Word

How language is abused and contorted in modern gay politics

Words in LGBT politics are the walking wounded of the bitter culture war. They groan like old soldiers on the crutches of absurdity. They haemorrhage meaning like a patient bleeding out. Their borders and categories have burst like an infected cell wall. The calendar of crimes committed against them are legion, “womxn” was raped some time ago with the non-consensual insertion of the ugly letter x. Innocent pronouns like “they/them” were made the modern slaves of narcissists, transported like convicts into the brutal foreign landscapes of sentences they were never meant to occupy. “Child sex worker” was an unconvincing smear of makeup on the words “raped child” and “genital fetish” replaced “gay” like an acid attack to the face of the beautiful English language.  

Only true free speech can do justice for these victims of crime, but heavy and numerous are the chains of cowardice and censorship which serve this hideous and banal lexicon. This is why we live in a golden age for appalling internet poetry, it is why mainstream gay media squawks like a trained parrot in basic noises it copied like “clap back”, “reach out” and “slam”. It’s why prose in those journals is to nuance what boiling industrial acid is to an innocent passer-by. Whether language conveys paradox is now irrelevant, the primary function of any modern word is the sound it makes to the tribe. Words are devolving into the shrieks of an ape to his troop.   

I recently saw a smiling doctor in a dayglow video describing double mastectomies as “teetus deletus” and tweeted about it. She’s one of the ghoulish lieutenants of newspeak and demonstrates in the piece she is utterly unequal to the personal or emotional catastrophes patients will have struggled with. She is unconstrained by the chains on free speech because she speaks only to those who speak in mantras, who are saturated in code, who treat serious surgery as a childish reauthoring of themselves as easy as modifying a computer game avatar. It is a message quite deliberately designed for and pitched to gender dysphoric youths and it’s cynical levity is breath-taking. It’s an adult speaking like child to children who are making adult decisions.

If you’re so naïve to think you are and will remain homo/bi/hetero-sexual and not homo/bi/hetro-gendered then you are the soon-to-be widows of the home front of 1914 who think the words you sent into battle will be home safe by Christmas. These words are fighting a bitter battle with gay charities now claiming them to be medical inventions, (an Olympic feat of chicanery given said charities active support of real-world medicalisation like “teetus deletus” above). The roaring engine of unreason, the post-modern, post-fact, post-empathy and post-dignity tragedy that is “queer theory” is coming for your words. It will tear them apart like a 5 year old tears apart a machine it cannot rebuild. Be in do doubt, their agenda is nothing short of complete personal sovereignty over truth and fact, each individual a lonely god in their own hermetically sealed parallel dimension, a chilling pocket universe where the creator is going slowly mad staring at the blank sky without stars.

Words were vital vectors of meaning. Now they are wounded and abused. They are a medical emergency in the battle of ideas. We’re in a war here and it’s time to tend to the wounded.