Culture Corner Series: Making New Words, Knitting New Worlds (Part III)
This essay is the second in a series exploring the language that shapes our lives, our politics, and our possibilities. Each installment features words that have helped me make meaning of my lived experience and of the world we are building together.
Have you ever heard a word for the first time and, right away, you knew what it meant? Or maybe you felt an emotional response, a feeling of recognition or relief in feeling like this word needed to exist for you so long ago. As a kid who learned English as a second language, I still come across words that don’t exist in English that I have to borrow from Spanish — like “mande” and “madrugar.” Across languages, there are words that capture unarticulated experiences and there are terms that express things more efficiently than having to say the group of words that explain them.2 2 `
This happened to me with “nibling” — a gender neutral and singular word for nieces and nephews. Over the last 15 years, I have definitely been using “niblings” to talk about the beautiful kids parented by my siblings, both biological and chosen. It was my own queer way to not constantly impose gendered language on kids who did not always have adults in their lives telling them they could be anything. When I say they can be anything they want, my niblings have always known I mean it. The Spanish version — “les sobrines” — rolls off the tongue so nicely, but isn’t as expansive when it comes to the way niblings can also stretch beyond blood relations.
Long before I became a parent, I was lucky enough to have bio-relatives and chosen family who had babies and involved me in their care. Besides my nieces and nephews, there were kids who, while not biologically related to me, were long-awaited and much-loved arrivals in my community. While talking to a friend of mine, who also has all kinds of niblings, they said, “I love it because it can refer to a whole host of different relationships I have with children and young people in my life, without separating the ones who are related to me by blood versus the ones who are part of my chosen family. And it doesn’t assume a hierarchy of relations, like biological over social.”
I think a lot about queer families these days, especially about what trans kinship looks like for the trans young people in my life who see me not only as someone who is a peer or relative of their parent, but as someone who is committed to their care. And, as someone who embodies a relationship different than the traditional role of an uncle, aunt, “uncty” or “guncle,” I think there is the possibility for mutual understanding because I have lived in similar or adjacent circumstances to the ones they are living. As a young person, I was lucky to find this for myself.
I was blessed to have a “movement godmother” — a self-described “Black Puerto Rican dyke — someone who taught me so much about organizing in QTPOC community,”, who housed me, found me work, protected me, and welcomed me home when my gender expression and queerness made me feel a kind of exile from the community in which I was raised. I bristle sometimes when she tells me about people who say to her of their own parenting struggles, “you can’t know what this is like because you never had kids.” She raised and parented so many of us, stepping into the gap created by transphobia and heterosexism that separated us from our families and communities of origin.
Nibling, uncty, or hunkle — which is what I love to be called — are not perfect terms. But cultures and subcultures use, stretch, change, and adapt words and phrases to better express and reflect our realities. At a time when trans people and our queer families are facing very real and existential threats in every branch and level of government, having more language to describe who we are and how we are connected feels especially important. It tethers us to each other, to claim each other beyond the narrow structures and definitions available in traditional cisgender-heteronormative nuclear families.
And, if we’re keeping it real, those structures were never meant to fit those of us whose reproductive labor was violently extracted to create the wealth and power of this country or those of us who came from large extended family models and migrated into networks of care that could not always be based on blood ties, but were more about shared experience, language, and ways of being. My earliest inklings of reproductive freedom were about getting to be in consensual kinship and caring for people who needed each other and who were committed to throw down for each other, no matter what.
Now queer and trans Black and brown folks are leading conversations around the future of true reproductive liberation. We are expanding our vision of family and care, recognizing the challenges of this moment where attacks on the rights, lives, and bodies of trans people emerge from the same playbook that wants to keep cis women “barefoot and pregnant,” incubating, at times by force of law, the next generation of consumers. And what that means is creating and amplifying new words.