I Don’t Know How to Use tonsi, and Neither Do You

by Haley

Click on the drawings to see them at their full original size.

Who am I?

I smile, wave, and say “toki a! mi jan Eli.”
Hi! I’m Haley.

In the beginning, I came out of my mother’s womb. At that time, everyone said that I’m a boy. And I said that too for many years.

But then I grew up. I left my home country of Japan and went to a university in Australia when I was 18. (That’s the drinking age there!)

I personally prefer calling Japan ma Nipon over ma Nijon.

Living in a dorm away from home was a brand-new experience for me. I discovered myself, I thought about myself a lot, and I crossdressed for pretty much the first time. And in conclusion, I decided to come out as a trans woman.

I have many names.

On the left side, a figure of me in middle school, wearing a name tag that says “Harry”, walks into the men’s room. On the right side, a figure of me now, wearing a name tag that says “Haley”, walks into the ladies’ room.
I’m transitioning to female.

My Japanese name is Haruki. The haru means “spring”; I was born at the start of spring. The ki means “hope”; I was my mother’s hope. This name is unisex.

My chosen English name used to be “Harry”, like Harry Potter. We both wear glasses. But as I realized that I’m a trans woman, I didn’t feel good using it anymore.

The girl name I chose was “Haley”. It sounds close to “Haruki”, plus it’s pronounced the same as the name of the lead singer of Paramore, Hayley Williams, though she spells it with two Y’s.

In Esperanto, I just transcribed that name “Haley” into Hejli. I did that in Toki Pona too, and called myself jan Eli (jan [e li .]).

Haruki, Haley, Hejli, and jan Eli—they all mean the same thing: me.

I love langages.

I juggle five balls, each of which represents a different language.
I know Japanese, English, Spanish, Esperanto, and Toki Pona.

I’m a bi-native bilingual in Japanese and English. I learned Spanish in middle school and high school, and I taught myself Esperanto on the Internet. I still use all of them.

I first heard of Toki Pona from LangFocus on YouTube. I’m now pretty proficient in Toki Pona.

...But it was only after a while that I first knew of tonsi. I have no idea how to use it. And I’d wager you won’t either by the end of this essay.

Context is crucial in Toki Pona.

My forehead has turned into a gacha machine, and has dispensed a capsule. I hold the capsule in my hand with a doubtful gaze.
Will my words carry my thoughts accurately to the listener?

Toki Pona only has 137 words, which is tiny compared to any other language. (The exact count may differ depending on where and whom you ask.) That means that every word has a really broad meaning, and the speaker has to use each word carefully.

Words are useful because they carry the same idea between different people. When someone thinks or imagines something, they can convey that to someone else using words. Words carry information, emotions, and desires from their thinker’s brain to another brain.

I think of an elevator, a car, and a train, and say the words “tomo tawa”. These disparate structures, oftentimes mutually exclusive, are all tomo tawa.

Toki Pona words are unlike words in any other language. Their meanings are extremely broad.

The listener always worries if they’re interpreting the speaker’s words as intended. The speaker always worries if the listener is interpreting their words as intended.

I feel like this is a fatal flaw with Toki Pona, but simultaneously, avoiding said flaw like a puzzle is its greatest source of intellectual stimulation.

What’s your favorite “animal”?

Three silhouettes, respectively representing Japanese, Russian, and Esperanto, say their word for “animal”. I remain silent, wearing a Toki Pona T-shirt.
Curses... I can’t ask this in Toki Pona!

You wouldn’t think twice about how to ask this question in languages other than Toki Pona. In Japanese: 好きな動物は何ですか？. In Russian: Какое ваше любимое животное?. In Esperanto: Kiu estas via plej ŝatata besto?. In Toki Pona, the best you could do is ask for their favorite soweli, but that excludes a lot of animals.

*soweli is often calqued as “land mammals”, but the distinction is blurry when the animal has no fur.

You can’t ask or answer this in Toki Pona alone. What if that favorite animal is a bird? A reptile or amphibian? A bug? A fish? What do you even call that species in Toki Pona?

Is an elephant a soweli? On one hand, it’s a land mammal. On the other hand, it’s not furry. Hold its trunk in your hand and speak into its big ear: is an elephant a soweli or not?

A worried elephant says to me, “jan Eli o, mi soweli ala soweli?”. I am unable to answer.
The elephant asks me, “Haley, am I a soweli?”

In Tuki Tiki, all living organisms are ka, including humans. A very tiny minority of Tokiponists use that in Toki Pona, but don’t count on being understood.

You’d have a better chance using an illustrated animal encyclopedia. “Which ijo—thing—inside this book is your favorite?”

Toki Pona is ill-equipped to ask this question without context.

The word tonsi is broken (shattered) and broken (nonfunctional).

Four silhouettes that respectively represent nonbinary people, gender non-conforming people, intersex people, and transgender people, melt into each other. On the right side, it says “tonsi nanpa seme?”. These disparate identities, oftentimes mutually exclusive, are all tonsi.

The word tonsi always requires context, which, let’s face it, is pretty much always the English label that tonsi subsumes.

The Toki Pona Dictionary (Ku) lists four main definitions for tonsi. (But not in this order.)

The first one is “nonbinary”. This much is uncontroversial; everyone who uses tonsi recognizes this sense.

The second one is “gender non-conforming”. Already is Castle Tonsi crumbling into the sand on which it’s been built: people who are very clear about being neither men nor women, bundled in with people who are very clear about being men or women. At least one of these gender minorities is gonna feel the erasure.

The third one is “intersex”, and that’s broken for the same reason. Take the Olympic runner Caster Semenya for example. She qualifies for the definition of “intersex”, but she hates that label. She’s, as she says, “a different kind of woman”.

The fourth one is “transgender”. Do note, though, that it’s marked as “alternate usage” and warned to be “controversial” in the sona.pona wiki and the nimi.li dictionary. And I agree. Under this fourth definition, I’m supposed to be a meli tonsi, but my binary trans heart rejects this entirely like a neodymium magnet.

There is a speech bubble coming from out of frame that says “tonsi”. I stare blankly into space, with a “Loading...” symbol above my head. Which tonsi are you talking about?

Why are we four flattened into the same label, despite our pronounced and conflicting differences?

In addition, I never know, and I couldn’t know, which tonsi anyone’s talking about toki pona taso!

*toki pona taso is a Toki Pona phrase meaning “in Toki Pona only”.

With other words, I at least have a vague idea of what it means. Is it broader than the speaker intends? Sometimes. Have I misinterpreted it? God, I hope not, but realistically, often. But I do have a vague idea.

I haven’t the foggiest with tonsi. Do you mean “nonbinary”, “gender non-conforming”, “intersex”, or “trans”? ’Cause it can’t be all of ’em, that would be pointless!

The “gendern’t nasin” doesn’t fix this.

I have an X mark made of duct tape over my mouth. I try to say “mi meli. mi tonsi ala.”, but the words “meli” and “tonsi” are blacked out in the speech bubble.
Out of sight, out of mind, still in existence.

Many Tokiponists hence adopt the “gendern’t nasin” and eschew gendered terms altogether, but that’s only the illusion of a fix. It only censors our ability to talk about the problem.

*nasin is a word meaning “road” literally, and “method” figuratively. In this case, it refers to a personal dialect of Toki Pona.

The majority of Tokiponists will call me tonsi because I’m trans. And in the gendern’t nasin, I can’t even protest about this. I can’t express how important it is to me that I’m a woman. I’m not allowed to vent about my dysphoria. This nasin silences me instead of fixing the root cause of the problem.

Every society in recorded history has had men and women. The gendern’t nasin cuts out a gigantic slice of the human experience, rendering it invalid and inexpressible.

Are trans women women, or what?

There are two trays: a blue one marked “man” and a red one marked “woman”. I happily peek my head out of the woman tray.
The gender binary is comfy once I’m on the right side of it!

I’ve heard indignant complaints on Reddit from binary trans people, wishing that Tokiponists would respect their identity as men and women, and stop tonsi-ing them away from cis men and women. I feel the same.

We all know the gender binary, right? In my mind, trans men are men and trans women are women.

It should be noted, though, that lots of binary trans people identified both as their gender and as tonsi. I personally could never, but it seems like some binary trans people aren’t as repulsed to being misgendered like this.

If I could just snap my fingers and remove all meaning from tonsi except “nonbinary”, I’d do it immediately. But apparently, many binary trans people would stop me because they don’t see the problem with that word.

A purple figure points at me and says “o tawa weka tan poki ni!”. I look up at its face, frowning.
“Stop trying to get picked, filthy assimilationist!” Fortunately, not many tonsis are this direct.

By the way, this Lipamanka guy (u/misterlipman) in that thread gave me the major ick. They said “all trans people are inherently outside the binary”.

This is invalidating as all hell. Whatever happened to “trans women are women”? I’m disqualified from being just as much of a woman as any cis woman, just because I was born with a dick?

(Very long footnote providing background on lipamanka's views on tonsi. Click here to collapse it and skip past.)

This is nothing new, either. In a now-redacted version of their “semantic spaces dictionary”, they wrote this:

tonsi describes any divergence from the [W]estern gender binary of male and female. [P]eople may choose for themselves if they exist within its semantic space, ED.: Practically speaking, this is not true because all trans people are assumed to be tonsi by the majority. much like the other gender words in [T]oki [P]ona. tonsi, mije, and meli are not mutually exclusive at all. [O]ne can be one, two, all three, none, or even something else. ED.: How?

It’s worth exploring what it means to be a binary trans person in [T]oki [P]ona. Even though trans women are women and trans men are men, transness is always in opposition to the western gender binary, which is founded in the constructed concept of biological sex. ED.: This framing is deeply invalidating to binary trans people like myself!! When binary trans people are automatically labeled “tonsi” or “always [against] the gender binary”, it implies that we are, at least in part, fundamentally a different gender from a man or woman, just like calling a trans man and trans woman “transman” and “transwoman” in English. Hence, many people use tonsi for binary trans people with this understanding. It’s good to check with someone if they identify under the umbrella of “tonsi,” but it’s rare to see a binary trans person in the [T]oki [P]ona community who doesn’t identify with the word tonsi. ED.: It’s rare to see a person in the Toki Pona community ask a binary trans person if they identify with the word tonsi, instead assuming that not one trans person feels misgendered by it.

The current version of lipamanka’s Semantic Spaces Dictionary says this:

tonsi describes any divergence in gender from the expectations of a european patriarchy. [...] ED.: This starting sentence shows that lipamanka still believes in their invalidating conceptualization of trans people as “inherently outside the gender binary”, albeit while being less overt in expressing that belief.

Many ask, including myself: can tonsi be used to describe binary trans people as well? Here are some notes on usage, based on an ongoing study ED.: Calling a Google Forms poll a “study” is ballsy. with a sample size of about 300, including 50 binary trans people:

  • 7/10 binary trans people use "tonsi" to describe themselves
  • 7/10 binary trans people use "tonsi" to describe binary trans people, in general
  • only 1.8/10 binary trans people are upset when others use "tonsi" to describe them
  • 3.5/10 binary trans people believe that "tonsi" should NOT be used to describe binary trans people as a group. ED.: Emphasis is mine. 2.5/10 didn't care one way or the other. 4/10 believe that "tonsi" SHOULD be used to describe binary trans people as a group.

It's always good to check before calling someone "tonsi" directly, ED.: Again, this rarely happens. but know that most binary trans [T]oki [P]ona speakers won't be upset when called "tonsi." ED.: 18% is 1 out of 5 or 6. Technically 4/5 or 5/6 is “most”, but this is not a risky generalization you should make. The odds are worse than a Russian Roulette (1/6, 16.66%). As for binary trans people generally or as a group, this usage is controversial among binary trans people. Use this data to guide your own usage. "should" has a slight edge on "should not," ED.: Cf. my Bluesky post below for my disagreement. especially considering that the people who don't care are likely fine with the usage and just won't advocate that others SHOULD use it. A few respondents contacted me to share this sentiment.

Lipamanka continues to be appallingly blasé about bundling all trans people under tonsi despite the data showing the following:

Haley Halcyon @2gd4.me 2025 July 18 15:23

Even if lipamanka’s poll shows that 70% of binary trans people claim `tonsi` for themselves, it’s also true that 40% vs. 35% of us are split between “yes binary trans people are `tonsi`” and “no we are not”. Plus, the poll was spread to active Toki Pona servers, not all trans people who speak it.

On the opposite side of the conflict, there are nonbinary people identifying as a “tonsi man/woman” or a “male/female tonsi”. And this just feels like an oxymoron to me. Are you nonbinary or not?

Let’s just pretend for a second that using tonsi as a headnoun means “nonbinary”, and using tonsi as a modifier means “transgender”. I’d be able to wrap my head around that, moral quibbles aside.

But in real life, that’s not how tonsi gets used, and that’s why I don’t know how to use the word tonsi. And now, do you know either?

So how could we ever fix this?

I sit down on a chair and think of the word “gender” in various languages.
Why doesn’t Toki Pona have a single, uncontroversial word for “gender”?

In my humble opinion, a word that would be way more useful and capable than a word for “nonbinary gender” is a word for “gender”. If you have that word for “gender”, you can express “nonbinary”.

I didn’t know what to call it at first, but after I mulled over it and talked to others about it, I’ve decided to christen it with the name pete.

pete

As a content word, pete encompasses sex, gender identity, gender roles, and gender presentation.

As a modifier, pete means “of sex/gender”, as well as “sexed/gendered”—i.e. separated along sex/gender lines.

As a transitive verb, when you pete something or someone, you are ascribing a sex/gender upon it, or perceiving it as a sex/gender.

Usage notes

pete is to be understood as a hypernym of meli, mije, and tonsi, atnd to be a word used to discuss under which hyponym a specific person or thing belongs. pete is not to be understood as inherently a dichotomy—whether between man and woman, or between nonbinary and binary.

Suggested usage

Etymology

from Polish płeć /ˈpwɛt͡ɕ/ (sex, gender) and Thai เพศ phet /pʰeːt̚˥˩/ (sex, gender, costume).

Rationale

Sitelen Pona

A simplified Mars–Venus symbol (i.e. combined male–female symbol). Originally proposed as the glyph for henelo by VSG in his a priori logography for Kokanu.

Asking someone’s gender would be as simple as pete sina li seme? (What’s your gender?). Responding to it would be just as easy: mi mije. (I’m a man.), mi meli. (I’m a woman.), or mi tonsi. (I’m nonbinary—the context of asking someone their own pete should restrict it to this sense).

And here’s the controversial part of my fantasy. It may feel invalidating to all the tonsi at first, but I’m gonna say it: we don’t even need the word tonsi.

While I’m still sitting in the chair, someone behind me wearing rainbow clothing, with rainbow hair, waves a rainbow flag, shouting “mi lon! mi nasa! o pilin nasa ala tawa ni!”. Be here, be nasa, and make people get used to it if you want. Just leave me out of it.

People can say their pete is mije, meli, or ante (different; something else). And in fact, since I see many nonbinary people finding self-esteem in trying to break the gender binary, I can imagine them even describing their pete as nasa (unusual). nasa doesn’t inherently have a negative connotation, after all.

And to lend nasa gender some credibility, there’s another Reddit thread that asked “How would you describe your gender in Toki Pona?”. A few of the respondents used nasa in some way to describe their gender there. So there’s precedent for (some) nonbinary people to think their gender is nasa.

I staunchly feel that both binary and nonbinary Tokiponists would benefit greatly from having a word for gender, even if that means that tonsi must go.

At the very least, please do not call me tonsi in any way.

Conclusion

Smiling, I bow.
My talk is about to end. Thanks for staying around!

I’m not a Tokiponist. I’m banned from most Tokiponist spaces. Lots of Tokiponists have already decided that I’m an irredeemable bigot and firestarter, and not worth listening to. This exclusion makes me profoundly sad.

But I still won’t blame the language for just one word that invalidates me. I want to be able to express my dysphoria and invalidation laconically in Toki Pona. And I want nonbinary people to be able to express their struggles too, and how they differ from binary trans struggles.

If you heard me out all the way through, I couldn’t thank you enough or wish you well enough. Thank you so much for listening!

Haley Halcyon @2gd4.me 2025 July 26 12:17

`tonsi` is broken. It is an overly vague, prescriptivist label that conflates non-binary, trans & intersex people, erasing nuance. As a trans woman, I’m `meli`, not `tonsi`. We need flexible language (like a word for ‘gender’) that respects self-definition.
#TokiPona #Gender

APPENDIX 1: Concerning lipamanka’s August 2025 video

After first publishing this essay, I’ve discovered that lipamanka (the nonbinary “all trans people are outside the binary” dude) has sort of, but not really, addressed the word tonsi in their video “WHY the world’s smallest language is so hard”—weird capitalization not mine. (I do recommend the video for its informativity, by the way. I just disagree with their position on tonsi.)

But first, I want to introduce the concept of “the burden of expression”. It’s a phrase I made up modeled after “the burden of proof”.

Usually, when someone tries to express something, they have the burden of expression to say that thing while balancing clarity with conciseness, being truthful, speaking in good faith, and generally following Grice’s Maxims.

When someone shifts the burden of expression onto someone else, the speaker abandons their duty to communicate cooperatively, and forces that person to correct the speaker or ask clarifying questions. At best, it’s a failure to phrase oneself well. At worst—like when someone calls me tonsi—it’s an erasure or understatement of someone’s identity.

With that out of the way, here’s the transcript of the relevant part of the video (starting at timestamp 10:32).

Some people pointed out specific lexical quirks of Toki Pona, like how the concepts for “nonbinary” and “transsexual” are both covered by the same word, and suggested that it would be impossible to distinguish between these concepts in Toki Pona.

[Transcript of comment shown on screen:]

You can’t express EVERYTHING in Toki Pona. For example, you can’t talk about you being transsexual and not nonbinary.

Yes, this comment is an oversimplification. It’s not that you can’t talk about that at all. I’ve demonstrated that I can in this essay about why tonsi can’t be used to talk about that.

It’s more that the default word that the (English-speaking) Toki Pona community uses to talk about transsexual and/or nonbinary people conflates the two, so the word tonsi can’t talk about you being transsexual and not nonbinary.

But it isn’t! You can describe the act of medical transition easily.1 You can describe the state of not being a man or a woman.2 In cases where someone is only nonbinary, or only transsexual, it is entirely possible to explain what’s going on.

It is entirely possible, but again, Toki Pona and its community pushes the burden of expression onto the people themselves who suffer from the erasure, not the people calling them tonsi and causing the erasure.

Why must binary trans people like me recount our pain of dysphoria and how we have to treat it? After all, in this world, not everyone who needs to transition gets to transition.

Why must the burden of expression fall on us when people assume that an overly broad category suffices for us, when it is inadequate to express what we are inside without us resorting to venting trauma?

And it should be noted that there is considerable overlap between these two groups. I have a lot of friends who are nonbinary, have had top surgery, but have not gone on hormones. The idea that Toki Pona can’t distinguish between this diversity is incorrect.

Lipamanka is correct in the most technical, most pointless way. One must note that the Toki Pona community does not distinguish it most of the time.

Especially when the speaker is both transsexual and nonbinary, it is assumed that the Venn diagram of transsexual, nonbinary, and tonsi is close enough to a single circle, which stamps out the dignity of binary transsexuals (and I guess, of people who say they’re nonbinary without actually doing anything substantial about it).

Lipamanka thinks it’s fine, just difficult, that Toki Pona bundles up apples with oranges into kili. But do they think it’s fine that people who don’t want to be defined by their transness, and want to be seen as equivalent to cis people ASAP, are bundled up with people who want to be defined by their tons-ity, and sometimes—not always—ridicule the former group’s desire to pass and transition as “assimilationist” or as “internal transphobia”? They don’t address that.

In addition, lipamanka being able to talk about the intricacies of being transsexual and/or nonbinary without using tonsi ironically demonstrates that we don’t need tonsi. Let’s see the phrases that lipamanka showed on screen:

1: describing transition

The through line is this: there is no laconic way to describe binary trans people in Toki Pona, without resorting to overgeneralizing them as tonsi, a label that forces us to identify as a second gender, even if we are strictly men/women, purely mutually exclusive from any other gender word.

2: describing being nonbinary

In a perfect world, everyone would see that tonsi is counterproductive and painfully underspecified. Much like it’s hard to mentally picture the scene “soweli li moku e kili.”—What animal is eating what fruit?—it’s hard to wrap your head around the phrase “mi tonsi.” And that Tokiponistic vagueness is exactly the kind of difficulty we don’t want when addressing and respecting the intricacies of gender identity.

TL;DR: Yes, you can talk about being trans and not nonbinary, but who does the disambiguation?

APPENDIX 2: A shout-out, recommendation, and criticism of Tamzin (jan Tansin)’s blog post There Is No Transgender in Toki Pona

In 2025 on September 2, I’ve been made aware of this blog post that discusses the meaning of the word tonsi. I recommend that everyone read it.

Tamzin (for context, a transfeminine nonbinary person to the best of my knowledge) describes how the core meaning of tonsi is defying binary gender norms (“tonsi is that which defies binary expectations of gender.”), and that it only “means transgender” in a very broad political sense (I think the same one Julia Serano uses in Whipping Girl).

They also warn that calling binary trans people tonsi usually misgenders them (“To state the obvious, a binary transgender person’s existence usually does not defy binary expectations of gender.”), but points out some examples where a binary trans person might use tonsi on themselves or an aspect thereof. For the ease of the reader, I’ll provide colloquial English retranslations.

I broadly agree with the points Tamzin makes in their essay; it confirms my intuition of how tonsi is used, how its use for binary trans people stems upon the idea that all trans people are inherently against the binary (at least in some contexts), and how its meaning gets confusing when one tries to coax tons-ity into existing English words.

The only point of contention I have—and it’s a very strong one—is that they support its use as a very broad umbrella term that gets imperfectly translated as “the trans community” (“toki pona doesn’t have a word for any other aspect of being transgender, because those aspects aren’t worth discussing in toki pona. The one exception might be describing the trans community. kulupu tonsi is a reasonable approach when discussing the community of all people who could be called tonsi in any way.”). I disagree, in that I would reject membership in any kulupu tonsi, because my tons-ity is externally imposed, and my discomfort and invalidation at being tonsi-ed doesn’t change whether the person tons-ing me is cis or trans.

Though, in Discord DMs, Tamzin said that they question the very premise that “‘transgender community’ is a pona concept to begin with”. So surprisingly despite their endorsement of the phrase “kulupu tonsi”, we agree on a more fundamental issue as well: that “the” transgender umbrella is too broad and vague for individual people to meaningfully describe their individual lives and identities.

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