I’m writing a book for Laurence King Publishing right now called 200 Words to Help You Talk About Gender & Sexuality. It contains definitions of 200 words, ranging from “heterosexual” to “demigirl” to “polyamory” and beyond. Although the finished manuscript’s word count will total only 20,000 (100 words for each of the 200 definitions therein), it has proven to be an absurdly huge undertaking. How do you define concepts that make up people’s identities, communities, worldviews? How do you describe, in universalizable and comprehensible terms, what makes someone [insert marginalized identity here]?
The answer to these questions, mainly, is research. When writing about an identity I don’t hold myself, or a phenomenon I haven’t experienced firsthand, I’ve been diving into the scientific studies and personal essays and intimate blog posts where people discuss the ideas I am defining. I’ve been looking for key themes, motifs that arise again and again, and then condensing them into one small paragraph. It is not easy to do. It is weighty work, and I am taking it very seriously. My spouse Matt, who is queer and nonbinary, reads through my new chapters at the end of every work day and critiques the most minute of word choices, suggests additions or subtractions, offers alternate perspectives and resources to seek out. I make diligent notes, dive back into my research, and write some more.
There have been some days lately when I’ve intentionally chosen words I think will be easy to define, words with fairly straightforward definitions, like “gay” or “tucking” or “virgin.” It turns out that even writing these seemingly basic definitions is not as simple as it seems, especially since I’m trying to include a bit about the history of each word in its definition and, in many cases, an acknowledgment of the ways each term or concept has been critiqued or rejected by certain populations.
But there are also days when I think, “Hey, I have some spare mental energy today. Let’s do a hard one.” Yesterday was one such day. Yesterday I decided to try to define the word “gender.”