’s nothing strictly incorrect about using the opposite order, and it might make sense contextually. So in the case of the drag queen example, if asked “how many meli tonsi are there in this group?”, and one member of the group is a cis male drag queen, it would make sense to count them, even if usually one would be more inclined to call them a tonsi meli. ↩︎
  8. Or at least, gender identity was. I see the case for opt-in gender roles, if only on (left-)libertarian grounds. And I see the case for gender as a broad set of aesthetic conventions. Gender identity, though? That was invented by cis Christians as a way to medicalize a phenomenon as old as gender itself: some people not fitting into the box you put us into at birth. Many communities handle that concept elegantly, but, for the Christian West, its philosophy built around the Aristotelian idea of “essence”, psychiatrists had to create the oxymoron of gender identity, an internal sense of a social construct, one that privileges gender over every other way of grouping people and perennially reënforces the binary by rigging all discourse in a framework of ontology, an endless debate of what trans people are that is ultimately immaterial to the real question of how we should be treated. ↩︎
  9. Created by a cis man, for what it’s worth. ↩︎
  10. Left as an exercise for the reader. ↩︎
  11. And if I really, really, for some reason needed to explain what Anglophone-defined gender communities I fall into? Well, like any other ike (i.e. not-easily-translated-to-toki-pona) words, I would tokiponize them as proper nouns, for instance Enpi for enby and Esente for agender. ↩︎
  12. At least probably? My legal gender in New Jersey is “X.” I’m kind of curious what a court would say about how that interfaces with a binarist law on toplessness… But not very interested in being the test case. ↩︎

There is no gender in toki pona.

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

toki pona, as an isolating language with no gendered pronouns, is grammatically gender-neutral. End of post.

Okay but actually…

[CW: Very brief references to sexuality; discussion of what gendered terms to use for people. This post assumes basic familiarity with toki pona. “There is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)” also exists.]

There are certain pitfalls ubiquitous to learners of toki pona. One early one many of us run into is hypermodification. mi moku e telo lete pi kili suwi sike suli jelo loje. Eventually we realize we can just say mi moku e telo. The next big hurdle is understanding the things we can’t translate directly because they represent views that clash with toki pona’s philosophy. Trying to say that you want something but don’t need it? Too bad; you’re going to have to learn to express differing kinds of wile instead.

As we become more fluent, we internalize these pitfalls and learn to seamlessly navigate around them. This, in fact, is the essence of fluency. We learn to think not just how to translate the English words but instead the underlying, wordless concepts. But the toki-pona-incompatible worldviews closest to us are the ones that are hardest to let go of. And in my experience, the one I see toki pona speakers struggle with the most is the idea of gender. Discourse around gender in toki pona almost exclusively revolves around trying to twist the language to convey things that simply aren’t its nature to convey, any more than want-versus-need is.

Let’s start with this: There is no direct translation for “woman” and “man” in toki pona. “Hold on!”, you might say. “pu translates ‘woman’ as meli and ‘man’ as mije.” And yes, it does. But the translation doesn’t go both ways. If I say, “mi toki tawa mije“, do you know the gender of the person I’m referring to? If you think you do, o awen pu.

meli

noun woman, female, feminine person; wife
mije

noun man, male, masculine person; husband

The simplest form of this, that meli and mije do not refer exclusively to gender identity, can be proven pretty decisively. If I see someone in public with a funny joke on their T-shirt, and that person matches my local community’s definition of masculinity, I might say to my partner “o lukin e mije poka. len ona la sitelen li musi.” I am not attempting to convey to my partner, in that moment, any commentary on the stranger’s gender identity. For all I know the person is a woman and takes she/her pronouns. Rather, I am using mije to describe their appearance, which will helpfully eliminate ~50% of the nearby people I might have been referring to.

If you have ever used toki pona to talk about strangers, there is a good chance you have used meli and mije in this purely presentation-based way. But the divergence between these two toki pona words and their frequent English mistranslations goes farther than that. Consider this scenario: A lesbian is at a lesbian bar. She is exclusively interested in women, and the friend beside her knows this. The lesbian says to her friend, “ike la mi taso.” Her friend gestures to a fem at the end of the bar and says, “o toki tawa ona.” She shakes her head. “mi alasa e mije.” In this context, it is unlikely that the lesbian is trying to communicate that she has suddenly become interested in men. Much more likely, she is saying, “I’m looking for someone butch.” Because a butch lesbian is—sometimes, in some regards—a “masculine person,” and thus mije is an appropriate (not the appropriate) term.

A different person, looking to convey the same meaning, might have said “mi alasa e tonsi” (where, by the same logic as here, tonsi can refer to any kind of gender-nonconformity) or narrowed her scope by saying something like “mi alasa e meli pi nasin mije,” or set gender aside and specified what precise attributes she sought. Context-sensitivity and subjectivity don’t stop mattering in toki pona as soon as gender is involved.

Perhaps most controversial is the application of meli and mije to anatomy. The use of these words in any prescriptive way to refer to anatomy would go against principles of speaking well (i.e. toki pona). And yet, consider a woman who lacks a uterus and is suffering acute lower-left abdominal pain. An ER triage nurse asks her “ken ala ken la sina kama mama?“1 She responds, “ala. insa mama la mi meli ala“. meli, in this context, means female, in the normative medical understanding of that term. This is probably not the language that most people would choose; I would not recommend using such language to describe another person’s body unless one knows they prefer it. But it’s the language that some people would choose, and their choice is no more or less correct than that of a person whose phrasing does not mention meli.

toki pona is a subjective language. toki pona was originally made as a language for self-talk, and in that context words can mean anything. When writing things for only my own eyes, I refer to my noise-canceling headphones as ilo awen, because those are the primary noun and adjective I associate with them, and I know I will understand what I meant. When talking to someone else, I might make the concession of picking a more physically-rooted description like ilo pi weka kalama, so as to be understood. The other person might make a concession in the opposite direction, continuing to use my phrase to refer to that object even if they would normally call it, say, a poki kute pi kalama poka ala. This same approach of what I think of as shared subjectivity applies to gender conversations. Perhaps the friend at the bar would have used tonsi, not mije, in that context, but will stick with mije in that conversation as a micro-locale emerges specific to these two people and their time and place. If tonsi had come up before mije, maybe it would have been the other way around.

That said, another aspect of shared subjectivity is that sometimes a word really is ike to someone; if above I’ve described the push, this is the pull. Suppose a man shows up to coffee wearing a sarong. His friend says, “len meli sina li pona“. This may be, in the subjective experience of the friend, an accurate description of the garment. But to the man wearing it, who perceived it as an entirely gender-neutral clothing option, it chafes. (The word choice. Not the sarong.) So he says, “n. ni li len tonsi tawa mi.” His friend says “a. mi sona. len tonsi sina li pona.” And ali li pona a. toki pona literally means “good conversation,” after all; these back-and-forths are a crucial part of the language, with gender as much as anything else.

As with gender words, a lot has been made of the difficulty in talking about gender itself in toki pona. Various semi-lexicalized noun groups have been proposed to express it, like a supposed clear-cut distinction between meli tonsi and tonsi meli. (The two phrases do carry different connotations, but denotationally there’s nothing wrong with, for instance, calling a cis male drag queen a meli tonsi.) But what these approaches betray is that here, as is so often the case, toki pona is not the ambiguous language. English is. People use “gender” to mean many different things, and then conflate those things, intentionally or not. The English word “gender” could in different contexts be translated as kule kon, nasin selo, or kulupu jan. All three of these things mean things other than gender. kule kon can refer to personality type along any axis. nasin selo can refer to anything about how one presents oneself. kulupu jan can mean any community. This is a good thing. Gender is not special; politicians in the Anglosphere have just tried to convince us that it is. Fortunately, like many ike things, fixation on an arbitrary categorization system like gender is much harder to do in toki pona than in English.

And here I maybe have to tip my hand as a gender abolitionist. I think what frustrates people when talking about gender in toki pona is that it shows that gender was a bad idea.2 I’m not saying that every concept that can’t be easily expressed in toki pona is bad (hello, most of science and math), but generally, if it seems straightforward in English—and mind you, I’ve taught the identity/presentation/sex theory of gender to sixth graders using this cutesy teaching aid3—and is difficult to toki pona, that’s a good sign that there’s something ike about it. toki Inli la we create term after term for trans and nonbinary people to describe ourselves fully, but each is fundamentally limited by the need to in some way relate to a broader societal understanding of what gender is, and society ultimately has no fucking clue what gender is.

In English I wrestle with questions like whether I’m transgender. I have changed my appearance from masculine to feminine, but don’t consider myself a woman, and didn’t really consider myself a man before, so what gender have I transed? Am I even agender? That’s the gender label I identify with the most, and yet, to the vast majority of people seeing me on the street, I read as a woman, and if I don’t believe I have a gender identity, then wouldn’t “agender” refer only to my presentation, in which case… shit, am I a woman? nasin ni li ike. But I know what I am in toki pona. mi tonsi. selo en sijelo la mi meli tonsi. len la mi meli lon tenpo mute. kalama uta la mi tonsi. telo insa la mi meli tonsi. insa la mi mije. anpa la mi mije selo, li meli kepeken. nena la mi meli selo, li tonsi mije kepeken. I know what meli and mije and tonsi mean for me in these contexts. I am not labeling myself, just describing myself. nasin ni li pona.4

A personal note: I really dislike having breasts. I like everything else HRT has done for my body and brain, but the breasts, they get on my nerves. People look at them and assume I’m a woman. Most dresses feel like they show either too much of them or too little or somehow both. I forget that they’re there and knock over boardgame pieces when I lean over to roll. If I don’t wear a bra, people might be scandalized, but if I do wear a bra, I feel like I’m conceding the point that my chest is in some fundamental way different than it was 5 years ago, which I’m not ready to concede—after all, plenty of cis men have larger breasts than I have. And if I go to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and don’t put on my robe, it is the position of the State of New Jersey that if the wrong person strolls by my front window, I am to blame for them seeing my chest and having impure thoughts about it.5

I thought for a while about getting rid of them—truly the ultimate enby move, get gender-affirming medical care in both directions—but the thing is… People look at them and assume I’m a woman. And I’m not a woman, and kind of wish fewer people would see me as a woman, but at the same time getting a proper genderfucky look going takes work, and for a low-effort look I’d rather be seen as a woman than as a man, and breasts mean that if I throw on a dress, make sure my face is smooth, and step out the door, there’s no question which way my somewhat androgynous features will be read.

It’s hard, in English, to explain how I feel about my breasts. To explain that my biggest problem with them is the way society contextualizes them. But when I decided against mastectomy, I decided on something else instead, a chest tattoo that conveys my feelings perfectly and concisely, in toki pona:

nena ni la mi awen mije.
Yes, the nena and mije arcs will trace my areolae.

I am not a man. I am not masc-presenting. I am meli or tonsi as far as most sexually-differentiated physical attributes go. But mi awen mije. mi ali li mije, li meli, li tonsi.

Kelly’s Typology

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

CWs:  Transphobia; brief references to various maladaptive behaviors; brief, mostly clinical depiction of sex.

Preface: Occasionally people ask me if I’m serious about this. There’s nothing I say here that I don’t believe per se. At the same time, part of the purpose of this post is to lampoon an incredibly stupid idea one cis guy had about trans people, and to subvert his own strange binarist, clinicalized way of looking at us. Make of that what you will.

Blanchard is so obviously wrong, and yet there’s something alluring about his typology.  Yes, it ignores the existence of trans men.  Yes, it ignores the existence of nonbinary people.  Yes, it says that all trans lesbians are autogynephiles.  But there’s something lurking beneath it that, for many trans people, on some level clicks.

What clicks?  The notion that there are, broadly, two different kinds of transgender.  And that they occupy spaces very roughly corresponding to Blanchard’s “homosexual [sic] transsexual” and “autogynephile”.  Blanchard’s theory about the nature of those two types makes no sense, but the types nonetheless exist.  Let’s drop the inaccurate labeling.  Let’s call “homosexual [sic] transsexuals” Type N and “autogynephiles” Type S,6 and let’s forget about what Blanchard says defines them.  We, as trans people, know people who clearly fall into Type N or Type S, and we’re aware of the difference, even if we can’t articulate what divides the two types.

Type N transfolk are the “knew it since I was a baby” type.  They’re the “Being trans is just a fact about my past” or “I don’t even see myself as trans” type, the type much more likely to want bottom surgery and to be stealth even in trans-friendly environments.  They’re almost always binary.

Type S transfolk are the “I feel better this way” type.  They’re the “Trans pride flag in every social media profile” type, the type much more likely to feel any bottom dysphoria resolved by calling it the right word and to out themselves as trans because they think it’s something people ought to know about them.  Many are nonbinary, and many more are “binary with caveats”.7

To explain what separates these two types of trans person, we have to start with something that all trans people have in common:  All trans people are autistic.

Now, okay, asserting any attribute to be universal among trans people will never be 100% correct, simply because any person can start identifying as trans, and there will always be some nonzero number who do so for reasons unrelated to the ones we normally think of as being involved in trans-ness.8  But setting aside these edge cases, yes, (almost) all trans people are autistic.

I’m not about to present a bunch of numbers about comorbidity between trans-ness and autism.  The point is not that all trans people have Autism Spectrum Disorder as clinically defined.  In fact, we’re not talking about Autism Spectrum Disorder at all, but the broader concept, what we can call “little-‘a’ autism”.  Little-‘a’ autism isn’t defined in the DSM.  It’s the definition that’s evolved parallel to the DSM.  “Autism” once meant, per Wiktionary, “a pathological tendency to engage in self-centered fantasy thinking”.  The colloquial definition of autism today, often used insultingly, is, again per Wiktionary, “Abnormal and unhealthy focus or persistence, stereotypically coupled with low self-awareness and unhealthy hatred of opposition or criticism”.9 Imagine versions of those definitions that weren’t skewed by the input of ableist neurotypicals, draw a line between these two points, and you have the shape of little-‘a’ autism.

Little-‘a’ autism is when the world needs to make sense, and some things make it make more sense, and some things make it make less sense, and some things make so much wondrous sense that you need to spend 20 hours reading about every single detail.  Little-‘a’ autism is when there’s always a huge amount of information to process, and you do a damn good job at it if you do say so yourself, but everyone always seems to think you do a bad job just because you forgot to say “Sorry” when your coworker’s dog died.  Little-‘a’ autism is when the ambiguity between “Sorry” as an apology and “Sorry” as a commiseration isn’t just something you joke about, but something that triggers that very specific burning feeling in that spot four inches behind the center of your brow, the kind where if you think too long you might have to go break something or hurt yourself or get very drunk—but not in the cool way neurotypical people do, a cold, clinical drunk, scientifically testing how long it takes to stop feeling.

Little-‘a’ autism is when the world needs to make sense.

Maybe this definition feels too hand-wave-y to you, but it’s the only meaningful definition there is.  Go look at the DSM definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder.  It doesn’t define a syndrome.  It defines a jumble of symptoms with no real attempt to explain what unifies them, to explain why wanting to stack soupcans would correlate with crying when there’s thunder and always wanting to wear the same hoodie, even though that’s obvious to us.  It reads like if the definition of COVID-19 were written by someone who’d never heard of lungs.  The only good definition of autism you’ll get is this kind, the people’s kind.  Autism is when the world needs to make sense.  Not just should; needs to.

(Almost) all people with ASD are little-‘a’ autistic.  Many people without ASD are little-‘a’ autistic.  And (almost) all trans people are little-‘a’ autistic, because as a rule the very things that make us trans also make us little-‘a’ autistic.  It’s not a comorbidity; it’s inherent in the definitions.

Because things have to be right.  Your body has to be right.  The classic examples with autistic people are how we dress, how we stand, how we walk.  Your foot needs to come down this exact way in your stride.  And the need for one’s body to look different than one’s endocrine system has planned—so infamously elusive to explain to most people who lack such a need, because it does not equate to anything they experience—slots perfectly into this system of autistic body needs.

It just feels Right.  Things need to feel Right.  It’s Bad if things don’t feel Right.  If things are Bad, then you need to do bad things, so the Bad things will stop feeling bad.  Except they’ll still feel bad.  You’ll still feel bad, as long as things aren’t Right.

As a rule the very things that make us trans also make us little-‘a’ autistic. It’s not a comorbidity; it’s inherent in the definitions.

(Almost) all trans people are autistic.  But not all trans people are the same kind of autistic.  There are two types, in fact: Type N and Type S.

For Type N, the binary gender opposite the one they were assigned at birth is a special iNterest, and transition is the way to best interact with that special interest.  A car is the way to embrace your special interest in highways.  A pair of binoculars is the way to embrace your special interest in birds.  Transitioning is the way to embrace your special interest in the opposite binary gender.  The transition will then take on a special role for you, much like the car for the roadfan or the binoculars for the birder, but it won’t be the special interest.  It is a means to an end—a very important means to an all-encompassingly important end, but a means nonetheless.  Some Type N people will embrace that means, will fly their trans pride flags high, will come out even once they pass.  But many won’t understand that.  Why highlight the one thing that makes the enjoyment of the special interest, well, imperfect?  Why think about the little things that still make you different?  Why think about how much more different things once were?  You were the Wrong gender before, and it was Bad, but now you are the Right gender, and it is Good.

For Type S, transition is the Stim.  Becoming a different gender isn’t the same all-consuming drive.  In fact in some ways it’s incidental.  Type S people reach for their stim when things are Bad, just like other autistic people (or they themselves at other moments) reach for a fidget toy or tap on objects in the right order or put together a puzzle.  It’s soothing.  You were stressed, but now you’re thinking about being a different gender, and that idea of changing your social role, or (for many) particularly of changing your body, has a calming effect.  And then experimentation becomes the stim.  You’re an adult now!  You can just buy girl clothes, or guy clothes, or pointedly androgynous or genderfucky clothes, and no one can stop you.  Holy shit this is great.  Now, getting to interact 24/7 with the thing that calms you down so much—the thing that isn’t itself Right, but definitely isn’t Wrong, and definitely helps make Wrong things feel Right—how can you resist that?  You might not even care if you “pass” eventually, or actively resist that as a goal, because that isn’t the point.  You want people to know you’re trans, because every time you say it to someone, you’re stimming.  It might even be bad to settle down into too stealthily binary a life, because at some point, mightn’t you forget you’re trans at all?  Might you just start feeling like a cis person of that gender, and then you would have no stim, and when Bad things happened they would stay Bad.

Blanchard says the unifying attribute for Type N women is androsexuality.  Maybe there is some truth to that, or was at a time with less lesbian visibility.  If the Type N trans person wants to embrace the norms of the opposite binary gender, and androsexuality is the norm for women, then maybe there’s a pressure, or in particular was a pressure back when Ray Blanchard was young, for a Type N trans woman to be androsexual.

Blanchard says the unifying attribute for Type S women is fetishization.  Maybe there, too, there is some amount of truth.  Type S women are certainly stereotyped now, in the trans community, as more sexual than Type N.10  Stim and fetish can often blur together, in any autistic context.  Just as many autistic people have the Right way to walk, many have the Right way to masturbate.  And if being reminded of one’s trans-ness is a plus, not a minus, for many Type S people, what can remind you of it more than feeling one hand on your breasts and one on your penis, or feeling a gay man enter your very male vagina?

Except, anyone who’s discussed sex with enough trans people knows some Type N people for whom there’s a kink aspect.  Special interest, just like stim, can become sexualized.  But maybe Blanchard just wasn’t asking his “homosexual [sic] transsexuals” the right questions.

Wouldn’t exactly be the first thing he got wrong.