Language bank

[JellySaurus]

I've come across a couple of phrases today that describe clearly aspects of issues that endanger women and vulnerable people.

Sometimes it's difficult to find terminology that people not well-informed about this issue will understand (like trans woman - adjective plus noun - unless you know what's being talked about you would think this phrase describes an adult human female who is trans, ie identifies as a man).

This is not about namecalling, but about clear, informative language.

• Gender supremacy

• A man who ideates a female persona

Anybody care to add other helpful phrases?

I thought you might have meant a bank for endangered language like there is for seeds from plants being destroyed in the rain forest.

Sex
Homosexual
Woman

for example

You are aware that “trans” is not an adjective, I presume? This is obvious as the attached noun doesn’t fit with it being an adjective. “Trans” is part of a compound noun.

Compare, for example:
Brown horse: adjective plus noun
Clothes horse: compound noun describing something which is not a horse.

“Men who claim they are women” is a very useful phrase, in my opinion.

I think the second one is a bit intellectual, iyswim. How about just man who claims to be a woman, which I've seen used? And vice versa of course.
Sex realist - for those who understand that sex is real, fixed at conception and immutable
Sex denialist - for the opposite
Gender reifying - gender affirming
Elective double mastectomy
Breast implants
Sex mimicking surgery

gender questioning child

Are you sure?

Brown horse = adj+noun = a horse that is brown
Clothes horse = noun+noun = a horse for clothes

Trans is not a noun. Transwoman cannot be understood as a woman for trans, or a woman and/with a trans.

Trans is not a stand-aone adjective, but a prefix meaning a change, as in transubstantiation.

That is why the term transwoman is so dishonest - it implies that a woman has changed, when the person it refers to is not and never was a woman. The gender supremacists try to equate trans with as tand-alone adjectives such as brown.

Men who pretend they are women is more descriptive to me. You cannot claim to be something you can not experience in reality.

Man role playing as female

I'm not keen on that @Fieldfly Do you have to have a role as a female. Can't you just be one. Isn't it role play that got us in this mess to start with?

Gender distressed child instead of trans child

Transvestite

I think we should stop using the terms 'transgender' and 'trans', which came into use due to the campaigning by Press for Change whose aim was to blur the boundaries between the old categories of transvestite and transsexual.

The older terms state more explicitly who is being referred to - nobody is in any doubt what is meant by a male transvestite or a male transsexual.

And when people want to apply these very adult concepts to children they'd have to talk about children being transvestites or transsexuals.

I agree, especially given that it would create severe dissonance to talk about children that way. But transsexual is another deliberately unclear term: nobody transitions to the other sex. People still believe that a male transsexual is somehow not a man.

IIRC the origin of ‘transsexual’ was in reference to sexuality.

It comes from the same compound combos as homosexual/heterosexual/bisexual and was intended to describe a ‘sexual invert’ - a woman with a man’s sexual orientation/interest and a man with a woman’s sexual orientation/interests.

Obvs that’s a load of stereotype clap trap but if you think ‘a transsexual is masculine lesbian primarily attracted to heterosexual women’ and ‘a transsexual is feminine gay man primarily attracted to heterosexual men’ it makes a lot more sense to add the T to the LGB than if you think ‘a transsexual is a person with surgically modified sex characteristics’ which is what it came to mean before it was jettisoned in favour of the new, genderist words.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_inversion_(sexology)

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_inversion_(sexology)

I’m profoundly interested in the topic - a couple of my go-tos are already suggested, I tend towards ‘gender distressed’ for my own child (along with genderweird or genderspecial to describe the adolescents who use the language of transgenderism to describe a subcultural tribe more akin to being goth or emo than as a manifestation of anything likely to be seen at The Beaumont Society meetings).

I probably can’t post many of my real-world phrases on Mumsnet just yet. Maybe another 6 months or so! They aren’t particularly rude, just matter-of-fact!

Helen Joyce has some good phrases, I can’t remember exactly but something along the lines of ‘Men who claim a female soul’.

Surrogacy needs a similar language bank!

When we use the terms of gender identity ideology we do their work for them.

Agree on “Men who claim they are women” or my preferred version: "men".

Good thread.

A basic but effective one is to point out that GI is:

sexist

That basic statement can be used in so many discussions

Male supremacism, the larger movement that includes genderism.

Being female, whatever you do is 'living as a woman'. It's only tile-playing if you deliberately perform stereotypes associated with femininity. For me that would be walking around in heels and a pencil skirt, for example, as I would not be doing it naturally but performing it.

It's rather like playing Dungeons & Dragons: if you LARP a wizard, you're not a wizard, you are performing stereotypes that your fellow gamers will accept as 'wizard'.

Perhaps it should be added to this vocab list:

• LARPing - Live Action Role-Playing

Compound nouns are not necessarily made up of two nouns. Daughter-in-law is one, for example, where the noun “daughter” is not strictly speaking true. Trojan horse is also not a horse, but has a more abstract meaning.

So no, I’m not sure, but I do believe the testerical insistence on the gap that has relatively recently been inserted into the noun “transwoman” is entirely intended to propagate the myth that “trans” is an adjective, which it is not. The insistence that it is an adjective is then used to “prove” that the noun “woman” must be correct.

I've started to use men who say they are women. I know it's longer but I'm not using their words.

Trans space woman trans woman is definitely used by transactivists as an adjective I've been told it is the same as small woman, talk woman, black woman, disabled woman. Or they throw that trans chemist definition about.

Ive just been reading the prison equalities report and it uses transgender female (a male) and transgender male (a female) very confusing. They could do with a proper list if terminology.

A glossary on this board would be really useful, especially for new people. It was all bewildering when I first joined.
The only problem is there are many words we aren't allowed to use! Really it needs to ordered alphabetically to be useful.

Sex Matters have a glossary in their media document which I think is a great resource.
sex-matters.org/posts/publications/media-handbook-on-sex-and-gender/

Perhaps we could encourage Sex Matters to have a web page just for this glossary so we can link to it.

Once upon a time I used ‘transwoman’ as it seemed polite.
The whole space nonsense and that insistence that ‘trans’ is an adjective has stopped me using it.
My preference now is ‘men who want to be women’, which seems neutral but factual, and clear to people not following the debate.

Same here. I first heard Helen Joyce using "men who want to be woman" and apart from the mad TRAs who say they were always women, it's a robust phrasing.

I've stopped using 'transition' as it conveys the impression that changing sex is actually possible. I say 'drugs and surgeries' instead. Disrupting your endocrine system with hormones at levels your body isn't designed for, and having surgeries on various bits of your body is not equivalent to 'changing sex' and we should stop pretending it is.

Self-inflicted endocrine disorder. I suspect this applies mostly to females living under the influence of testosterone and induced menopause.

Self-inflicted? Or medically-induced?

It's appalling that the medical profession applies harmful drug-regimes, creating life-long damage, as treatment for emotional or mental distress.

Pumping girls' and women's bodies full of toxic chemicals for no good reason will be this century's lobotomy shame.