Dan Brown Adds “Transgendering” to the Lexicon
Yesterday, CBS CBC News reporter Sarah Liss spent 12 hours of her life reading The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s 509-page sequel to The Da Vinci Code. Only 45 minutes in, Liss comes across this Brown gem:
The act of tattooing one’s skin was a transformative declaration of power, an announcement to the world: I am in control of my own flesh. The intoxicating feeling of control derived from physical transformation had addicted millions to flesh-altering practices …. . . cosmetic surgery, body piercing, bodybuilding, and steroids . . . even bulimia and transgendering.
“Ugh,” writes Liss. “Sometimes, Dan Brown, loosely adapting Anthropology 101 texts for fiction just doesn’t work. Also, why do I get the sense you’ve never been tattooed—or met a gender-variant person? Also: ‘transgendering’ is not a verb.”
Allow me to join in here: Fucking Dan Brown.
No, it’s not enough for him to casually and unnecessarily refer to transgender people as “addicts.” Too subtle. He must also lump them in with a laundry list of other “flesh-altering” sorts—Barry Bonds, people who suffer from life-threatening eating disorders, and dudes with tribal calf tattoos—then top it all off with an offensive make-believe word . . . which millions of people will surely read. God damnit! Fine: Just add it to the dictionary now. But please, don’t make Tom Hanks grow his hair out again. I’m begging you.
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3:37 pm
Seriously, fuck Dan Brown. He’s a shitty author and he’s a cissexist.
Don’t read his books, they suck. The movies are slightly more livable, but after this idiocy? I’m going to speak with my money and not give it to him and his.
8:38 am
One minor editorial correction: Sarah Liss works for CBC, not CBS.
9:28 am
Thanks Michelle, I’ve corrected the post.
8:57 pm
actually it’s not a noun.
but i know what you mean.
12:31 pm
dan brown sucks, and is doing just as much (or more) as j.k. rowling to destroy 21t century literature.
12:55 pm
So what if he made a verb out of transgender? It makes some sense, and language changes all the time. The real problem is his ignorance of transpeople and his shitty writing.
7:15 pm
I agree with Don — and Brown actually isn’t the first person to use it:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2009/07/20/090720gonb_GOAT_notebook_als
Hilton Als is pretty sympathetic, I think, to the cause of transpeople, so I don’t think the word itself needs to be dismissed.
8:09 pm
Don, Amanda was an English major. Linguistic ignorance is to be expected.