By Maya Friedman
“When you’re with other people, your mind isn’t your own,” she once
said, and although she was talking about perception, and connecting to
the realm of feeling, I think about language too. Can you be alone with
language? What a dream that would be, what a nightmare.”
• T. Fleischmann, from Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through
The scene: several white canopies on the grass at night, alternating between downpour and dripping, a crowd bunched up to the edges of the covering and gathered beneath its own white breath.
I had to write my pronouns down on a white name tag, sticky and big as a brick. The event: “Queers in the Outdoors,” an opportunity for Portland’s sporty gays to find friends with which to hike, ski, camp, and maybe kiss. I was there to test the solubility of my queerness under the guise of finding people to carpool to the mountain with. I panic- ordered a bitter beer at the bar, stuttered a delayed thank you to the bartender who complimented my shirt, and wondered if the veteran queers could smell my fear, uncertainty, and lack of experience. I was there to see if someone could see me within the bi, asexual, gender-questioning maelstrom that consumes me whenever I have to introduce myself.
The label stuck to my jacket was meant to usher and prepare this seeing, to forecast the self as words. In my identity experiment, I failed at the outset, as soon as I was asked to name myself: how could I expect someone else to understand me?
Language is insufficient, and the dread of the writer is to snare reality. I dread mistaking myself, forging a misrepresentation. Choosing implies I am sure and strong. I feel like I get one chance to guess at who I would have been without a society. We are all writers trying and failing to translate ourselves for each other. I return daily to an Alison C Rollins quote from a lecture given in 2022: All writing is either successful or unsuccessful miscommunication.
I remember the taxidermy lab at my university always smelled dusty and sweet, each bone spiked with wire attached to a small white flag. I’m not going for a one-to-one metaphor here. I’m not trying to imply that pronouns are wires that spike into my bones, or that I shiver with a million paper feathers. I’m trying to say that words are tools and that pronouns make me feel dusty and sweet.
Outside the lab was a long hallway that circumnavigated the science building’s brick courtyard. It held displays of stuffed rodents in painted murals of their natural habitats, rows of dead birds with smoothed heads and closed eyes like velvety torpedoes.
Black and white photos of old men gazing past the frame, accompanied by a paragraph detailing their contributions to the studies of ecology, ornithology, and entomology.
One of them was Carl Linnaeus, an 18th century Swedish naturalist who is commonly credited with designing the taxonomy system used today in Western ecology, known as the Linnaean system. Linnaeus categorized creatures hierarchically (by class, order, genus, and species), using a two-name system to differentiate species within the same genus (e.g., homo sapiens). This allowed for more detailed distinctions to be made between organisms with similar characteristics, as well as for the mapping of evolutionary relationships. The goal was to achieve understanding through arrangement, to funnel the wide and foggy spectrums of nature into consumable pieces.
Linnaeus lived during a time in which Western science was expanding in its colonial nature. His standardization invited further expansion and collection. It was an era of expeditions: the ships setting off from Europe, if not spurred by the fire of scientific inquiry, at the very least carried a “naturalist” or two. Perhaps the most well known example is the 1830 Beagle expedition around the world, whose resident naturalist was Charles Darwin. Darwin returned to England with hundreds of specimens preserved in liquid, whose bones and shells and feathers ultimately led him to his theory of evolution. The pursuit of scientific knowledge was (and still is) a branch of conquest; scientists rarely, if ever, sought the permission of indigenous people to claim the nature around them and had no regard for the damage such reaping could cause.
In 1871, Darwin placed humanity firmly alongside Earth’s other creatures when he published The Descent of Man, arguing contentiously that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor. Despite its controversial nature, this book made clear humanity’s desire to understand itself as a species through scientific research of the natural world. I have to believe that there is a way to compile our knowledge toward further learning without taking so much; not just names, bones, and feathers but whole beings, whole flocks, and whole ecosystems, pulled at the root. Names are tools, used to build or unbuild things. To build often implies a preliminary leveling, some kind of demolition. The more I try to travel within myself and collect evidence for my categorization, the more it hurts. The initial joy of questioning, floating neutrally in limbo, was erased when I realized that its compulsory end is another container, and may lead to extinctions.
The way through everyone, those already tagged and mingling, felt like a labyrinth; I snaked to the table, its pages of labels to peel with that soft splitting sound and at least six colors of marker to choose from.
Just the black would do.
The person watching the table was chatting with a friend, and their body was turned away from me. I had a chance to avoid being witnessed, if I moved fast. I uncapped the marker and it released its chemical smell, which eased up into the cold and the noise of people meeting each other.
Gaze is a traceable detective’s thread. It refracts like a wave of light. We think it reflects more truth than the mirror. We project ourselves outward and people project us back to us and then we can interpret what we look like. Gaze is translation. Translation is transformation. Since puberty I have moved in a way that prioritizes the quality of the reflection, not the self.
I was not ready. I wanted to leave the name tag blank, because I myself am just a line with nothing written. I am a hesitation. The most neutral word carries with it a new set of assumptions. Feels like a bright berry, a gift someone spent too much on. No, I can’t accept this.
I wrote down my best guess and pushed away the weight of authenticity for later that night when I would get home and feel shame for not being proud of my queerness, for not wanting to think about it at all.
Last year when my friend asked if I was doing anything for pride month, I said no. I said I’d never really felt proud, and they said, “Me too.”
Pride is survival, and I am not visibly queer in Portland, Oregon (though I am in the airport of Charlotte, North Carolina), and so I have not yet utilized pride to survive, and I am still sometimes ashamed of how my leg hair does not accessorize well with a feminine shoe. Without a society, I think I would like the pairing. Without society, I would have no shoes.
The Harry Potter series may have been the first thing to impress upon me the power of words and names. It taught me the concept of a slur, the word “Mudblood” hurled against Hermione by wizards from “pureblood” families. It taught me reverence and superstition, words as spells, the true terror of those afraid to speak the name Voldemort (which translates roughly from French to flight of death). It is all the more ironic and disappointing that the author seems so deeply fearful of self-determination, the crux of which is often first approached by a renaming of oneself, a redemption of identity through self-taxonomy.
The author’s means of making her strange, magical world understandable is naming. Severus Snape’s first name is Latin for ‘harsh.’ Remus Lupin is a werewolf and Rita Skeeter can transform into a beetle. A common enough shtick in children’s stories, the implicit logic remains that the name determines the self, and that the goal of a name is to make one legible to the dominant culture.
The many fantasy novels I have read teach me that a name is a soul. In Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, the sorcerer Ged learns that each being has a “true name,” the knowledge of which allows total power over the name’s bearer. “No one knows a man’s true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may hear it . . . Who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping.”
The people of Earthsea aren’t born with their true names, but are given them at a certain age. The lovely and queer implication here is that what one is called at birth may not be illustrative of one’s soul, which will reveal itself over time. However it does seem that one’s True Name, once given, is fixed, as if the soul does not evolve throughout life.
Ged goes by the nickname Sparrowhawk and reserves his true name for those he trusts utterly. Sometimes I feel that my soul is private and intimate, and that the words that might describe it deserve ceremony and discretion.
The concept of True Names in fantasy books is well established, and it has roots in folklore across multiple cultures. The Bible, ancient Egyptian myths, Chinese Daoist traditions, Scandinavian lore, and tales like the Odyssey all contain stories in which names are withheld as a means of protection, or else wielded over others as a form of ultimate control.
The idea has many modern manifestations as well: Betelgeuse can be summoned by repeating his name three times, the witch Yubaba in Spirited Away controls people by stealing their names, and countless demons in horror movies can be banished by discovering and speaking their hidden names.
The prominence of this trope throughout various cultures indicates some greater social understanding of the importance of the words we use to identify ourselves. In my mind, pronouns become an ancient, sacred spell I can uncover, but one with dire consequences for my soul if I speak it incorrectly.
Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss finds its title in the protagonist’s quest to discover that which would offer him control of the wind: its name. The magic system in this book works in a similar fashion to that of the Earthsea: “As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.”
To know something’s true name is to have complete power over that thing. If I picked the right words, would I have complete control over myself? I dream of this.
Another prominent idea that goes hand in hand with True Names is that of Namelessness, or the insufficiency of language to capture the divine universe. In Jewish tradition, the true name of God is only spoken in specific and sacred circumstances, and is otherwise replaced with alternatives such as “Hashem” which means ‘the name’ and “Adonai” (Lord). A similar idea is present in the Dao of Daoism, which refuses description not of a god but of an ancient and natural way of being in the world. At the core of ‘namelessness’ are concepts, beings, or spiritualities beyond language, and the idea that attempting to describe these things would limit one’s understanding of and connection to them.
I am not a religious person, but I do consider myself to be a fragment of the universe. I want to use language to describe my experience, but I am coming to understand that this will require endless words, over a long period of time. In this light, my pronouns start to carry less weight. I think about my gender often, but not about what words I use to transcribe it. What if it can’t be described? What if I don’t want to have a true name, even to share with my beloveds? I will always honor, uplift and respect those that have found themselves through a name or their pronouns. For myself, other words and experiences have made a greater impact on my sense of self. When my mom chops locks from my overgrown mullet and says I look like a prince while small shards of hair collect on my cheeks, or when my partner calls me his boyfriend. When I play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, and get to embody a frog wizard named Benedict who moonlights as a drag queen.
Choosing one’s pronouns feels like choosing an outfit for a summer wedding. These things I cloak myself in don’t feel how I expect. A hastily purchased jumpsuit, with its reassuring legs, ends up frilling toward Womanhood, overcompensating for its general form with a defined waist and various ruffles. A generous dress loaned from a friend, while being the shape stamped on women’s restrooms, has voluminous sleeves and feels like wearing a sculpture. I do not feel like a girl wearing it, or else I feel like a girl in a way I enjoy.
Writing an essay about the fruitlessness of language feels wrong, the way that making attempts at describing myself is viscerally uncomfortable. I’m trying to get to a place where the insufficiency of language feels less like a small and terrible itch and becomes something endearingly wonky. I will continue to tinker with language because I am a writer. I praise its evolution, constantly turning over. I want to be alone with language without being afraid. And then I realize that being alone means being with words, because I think in sentences. It may instead be the imperfection of translation that I must learn to accept as my own. If language evolves by the trading of our tongues, perhaps I am okay with the price of being misunderstood.
Maybe I can settle into some relationship of comfort with the self, so that I may be perfectly understood in the cave of my brain even as I change by the second. I let myself become a thread that I loosen and slither into the trees.
The label: I adhered the square to the outside of my jacket, visible to everyone except me, and forgot what I wrote. I left the event alone; my new acquaintances stayed drinking loud by the glowing outdoor heater. I crossed the flooded grass (it had stopped raining). The sticker made a different sound as I pulled it from my jacket and folded it in half, sticking it to itself. At home I laid it on my desk.
On the folded paper, forged in black marker, the ‘She’ faced the ceiling, feigned and familiar, at times fine and meaningless, at times bringing a grimace. The ‘They’ was face down, feeling wrong in its own way, bringing stabs of fear at naming myself, the moral game of choosing or cruising on your set path, holding all my pliancy and dread (of pulling the lever). ‘They’ bled backwards through the paper, crossing ‘She’ until both were just shapes, new, a knot of nonsense, unnamable.
Maya Radcliffe Friedman is a writer and artist living in Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2023. Maya writes short fiction and lyric essays exploring identity, dreams, generational memory, bodies, myth and the supernatural. Their writing can also be found in the 2025 Spring Anthology of Querencia Press.
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