I saw a post that I thought was fairly insightful, that suggested trans men are comfortable identifying as lesbians because it is a discrete word and if we did not have that word but simply called gay women gay women as we do gay men, they'd probably not do it, but the word adds a layer of distance or obfuscation. it posed the inverse as well, that you don't see trans women going around calling themselves gay men, precisely because it's degendering.
But, well, I've been around enough trans women to know that plenty of them do indeed call themselves faggots, queens and twinks quite often, without a sense that they are degendering themselves. I mean frankly this is a fairly trivial observation to make.
so rather than the original point it was making, which was a rather pointed observation about the ability of trans men to degender themselves without degendering themselves because of the nature of the English vocabulary for the community, I think the point is more that language in general can be used not only to circumscribe reality but to create a zone of ambiguity, obfuscation and transient meaning, through which people can and do swim both generally and specifically when constructing and communicating their identity.
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