Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
Loading the language to sell dissociation, goods, and services
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 21 January 2022 – gender:hacked
(**Note that I’m going to use a word I genuinely abhor here—‘problematic’—because in this context I’ll use it to refer to the process of *labeling something* in order to dismiss or marginalize it, typically without explaining your reasons…)
It’s no mystery at this point that trans activism loads ordinary language with objectionable associations and pushes its own bizarre language of disembodiment as an ‘inclusive’ alternative.
And it’s no coincidence that this loading of the language alienates trans people from the everyday language that everyone else uses (intending no offense) and drives trans people ever more tightly into the embrace of an insular and manipulative community.
‘Woman’ is an obvious case. Every language in the world has a word that refers to adult human females—women, 여자들, wanawake, wahine, feminae—except for 21st-century Anglophone genderists, that is. It’s gotten to the point where the only people it’s unproblematic to refer to as ‘women’ in ultra-woke circles are males who identify as such.
But because there’s an obvious need for a word to refer exclusively to half of humanity, we find ourselves shuffling through unsatisfactory, inaccessible, and often downright insulting alternatives: birthing bodies, gestators, menstruators, cervix-havers, AFABs We can fight over whether ‘woman’ is a sex-word or a gender-word or asex-and-gender-word—and we will!—but what’s truly remarkable is what happened to the most obvious alternative: female.
Nowhere is the trans community’s loading of language more clear than when we consider the words ‘female’ and ‘male,’ words that refer to reproductive roles not just among humans but across the animal kingdom.
For the overwhelming majority of society, ‘female’ and ‘male’ refer simply and unproblematically to sex. These words don’t imply a right or wrong way to be male or female. ‘Female’ and ‘male’ don’t say anything about identity. They’re ideal for use in scientific or medical settings where gender-sensitivity forbids the use of ‘woman’ and ‘man.’
Yet you can lose your Twitter account or find yourself accused of hate speech for referring to a biological male as male, and get pilloried for being exclusive by referring to the existence of ‘females.’
A dear trans friend of mine said whenever they hear the word female it automatically means “not me.” Better to be a body with a vagina, which makes unwanted body parts sound incidental, not elemental. In the trans community, ‘female’ has thus accumulated all the baggage of the community’s own regressive sex-role stereotyping and inability to separate sex and gender: Females should be this way, not that way; I’m AFAB but not female.
But the word’s real crimes are more basic.
‘Female’ coherently picks out the sex class that can bear young and excludes males (never mind that biology excluded males first). ‘Female’ keeps women together as a sex class and keeps women’s bodies intact, rather than spinning us off into body parts, functions, and services… And it’s an unfashionable reminder of our embodiment, our humanity, and that we’re animals—none of which sits comfortably with the new global empire of disembodiment that’s pushing the sex trade, surrogacy, virtual reality, and transgenderism all at once…