Twisting my words
One of the strangest things about the clash over gender identity is the inadequacy of language to resolve it. It’s strange to be full of words and yet know they won’t bridge the divide. I’ll write words down and they turn on me. Anything I say comes out twisted, inside-out.
If you have friends or loved ones who identify as trans, you know what I'm talking about when I say the meaning gets lost. Words that should mean something don’t. Words that should connect separate.
What do we mean when we talk about self-acceptance? To trans activists, self-acceptance means changing everything about yourself, from your body and your name to your once-thoughtless gestures, so they won’t give you away.
So if I said to a friend of mine who identifies as trans: "Let's stop pretending. There's nothing wrong with you the way that you are. Do you really need these injections, these surgeries, these lifts in your shoes?" what would get through?
It makes me think of how the Chinese government splashes the words 'freedom' and 'democracy' on everything, so that those words lose their potentially subversive meaning and become useless to the people who might be drawn to them or need them. In the gender mess, 'self-acceptance' is a concept that should provide a way to question the self-rejecting teardown operation that gender transition represents. But instead 'self-acceptance' becomes accepting yourself as transgender.
What does it mean to say that something is a delusion or that a claim defies reality?
If there’s no reality of the situation, what does it mean to say that someone got hurt or that someone did something wrong? How can we talk about harm if everything—mastectomies, hysterectomies—can be written off as part of someone’s “gender journey”? Does that mean no one was responsible, nothing was preventable (and why should any of it have been prevented?), no one was harmed? Does it mean that nothing whatsoever happened? That we simply ‘let’ someone—a child, perhaps—be their ‘true self’ and then their true self changed?
There's a horror in the failure of language here, in the gap that opens up between language and action, when girls become “boys"—not in reality, but in the way we talk about reality, and elective mastectomies on girls become “reconstructive chest surgery” on “boys.” Exploratory therapy or letting a kid go through puberty as nature intended becomes “conversion therapy.” Drastic, life-altering medical interventions get reconceptualized as non-interventions. Hysterectomies, oophorectomies, and phalloplasties become “gender-affirming care.”
There's a terrible inexorability to language like this: We did the only thing that we could have done at the time. Then the times changed. That’s all. It was nobody’s fault. Nothing could have unfolded in any other way. (Notice all the passive voice?)
And there's another kind of horror in trying to speak as clearly as you can and being misunderstood and monstered because the people you need to communicate with have decided in advance that you're driven by bigotry and ignorance.
What happens when we run out of language before we run out of life, dilemmas, questions, conflicts?
Indeed, this is a huge problem. I am working on writing my testimony for a bill in the WA state legislature that would limit public records disclosures about biological males being locked up with women in our state prison. If I refer to the people being transferred to women's prisons as "men," (the radical feminist approach, and in complete accord with how I see reality) that will be deemed highly offensive. If I refer to these individuals as "trans women" then I am repeating something that doesn't fit my own perception of reality. I do not believe men can be women of any kind.
"Biological males" is the compromise term I chose, even though that is not going to gain me much trust with those who disagree with me either. At least I am making the point that I am talking about differences in biology amongst humans. The bigger, stronger ones with weaponizable body parts. I do not want to be inflammatory, and I truly want to communicate with the Senators, who for the most part support the bill which they probably truly believe is protecting "vulnerable trans people" by denying information about them to the public. I do not wish to cause pain to anyone. I want people's ears to stay open to the very real pain being caused to women who must live there, locked up with men, many who have histories of abuse and rape. But I can only compromise so much: I do not subscribe to the tenets of this gender ideology and believe it to be very harmful, especially when coded into law as is happening right now in my state and everywhere in the world. Language has been gagged and chained, which makes communication with anyone who has subscribed to these religious beliefs so challenging in this moment.
Ah, the irony ... a piece on the inadequacy of language, perfectly expressed.
Thank you for this. I struggle with this, too, every time I try to express a gender-critical view on Twitter, or in comments to media pieces, or in letters to government officials.
When you've immersed yourself in this issue, you know even as you try to capture your thoughts what the automatic response is going to be to every word you use -- the accusations of hate, of wanting people not to exist, of wishing or calling for violence, of thinking "real women" are only those who can bear children. It feels Orwellian, as if there is a concerted intent to strip away my language so that I can't express -- or even think -- wrongthought.