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
mijenoun 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:
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Created by a cis man, for what it’s worth.
- And if I really, really, for some reason needed to explain what Anglophone-defined gender communities I fall into? Well, like any other nimi ike, “mi lon kulupu Enpi. mi lon kulupu Esente.“
- 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.
2 thoughts on “There is no gender in toki pona.”