Semantic Infiltration

[Blort]

I saw this TikTok and thought it was interesting.

"Semantic Infiltration is the art of forcing your oponents to use your language"

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYbbJAS8/

If you can't access the app, there's more info here https://www.thedp.com/article/2022/11/are-your-words-still-your-own

The examples given are 'pro life' for 'anti abortion'.

Can see a lot of this in the TRA movement.

Trans women/men for transgender. Cis woman for woman. LGBTQIA+ for gay/lesbian. Queer for gay.

Birthing person. Chestfeeding. Inclusive.

The list goes on and on.

Oh ffs. I kept getting an error message when i went to post. I will report the other threads.

A useful term to know thanks, everyday is a school day.

Thought it was great, have never heard the term before. Feel like it explains my unease with pronouns and language etc.

Yes, very useful.

Earlier in this debate (five-six years ago) I spotted how the acceptable terms for transwomen and transmen etc. changed week by week, so that all the time I had to check what terms were now regarded as no longer acceptable, what new terms were added and had to now used or to be called a bigot or in need of re-education or being 'gently corrected.'

After I gave up on that effort of trying to be polite (as it was completely one-sided extra work demands) I noticed that this trend is still ongoing. Now we are supposed to use transmasculine for FtM transitioners etc., but if that becomes common it will be changed.

Not sure if this is part of the semantic infiltration or an additional aspect.

@nepeta yes I know exactly what you mean before I peaked I often had to read an article twice to try to figure out in which sense the other was using language, it is telling how few articles and arguments focussed on the fair treatment of transmen. There were arguments for 'trans people' which actually always seemed to be about giving transwomen the rights which transmen had previously enjoyed whilst granting them precious little in exchange and those which just blatantly centred transwomen, apparently forgetting that transmen existed - once I spotted the pattern it was clear as day.

Like all the articles insisting that this or that transman is entitled to a spot on the men's olympic team, or all the transmen fighting to be sent to the men's prison.

It’s part of the push and pull of any conflict. Every movement influences language.

Anti-trans became TERF became GC became Femalist

GC isn't anti-trans or even anti-trans rights, transpeople should have the same rights as everyone. Femalist is new to me. TERF is used by tras as a slur.

I was thinking the other day of the phrase 'my pronouns are.....'. I wondered what would happen if I were to then ask the pronoun announcer, 'how do you use your pronouns?' Would they have the face to tell me that they're actually instructing me on how to speak?

Didn’t start out that way. You need to read the history.

It's been going on for years. Up until 1987, homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder ... this was semantically infiltrated starting in the 1960s so that any viewpoint critical of homosexuals eventually became known as homophobia. The irony is that phobias are psychiatric disorders - except that the actual emotions exhibited by the people we now call "-phobes" is revulsion and hatred, not fear or aversion.

I know the history.

You made a strange comment then. As a quick synopsis, TERF was originally coined by women defending women’s rights and spaces as a name for themselves in reaction to being called anti-trans by TRAs. Then once TRAs started using it in insults/threats, it became viewed as a slur and TERF was replaced with GC. GC was then linked by TRAs & SocFeminists to “the far right” and other nonsense (ie most recently NAZIs), so now many have moved on to Femalist.

Whatever it's origins, TERF has been recognised in court, one of Maya Forstater's cases I think (I could have that wrong) as a slur. I'm not aware of anyone other than gender identity ideologues linking GC with the far right mostly by slandering and/or labelling KJK. Something that was started by some feminists and gleefully seized on by tras. Never heard the term femalist before and tbh I don't like it. I think it sounds like a mash up of feminist and racist, I'm sorry I'm sure that's not the intention. I can't see myself using it. Happy with GC.

So you didn’t know the history. You kind of need to in order to track semantic infiltration.

I do know the history, I didn't think you wanted me to essentially repeat your post back to you in different words. Waste of my time to type and yours to read.

Ok then. I apologise as I think I was confused by your replies then.

No worries, it can be difficult to distinguish sincerity from sarcasm sometimes

I remember emailing a friend about this some years ago and having to explain to her that now 'woman' didn't always mean what she thought it meant.

I remember being enraged that I was having to play along with the whole mangling of language.

This is not quite the same, in my view, as, say the Lesbian and gay movement, although I have read that being argued online.

For instance, I have read that 'cis' is just the same as introducing 'heterosexual' or 'straight' to allow gays and Lesbians and bisexuals to have their sexual orientation treated equally with the majority.

But 'cis' is not the same thing, because it orders people to believe in an abstract gendered soul which may happen to match the sex of their bodies or not. Most people don't share that belief for themselves, i.e., they don't feel an abstract inner gender identity.

So being told to use 'cis' is not like being told that the opposite-sex sexual orientation is called being heterosexual. The former changes the meaning of the phenomenon discussed by erasing the possibility that many people don't have gender identities at all or that their identities are embodied, based on living in a sexed body.

So what is being pushed and pulled here includes the way everyone is expected to define themselves, even if the demanded changes invalidate most people's actual self-definitions and, in some interpretations, would replace those with deeply sexist and retrogressive new definitions of women and men, say.

I don't think this is the usual type of language change at all.