Cross-cultural issues in trans terminology

Abstract

This article examines the applicability of trans terminology in non-Anglophone linguistic environments, particularly in Spanish and Modern Greek, two grammatical gender languages. The aim is to demonstrate the importance of cross-language comparisons that question the all-encompassing pretensions and universalist biases which still permeate the Western gender structure. Drawing on the methodological tools of double vision uncertainty, trans-crip-t time and translatxrsation, the article examines the particularities of both languages in terms of gender language scripts and representations, and offers a sociocultural analysis of how norms of the masculine generic, female semantic subordination and presumed binarism and cisgenderism have been consolidated, much to the detriment of sexual and gender diversity. Although this reflection stays within the Western paradigm, it focuses on peripheral models of gender diversity that help to deconstruct the binary and to queer gender in open dialogue with transnational realities, and calls for more cross-cultural and cross-language comparisons.