"Gender" is surrender

Why it is never wise in any battle to use the words of your opponents

Are you “gender critical”?

Do you find yourself debating the existence of “gender identity”?

Have you discussed the unprecedented surge in “gender dysphoria”?

If you have, you may have unintentionally ceded linguistic territory in a battle principally waged in the sphere of language. Being a creature of language, gender often hides it’s true intentions in linguistic tricks and frauds, it empties words of meaning and where they stubbornly convey truth it simply obliterates and replaces the inconvenient ones.

Thus double mastectomies are euphemised to excise their visceral nature and become “top surgery”. Gay men unwilling to join the church of the gender borg are castigated as “genital fetishists” just as our sister, lesbians, are insulted as “sexual racists”. Us homosexuals, who so often face vilification and ostracisation from our families are possessed, according to those who insult us, of “cis privilege”. This is a lexicon of deceit and inversion and if you start using it, you are already adopting the new language of your imperial masters.

There’s a reason the abortion debate in the US splits into “pro life” and “pro choice”, each side positions itself a positively in favour of a virtue. I’ve written before on the significance of words in this debate and described them as the walking wounded of the gender wars, but we have a chance, if we think about the words we use, to escape this trap.

Now think about the fact you’ve boxed into a corner and may have described yourself as “gender critical”. But perhaps you are no such thing. There is a modern craze of unscientific and immoral biology denial and perhaps you are simply pro reality / pro sex realism / pro biology. You didn’t change, the world around you did. Radically.

Let’s take an example of how “gender” distorts debate and discussion and consider the effect of the term “gender dysphoria” and what it does to discourse.

I suggest we need to stop saying "gender dysphoria" and start saying "body dysmorphia" because gender is a fiction which blurs and blunts debate, even saying the word is making peace with fantasy and leads inevitably to the underlying premise - that there is such a thing as gender and a gender identity. That conceals the Wizard of Oz like truth - that behind the curtain of gender are unimpressive flailing ancient sexist stereotypes.

Body Dysmorphia by comparison accurately locates precisely what we're dealing with here, particularly in the case of young people persuaded by the fools and ghouls of gender that surgical and chemical correction is a substitute for self and social acceptance - the gay conversion therapy of our time - gay conversion, you guessed it, by gender.

Gender Dysphoria, by contrast, is designed to suggest a single location for trauma and leads inevitably to heavy medical apparatus of gender to assuage it - it is a conceit designed to see only gender and ignore comorbidities, bullying, abuse or anything outside of gender. It is a con designed to smother the diagnostic process and lead to only one inevitable outcome - more gender.

Using the phrase "Body Dysmorphia" is expedient as it cleaves clear blue water between the children lined up like cattle for surgery and the adult transvestites who would never countenance the loss of the things they hold most dear. BD thus drives a wedge accurately telling us who is subject to the crippling mental health issues visited on them by cynical and stupid adults and who is not.

Brave and brilliant women

Gender, like "queer theory" can only win when it scuttles round in the shadows, the precision of language is an enemy to it because it casts light on what is really going on - for this reason we need to strip the word "gender" from this debate so far as we can - by using it we are conceding philosophical space.

The tension and distinctions between gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia offers you a glimpse of the underlying reality at play here, the tough, cold, surgical horrors that these words float on top of. It offers a useful vignette into how the principal aim of the lexicon of gender is to obfuscate, to reframe, to blur, to make unclear, to keep you off balance such that horrors can be waved through in the name of the great religion - the demands of the flesh hungry gender gods presiding over the bodies of so many young people.

Now continue the exercise…….

What is “gender affirmation” medical care. If gender is an illusion and zealots are the magicians, what, precisely, is being affirmed? How can one affirm that which is not there? One might as well affirm a ghost or a gendered soul. What is being affirmed?

If there’s nothing behind the curtain that what is most often being affirmed, as Dr. Hilary Cass has been astute to notice, is for the vast majority of children a passing phase that is often the product of other issues, “comorbidities” to use the medical term. It’s unhappiness. It’s bullying at school. It’s homophobic parents who can’t handle camp sons or butch daughters. It’s the normal desperately unhappy state human teenagers are apt to experience with the development of their sexed body. Most of all what is being “affirmed” here is the regressive and depressing suggestion that boys must be masculine and girls feminine and any deviation must be met with medicalisation. It is the return of homosexuality to the operating table. They may not be attaching electrodes to us anymore but make no mistake, this is homophobic violence by surgery and it is the homophobic correction of kids who dared to be different.

So it is. Once you strip away the engine of unreality you see all these things. And you see that what is really being proposed here is lifelong surgical and chemical correction of being different.

Where you see gender you first will see a lie.

Then when you lift up the word you will see what the lie is concealing.

Then you will be horrified.

Then you will resolve never to cede language to this madness.

Oh, and with reference to image above, do it with the word “Queer” too.

Once one sees the chicanery of gender in language, once you unplug from the Matrix and see the lies you will see them everywhere you see the G word, because G is a lie, that’s why it must silence and cancel and make people fearful to speak, (as Helen Joyce pointed out brilliantly in an interview here).

We must untether our language from that of our opponents, it is their greatest and most dangerous subterfuge.