What Lies Behind the Words: On Translating While Trans

For me, the real litmus test of fluency has always been: Can I use this language to convince a native speaker that I exist?

In English, because gendered pronouns only exist in the third person and the vast majority of adjectives are neutral, a pronoun is generally something bestowed on you by others. You can do little to contest it, since—with the exception of direct statements—it mostly happens when someone is speaking about you to someone else. When chosen with care by a person who loves and respects you, a pronoun can be a gift. Otherwise, it is a weapon.

“Compared with French,” Nino S. Dufour writes in the translator’s note to the French edition of my novel The Thirty Names of Night (Les Trente Noms de La Nuit, Rue de l’echiquier, 2022), “the English language is much less gendered on the grammatical level: articles are neutral, even pronouns—with the exception of the third person singular.”

The protagonist of The Thirty Names of Night is in the process of choosing a new name at the opening of the novel, and he remains nameless and resists gendering himself until most of the way through the book. I had the privilege of talking with Nino on the phone during the translation process, strategizing how to handle gender in French in a way that would be true to the original text. Once we realized that we both spoke Italian, we decided it was easier to speak about French in another gendered language. In Italian, Nino was able to show me the escape hatches that Francophone queers know intimately: the safe havens of gender-neutral nouns, the uses of plurals and the middle dot (i.e., les ami·es), the grammatical evasions of the gendered past participle, the third-person singular neutral pronoun iel.

I’ve been having this conversation for years, in many languages. In Italian, which I learned from my Italian-speaking partner, I’m well versed in wriggling out of conversations with cis people by dancing with grammar like a hula hoop, always with an eye to the words I can count on, the way un artista becomes impossible to tell apart from its feminine counterpart un’artista when spoken aloud. The way you can always resort to describing yourself—or your partner—as a person who . . . The way the verb minus the pronoun, at least in Italian, can save you. The way, because few of these tactics work as well in Arabic, I’ve learned it’s better to pretend I don’t speak it and keep my Syrian dialect to myself.

In gendered languages, a speaker has the option of using gendered terms when speaking about themself. In a best-case scenario, a polite listener will wait for this cue to gender the speaker (though, surprise surprise, few cis people extend this courtesy to trans people). What this means is that pronouns can sometimes be “negotiated” in the space between you and other people without explicitly naming your gender. In Italian, I don’t need to say sono un maschio (I’m a male) or uso pronomi maschili o neutrali (I use masculine or neutral pronouns). I need only gender myself with the masculine -o or neutral -ə (-u is also currently used this way in some parts of Italy; in the Sardinian language, though, –u is masculine). In every language I speak other than English, to assert my pronouns I need only say sono uno scrittore / أنا كاتب, or even, simply, sono stanco.

That doesn’t help me, though, with the people who question my knowledge because I’m not a native speaker, or because I’m an immigrant and a racialized person. For me, the real litmus test of fluency has always been: Can I use this language to convince a native speaker that I exist? I’ve translated poetry, fiction, and song lyrics from Italian to English. I’ve used my Italian for television interviews and workshops and live translations, have used it in the backs of ambulances and at immigration interviews. Yet some of my most frustrating linguistic moments have been pronoun wars fought at kitchen tables, on sidewalks and in cafés, and, terrifyingly, with police and bureaucrats who hold the power to deny me my human rights. Even when we speak the same language, we don’t exist the same way inside of it.

Does this, too, count as translation?

*

When I was a kid, America made it clear to me that I was unwelcome by the way it told me even my tongue was wrong. After my family left New York City for a small New England town, my teachers urged my parents to put my sister and me in remedial English classes. The hybrid New York/Arabic accents and turns of phrase we’d picked up from my dad were problems for whiteness to fix. I wonder, now, what it might be like to carry nothing within me that cannot be translated into word or flesh. Just as with a piece of writing, what cis people read of my body is an approximation of something that can’t be fully expressed in the languages we have in common. The way I move, speak, dress, even my refusal to pluck my unibrow or remove my body hair are nods to something that exists behind those embodied languages.

This is the case even if the language available to us—whether word, flesh, or adornment—also drives how we actualize those deeper, wordless knowings. The whiteness of the cisgender binary determines the haircuts, mode of dress, and types of bodies that are read as masculine by the world at large, for example; expressions of masculinity by racialized people and in non-white modes are often punished. Likewise, I may have access to testosterone as a life-saving, gender-affirming treatment, but I have little control over the effects the hormone will have on my body or how the people around me will react to those effects. For me, transition has been a joyful exercise in playing with the language of gender, even when half of what I “say” goes over cis people’s heads. That’s okay. I’m not saying it for them.

Even when we speak the same language, we don’t exist the same way inside of it.

Until recently, I didn’t have the luxury of an equivalent of the English singular they in Italian or Arabic. I’d never heard of the Italian neopronoun ləi, or had anyone use the Arabic dual pronoun هما for me. It’s hard to say whether I would have chosen to use these pronouns more had I known about them. To make sure the people I loved would not call me she, I translated myself. I, as a non-binary person, mainly use he/him, lui, and هو; for me, that makes those pronouns nonbinary by definition. Still, other people often look at me and decide that I do not belong to he, to lui, to هو. I’m never offered the singular they as much as I am by cis people who are uncomfortable with my trans masculinity.

Other queer and trans Arabs were the ones who first offered me هما. Among ourselves, we’ve had ongoing conversations over the years about how to make space for ourselves in our Levantine and Egyptian and Khaliji dialects, worked to reclaim terms like hassan sabi and boya and the divine feminine. We’ve figured out how to talk about ourselves to our elders, to our lovers, to ourselves. Once, I ran across a Reddit thread about هما in r/learn_arabic. The Redditors, mostly white people studying Modern Standard Arabic, it seemed, suggested using هم ,هما, or alternating masculine and feminine pronouns. There were only a few native Arabic speakers on the thread. I still remember where I stopped reading: One user said, “I see a problem with language learners forcing foreign concepts into the language they are learning.”

The thread is archived now, so I can’t respond to the homophobia or racism of this statement. I used to joke with a fellow trans Arab friend that we’d make the perfect team for a heist. If we’re so invisible to the world at large, who would catch us? To them, our existence is impossible. We might as well be ghosts.

*

Translation is an asymptote: You may approach transparency in a translated text, but you can never arrive. My favorite translations are the ones that make room for the reader to feel at home in the language while also never letting them forget that what they are reading is not the original. The process of learning any language is also a process of learning to hide your tells. Learning to think I have need of rather than I need, or it pleases me rather than I like it. Understanding that a need is a possession, and that pleasure is not so much a choice as a thing that graces you. Words become vehicles for ideas, portals for otherwise unthinkable thoughts.

Is become the right word? In Arabic, to say I started translating, one could say: I became to translate. In Italian, the verb diventare mostly appears as past participle: The situation has become difficult, or he’s become strange. There’s a sense of arrival to become, just as there is in translation itself. Yet in English, arriving is something we do—I have arrived—whereas, in Italian, one says I am arrived. Arrived is something one is, a state of being one occupies with the body. I am in a constant state of arrival in any language. My Arabic and my Italian and my Spanish and my German are geographies in which I constantly set foot afresh and shake off my dust. My languages are embodiments. I become to speak.

Sometimes what I want is to remain untranslatable. Don’t get me wrong: There’s little more delicious than being able to imagine what someone I love might sound like in my mother tongue, and it’s even more fun to revel in the untranslatable—to say there’s no tripe for cats rather than nothing doing, even if the first time a friend tried to translate the Italian for me, it warped itself into the hilarious, now-legendary there’s no trips for cats.

My favorite translations are the ones that make room for the reader to feel at home in the language while also never letting them forget that what they are reading is not the original.

Listen: What I’m after is something more akin to an embodied form of the French middle dot. I want that middle dot to exist in people’s minds when they see me, speak of me, think of me. Maybe what I want is doubt: I want to flicker in and out of their vision like a haunting. I want my body to make them wonder, perhaps even fear, what their own flesh is capable of. My biracial, hairy, nonconforming body has always been a target for the desires, fears, and projections of the white, cis, American imaginary. Maybe feeling other—even, at times, monstrous—is part of how I’ve come to know myself. Maybe I’ve spent so many years beyond the borders of language that I understand myself fully only when I leave that border behind.

It’s hard to write this essay without translating my anger. I wrote the first draft of this essay via the voice-to-text feature on my phone because long Covid makes my eyes hurt when typing and reading. In other words, I translated this essay from my lips to the page. My phone heard Covid and wrote it as cove, which I then misread as cave; I try to talk about disability, and English pushes me underground. The English-language voice-to-text can’t make sense of my Arabic or Italian. English overwrites every other language, just as transphobia and fear try to plaster themselves over my tongue. What transphobes want is not for us to translate ourselves into a tiny, respectable linguistic box, but for us to not exist. When they ban our books and our bodies from public space, what they want is to erase what lives behind the words. What they want is for us to have no words at all for ourselves. They don’t realize that rendering something unspeakable doesn’t make it vanish. There has never been a world in which trans people did not exist.

Seeing Nino create a trans spaciousness inside of French in Les Trente Noms de la Nuit reminded me that burrowing into the margins of language and making a home there has always been the business of queers. New and reclaimed words and novel ways of using them pop up between us all the time, passed along from one queer to another, and we make adjustments as we go. On the third episode of Hazel Jane Plante’s t4t podcast, Kama La Mackerel speaks about using the French iel when translating Kai Cheng Thom’s From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish of the Sea, saying, “We’re inventing this right now, so maybe in five years, that pronoun will be irrelevant and that’s fine, you know. I’m not attached to it. I think that the most important part is for us collectively to do the work.”

Language changes and evolves. As a budding translator, whether by choice or necessity, I’ve learned over and over again to cleave as tightly as possible to the idea that lies behind a word. My transness, too, would exist even were there no word for it in any language. Sometimes I remember the years, as a child, before I had even the word trans. The years when it was my secret thing, the wild sweetness of it before anyone could yoke it to a name. The deliciousness of that self-contained and wordless feeling, that blood and bone knowledge in need of no translation. An untranslatable self toward which I am always arriving, always already here.