Sleight of words – Why the function of language matters
Sleight of words – Why the function of language matters
In gender, language is never gender neutral - there is a war afoot and the weapons are words
Before adopting the language of an ideology in the name of kindness, convenience or because one is fearful of the consequences of not putting “your pronouns” in an email signature, always ask yourself what function the language truly serves.
Gender/biology denial is principally a bourgeoise word game, this is why it endlessly offers up ugly new innovations like “cis”, “demisexual” or “transfeminine”, it controls language because when the natives start using the language of a conqueror they offer the significant concession of participating in their own cultural extinction. Language regularises and describes reality. Change language you change reality. Change enough language and you’ll even change the way people think, because what do most people think in if not words? For example, the moment you adopt the philosophical proposition that they are “your pronouns”, gender’s fraud is half executed, because you have already accepted that pronouns are personally property, adornments to be chosen by the speaker.
Except they’re not, of course, “your” pronouns. They belong to a language far, far older than you which allocates pronouns on the basis of biological sex. This magnificent and beautiful English language will outlive you and I of course, but it’s an open question today just how badly this modern gender fad will damage it. Protecting it, and by extension our reality, requires that we analyse closely the conceits of gender and what dark frauds lurk behind even the most innocuous phrases of its absurd lexicon.
“Assigned at birth”
Sex is not “assigned at birth” any more than eye colour is. Doctors can observe the biological sex of a child at 15 weeks pregnancy. Sex selective abortions depend on this and gender has never proffered an answer as to why they still occur in some parts of the world with the frequency they do if the truth was that one waited till birth for assignment. The phrase is palpable nonsense worthy of the mad hatter’s lgbT party. Yet it is repeated, adopted and you will find this obnoxious silly lie in publications as august as serious medical journals all the way through to the Equal Treatment Benchbook. Why?
Well. In gender, medicine is the alpha and omega of all things. Gender needs its clinics and doctors and therapists and castrators and mastectomists and the Orwellian named USA specialists in “informed consent”. One cannot have gender on a desert island. It lives in operating theatres and consultation rooms. So it insists that the sex of a human being, male or female, is “assigned at birth”.
Why? Well, simply ask yourself who is doing the assigning in this situation - the answer is a medic. According to gender, medics capriciously “assign” biological sex seemingly at random, this is turn justifies the unprecedented rise in (mostly female) young people telling doctors they were “assigned” the wrong body. This con trick elevates the medic to hero and villain, god and the devil, for what was once “assigned” wrong will be made right by medicine. Simultaneously, the victim of this open air live experiment on mostly homosexual young people absolves the duped patient of responsibility or agency, they were “assigned”, a mere vessel for an erroneous medical decision, a mistake of a human, a patient waiting to happen years before they ever thought about walking into a surgery.
Never mind most of them are female. Never mind most of them are homosexual.
Except of course I, and many, many others, very much mind. We mind because we see here the most plain evidence of gay conversion therapy there can be. Give us your embarrassingly butch daughter and we will make of her a simulacrum of a heterosexual male – and vice versa. We mind because we see the re-medicalisation of homosexuality, for that is what this is, and that is what the phrase “assigned at birth” is doing. That is its function. It hermetically seals the patient within the theatre of medicine, it problematises and medicalises boys and girls who are just a little different. We used to say in gay rights society should change to accept butch girls and camp boys. Now we say it is not society that should change, but that is them and their bodies that must change by way of surgical correction.
“Cis”
If you call yourself a “cis man” the function of that piece of language is to imply that “man” is a broad category and you are a member of a subset within it. Using the term gives up the claim that “men” are a biologically observable reality, and it gives up the claim that male bodies, socialisation, experiences rooting in the biology of maleness are requirements (or even important descriptors) for being a man. Some language represents a concession, if you say you are “gender critical” (as I’ve argued before), you accept there is a real thing called “gender” and you are a critic of it – you cast yourself in the role of a sort of antagonist. By comparison, calling yourself an “evidence-based rationalist” emphasises an understanding of the world based in basic reality and science, casting the contrary position for the utter fantasy it is. Viewed in this way, if “assigned at birth” is a concession to medical supremacy, cis by comparison is a complete capitulation, because if cis men are men, then trans women are women. That’s the point of this subterfuge. That’s the function. That’s where it leads you. So always ask what the function of language is. Better yet, ask what the strategic function of language is measured against the goals of biology denial, you will invariably tend to find the language is playing these sorts of game if you go a few links down the chain of logic behind most terms and phrases.
The shape of absent words
Why do we not say “detransphobic”? Detransitioners online certainly wear enough abuse and opprobrium for there to be a need for such a term. It would have a function. We could place that word in sentences and wrap it around some of the most appalling abuse social media has to offer. Gender of course insists that there is no discord under the increasingly crowded rainbow, it has nothing to say to the victims of gender so it chooses to have no word for the hate they face all the while it is acute to find hate in all things that oppose it.
Why does gender repudiate the word “homosexual” and try to replace it with “homogendered”? I ask rhetorically of course as gender posits that we are all attracted to immortal gender souls, it knows so little about gay men it imagines that for us the parts of a man’s body that most make him a man are a sort of optional extra one shouldn’t be too fussed about. It says we are “genital fetishists” and “creepy and weird” is we dare express that love, for it would prefer it did not speak its name. It fundamentally abhors the idea that a man might be attracted to a man for his maleness, his penis, his male buttocks, his male torso. It finds same sex attraction repulsive and seeks to enforce shame to banish it. Are you seeing this yet? I trust you are.
So just as we ask what the function of words is, always spot the absence of words, the concepts for which gender has no function.
Words are power
Gender is a power game
Always analyse it tactically
Because it’s playing tactical games with you
I see it in action in my job. Yesterday met a girl, trans identity, very boyish, wants to medically transition. She is same sex attracted but sees herself as male. Everyone refers to her as if she was male. Trauma, tick, neurodiverse, tick, lesbian, tick, threatens suicide to parents and everyone else if transition questioned and pronouns denied, tick. This was a lovely, vulnerable child. It’s so so sad and horrific that trans is now so normalised. I challenge it, and treat it as a safeguarding concern, but my workplace celebrates and promotes it.
(A lesbian just won I’m a Jungle whatever it’s called, but it’s reported as first LGBTQ+ .. everything gay and lesbian is😡😡😡😡)
Spot on, Dennis. Such a relief to have GMN and the LGB Alliance in our corner.