Where does all this weird language come from?

[speakingwoman]

Hi, just wondering if someone can help me trace the history of the terms that we hear in modern discourse around trans issues. I had assumed that "erasure" and being "erased" were very modern terms but just saw "erased" used in "An Angel at My Table" so it's not as old as I thought. Also the concepts of "violence", "literal violence" and "identity" which sound absurd but seem fraught with meaning.

Also if someone can help me understand the history of this modern tendency within Universities to shut down wrongful thinking/speech. My suspicion is that people saw Germany's successful banning of Nazi propoganda post-war and wanted to use the same techniques for slightly less apocalyptic issues and have been figuring out ways to do this ever since.

The reason for asking is that I'm pondering whether it's best to avoid the modern language altogether. The most effective techniques seem to involve much more old-fashioned down-to-earth language (I'm thinking of JustineMumsnet on the radio).

I also have this suspicion that if we adopt what I call "erasure" language we're playing on the other side's pitch.

I'm not trying to police other people's language. I'm just wondering whether I should be trying to understand and use these terms or whether it's better to see where they came from and reject them (in the way I know how to do with, for instance, certain jargon in education circles).

Great post seafret - I hadn’t thought of framing it like that but you’re right.

The way that language can then be used to dehumanise others is striking - menstruators is one step away from breeders and that to me is chilling. When we can dehumanise women like that we can reduce them to nothing. And so much of the imagery thrown around is like this - the womb transplant stuff from last week for example. Treating women as suppliers of parts.

Useful jargon: knowing when to use "I" or "me"
Non-useful jargon: using "myself" every time

I pretty much refuse to use any of this language. The more it circulates the more credence it gains. It can also obscure the issues from people who are trying to become more informed. To be honest, I found some of the threads on this board initially very impenetrable (despite a postgraduate education in the social sciences) due to the jargon.

It took me a while to work out that transwoman was a man who was transitioning or who had transitioned, rather than a woman who had done so.

The language and issues need to be set out as clearly as possible for women’s sake.

I live in a semi rural area surrounded by many nice, conservative, middle-aged and elderly women who are going to be unaware of this or ignore it as confusing PC twaddle that doesn’t affect them until the day they find a man in their grand-daughters’ changing room or conducting their smear test.

"The more it circulates the more credence it gains"

I think that's right.

when I'm helping a trainee solicitor draft a reply to a stupid letter full of "We are surprised that...s" and "We fail to understand why....s" and "Do you mean nonesenseA or nonsenseBs?"

I talk to them a lot about not playing on the other side's pitch, not letting them set the agenda.

But here on mumsnet I just use all sorts of jargon I don't really understand and which is probably meaningless and all I do is increase the circulation of that jargon.

I need to sit myself down and have a word with myself.

How malleable are such a generation? How can they take on truly scary powerful regimes? How can they stand up for themselves against real oppression when they cannot argue?

Yes to this. I have been vaguely thinking along these lines for a while, but this sums it up beautifully.

Maybe I said the same as your last paragraph on a trans thread yesterday, off topic but this to me is the worrying thing that so many 'normal/everyday' women are going about their lives, with their own worries and they know nothing of what is happening and how our everyday lives are being changed by a minority who already have human rights protection. How has it come to this and why are politicians, police, schools, the press, broadcasting etc etc buying in to it. Seconding noqont too, frightening.

Okay, I have to admit something here... I'm a postmodernist. I wrote my thesis on Valery's concept of the Total Phenomenon with reference to cultural artifacts.

Don't hate me. And here's why you shouldn't hate me!

It strikes me that when people reference postmodernism, they aren't actually talking about postmodernism but something else that I suspect might be a deviant form of neo-elite Marxist thought (read: twisted batshittery that centres the preoccupations of the self using the parameters of class analysis). Jordan Peterson is really bad for this mistake, as is a lot of the intellectual dark Web.

At root, postmodernism claims that people's experiences of existence are so radically different from one another that we can be said to operate in different universes, that we each live on our own worlds of meaning and perception.

I cannot think of one instance where a thinker or writer claims that this means there cannot be "overlaps" that prove the existence of a material reality because that would be stupid. In fact, my thesis was about, to all intents and purposes, how one can locate material reality through a postmodern lense. What postmodernism does is widen the picture, recognising for example, that the world and perceptions of a Bangladeshi female trade unionist will be radically different to those of a Central European dairy farmer, not that one of them somehow does not see objects where the other one does. If you are walking into a lamppost, postmodernism does not claim that the lamppost will erase itself from reality just because you don't "see" it or refuse to see it.

To me, a lot of the language involved in trans issues seems to be more akin to old Soviet language mechanisms, rather than postmodernism, which is why I say I think the culprit is a twist form of neo-Marxism, and why it maps so well onto Orwell's exposures. This is where you can state something does not exist and it then politically does not exist.

What activists are trying to do is force an "unseeing" of material reality. And I cannot think of a way that this relates to postmodernism, because postmodernism is about recognising instances of "unseeing". It's at odds.

The mental health stuff is really interesting.

The fusion of those terms with the ideas originating from contemporary critical theory is especially troubling - however, as long as we remember that this is indeed a smoke and mirrors strategy designed to exclude as many people as possible from the debate, it loses it’s power.

Women cannot be erased because those that would like to replace us cannot perform womanhood without simultaneously reminding society of biological women and our inimitable (reproductive) bodies.

This is why they are so keen on divorcing the words that describe us, female, girl, woman, from the material realities of our female bodies, good or bad.

Menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, lesbianism, gynaecological cancer - they need us to shut up about all of it for the plan to work.

"To me, a lot of the language involved in trans issues seems to be more akin to old Soviet language mechanisms, rather than postmodernism, which is why I say I think the culprit is a twist form of neo-Marxism, and why it maps so well onto Orwell's exposures. This is where you can state something does not exist and it then politically does not exist. "

Apologies I just can't even face reading the postmodernism bit of your post but I like this bit quoted.

The Havel quote from another post analysing what it means for a greengrocer to display a "Workers of the World Unite" banner in his/her window was very interesting and helpful on this.
If you do an advanced search for Havel na Hrad that should pop it up.

To me, a lot of the language involved in trans issues seems to be more akin to old Soviet language mechanisms, rather than postmodernism

I read something a while back (and I cannot for the life of me remember where, argh..) about soviet hijacking of postmodernism as a propaganda/espionage tool. It skirted with the rather paranoid in places - I think their argument was that postmodernism had been poisoned by soviet spies/plants in order to weaken western academic critical thinking and that a lot of this is the result of that.) I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t understand a lot of it - it was VERY dense and I am no philosophy expert...

Well, I recall the great spoof physics pomo papers:
www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
As stated above, I'll admit post-modernism sounds trivially obvious? But there are some 'interesting' stuff like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativity -- which to me, since Sapir and Whorf apparently never worked together and formulated a hypothesis, and since linguistic relativity sounds like a serious attempt to borrow from the intellectual weight of relativity in the physics realm (I could be totally wrong here!), which then begins to sound less interesting, or interesting for the wrong reasons.
Whilst some post-modernist ideas may be relevant, perhaps the issue here is one that TRAs make as well -- certain concepts and hypotheses may be useful/relevant/meaningful for some populations (like the concept of an innate inner gender identity), but becomes problematic when someone tries to over-generalize, and expand that notion to areas where it isn't really relevant. Like post-modernist approaches to almost anything, or requiring all of us to have some inner gender identity, even when many of us state that we don't have such.

But then I'm just a simple scientist and mathematician, and unless you are talking about quantum theory, or Godels Incompleteness Theorems, things are usually more straightforward................

I'm concerned about a generation of University students who seem to be applying themselves to learning how to think like a corkscrew.

Someone once posted that a group were asked to read an extract written by Andrea Dworkin, and one of them muttered 'this stuff is easy'. Andrea Dworkin wrote in a way that is intelligible. That isnt cheating.

LisaTheMug
One I learned recently was "counterdemo". It was used to describe a group of violent activists deliberately seeking out and chanting at a small, quiet group of women standing at Speaker's Corner, minding their own business.
I presume that is the "small quiet group of women" who had gathered to move on to a pre-arranged hate rally, who had the forethought to take a loudspeaker with them, who spent quite some time trying to provoke a tiny group of trans and pro-trans people, and eventually resorted to physically attacking one of the programs group so that they could film the rescue attempt?
The group whose prize "victim" was censured by the judge in court for her behaviour, and refused compensation because of her own actions in provoking the fight?

who spent quite some time trying to provoke a tiny group of trans and pro-trans people, and eventually resorted to physically attacking one of the programs group so that they could film the rescue attempt? The group whose prize "victim" was censured by the judge in court for her behaviour, and refused compensation because of her own actions in provoking the fight?

Are you saying the victim deserved it?

To clarify, you seem to be implying that the slightly built, 60 year old female victim, who was punched to the floor by her 6 foot 2 attacker, in some way ‘provoked’ them?

Please do clarify that you wholeheartedly condemn any physical violence

I keep seeing that lie posted around the internet, but fortunately the whole thing was filmed.

If anyone had been provoking the trans activist demonstration the judge would have mentioned it in the court case.

What is also ignored is the fact that Speakers Corner is traditionally dedicated to free speech. The fact that women trying to talk were attacked in Speakers Corner is a demonstration of authoritarianism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner

Answering the OP not rtft.

Much of the jargon is directly appropriated from other rights movements like a growing lavae eating out the unsuspecting host from the inside.

For example women's rights 'misogyny' becomes 'transmisogyny' even though it doesn't make any fucking sense.

'Triggering' of victims of violence became appropriated as 'triggering' for people with disorders who say they with kill themselves if they are told the truth.

'Safe spaces' for victims of rape, child sex abuse, domestic violence, etc to know that they can share their experiences without men present became 'safe spaces' for males to enter sensitive situations for women without challenge, centre themselves and eventually destroy them.

'Intersectionality' was a term for people specifically oppressed according to the overlap of belonging to more than one oppressed class, namely the female sex and the racialised class, this became a term for members of two or more oppressor classes such as being 'male' and 'white' claiming to be just as or more oppressed than Black women because not all people play along and fucking buy their charade.

So to stop using the language that the appropriating authoritarians adopt will leave us with no language, because they will simply appropriate every term we use to describe reality until we have no words left. The lavae will have eaten the host from the inside.

@Bowlofbabelfish Are you saying the victim deserved it?

Didn't the person convicted of assault in this incident, also turn on a female in their own group when they tried to defuse things in the same moments? I wonder if they had also "provoked" and thereby also "deserved" it?

I can understand people who cynically lie and manipulate language to serve their own purposes. I think they are narcissistic psychopaths but I can understand why they do what they do.

What really scares me is the number of people who are willing to totally commit to fighting for the proposition that X are Y without being able to define X or Y.

It’s dumbing down taken to a dystopian extreme. Theres no thinking, only feeling and people are proud of that - questioning is heresy and violence. It really worries me in terms of the political future.

Oooooh, materialist, I read your post and got all excited.

Yes to what you said. A big fat yes.

Crikey, I have to try and organise my thoughts now .... the problem with postmodernism is that you can't map power onto it because it is the recognition of the multiplicity of individual perceptions.

What I think happened was that, in the pursuit of power within the postmodern context, the individual then expanded to become "class" in a kind of "I feel, therefore I am legion."

An example ... you have an individual. Lets call him Bob. Postmodernism validates Bob's interior world and perceptions. Okay. The problem comes when Bob wants power over others. How can he achieve that? He's one ontology competing with millions of others.

It's simple. He borrows from Marxism. He multiplies himself through reflections, and then puts forward those reflections as evidence of a "class". Those reflections are all Bob, but few people realise that. All they see is the power of a multitude, the power of class, and this class using Marxist concepts to push forward their class claims.

Essentially, Bob takes postmodernism, hitches it onto the cart of Marxism and then drives that waggon all the way to the centre of State governance and policy.

Hence the confusion about what the waggon is: postmodernism or marxism? Well, it's both and neither. It's Derrida's zombie: neither one thing or another but both, which I suppose bollocks means the phenomenon is fundamentally postmodernist in form. Bugger.

Any how, I think you can see Bob's process very clearly with TRAs and their activism. They project this notion of a legion, of a class, which is very easy to do when you have millions of mirrors and thousands of strands of communication, which the internet provides. The reality is that this legion doesn't exist; it's a mirage. And it has no realistic or viable claim to interfere and change policies that affect millions of people.

However, the crook in the tail is that the very act of projection recruits. If Bob reflects himself enough to create false evidence of a class, sooner or later, other people will come along and look at that projection and identify with it. "Oooh, look at all these Bobs. So many people must be a Bob. Am I a Bob? Yes, I think I am." So the mirage becomes material.

I got as far as "the reflections are all Bob" .....

An interesting test for this stuff would be how we feel about men interrogating use of specialist language by feminists. It's easy to mock jargon when you are on the other side.

We object to "triggering" and rightly so when used about nonsense like not knowing someone's pronouns etc. But are we careful enough to avoid using it ourselves to describe a fairly mundane daily experience of sexism that isn't really "triggering" in any way that needs such an extreme word?

An interesting test for this stuff would be how we feel about men interrogating use of specialist language by feminists. It's easy to mock jargon when you are on the other side.

We object to "triggering" and rightly so when used about nonsense like not knowing someone's pronouns etc. But are we careful enough to avoid using it ourselves to describe a fairly mundane daily experience of sexism that isn't really "triggering" in any way that needs such an extreme word?