"with this sign for beautiful, there is no objection"

July 7, 2022 9:11 AM

Rogan Shannon is a queer deaf guy who makes YouTube videos about a lot of different topics. This video (turn captions on, it's silent) discusses the creation and evolution of signs for trans people and topics in ASL. It's a few years old and he's updated some of the terms in this video and gone a little more into some of the history of the ASL word for trans (blog post, video). This video by Britton, a non-binary trans person (no captions, read transcript below) talks about the use of the sign for trans within the trans Deaf community. Rogan has also made a video and blog post about queer signs in other countries.
posted by jessamyn (3 comments total)

Wow, this was really interesting. I had considered the process of adding words in a gesture based language before, but the trans sign video really emphasizes the nuance of it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 11:37 AM on July 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I thought so! I got interested in this topic because I just finished reading True Biz a book about many different kinds of deaf people including one young woman who has a cochlear implant (which doesn't work that great) and so grew up not-really-hearing but also without ASL so she's been deaf but without knowing much about Deaf culture. The book has a lot of facts about ASL and Deaf culture and I became curious about words for trans and adjacent topics in a language that has a different process for adding new words than, say, English. Shannon talks a lot about the context of the signs for trans topics and the implications of some of them, the ones he likes and the ones he doesn't like as much. I felt like I learned an awful lot in just ten minutes, and then doing related reading.
posted by jessamyn at 12:35 PM on July 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Amazing. I learned so much! Thank you!
posted by erebora at 10:49 PM on July 7, 2022