My first tentative introduction to trans issues probably came in 2014. I’d joined an online group the previous year and befriended all sorts of people.
One of those people was someone who went by the name, we’ll say, Patricia. Patricia seemed sweet, was struggling with mental health issues, and would reach out to me most days. After months of speaking, Patricia came out to me as trans and I learnt he was therefore, in fact, male. He explained how hard it was to tell me given that I mattered to him.
It was obvious he was in a lot of distress, so not only did I try to be understanding, but I took on board what he said about the plight of trans identified people, too. I never considered, at that time, what these issues might mean outside of a one on one interaction, or a (then) friendship.
The first red flag was seeing sex denialism creep into the conversations, a few years later. There was a shift, in circles I was in, away from “some people have a mental illness that makes them unhappy about their sex so it upsets them if you keep referencing it” towards “some people are not really their sex and you’re a terrible person if you don’t agree”. It seemed to escalate fast. Suddenly, people were saying lesbians were bigots if they didn’t accept “transwomen” as partners, and discussing the “female penis”.
All of this was the consequence of the language long promulgated in those circles and how, over time, it had successfully obscured the simple reality of who was a man and who was a woman. This is why the internet has been such a perfect place for this ideology to catch on; it is an ideology that has relied on confusing people, by twisting language, and it has found a place where they are denied the evidence of their own senses. Even to, a great extent, their eyes. It is no wonder it has flourished. Not only does everyone now take the internet with them wherever they go, but once successfully convinced of the ideology, they take that with them as well.
Once the sex denialism started I began to look into trans issues more. I had a friend who’d smuggle me YouTube links, like Magdalen Berns videos, and we felt like outlaws as we watched. In our social circles, by this point, to question any of this was unacceptable. In fact, it wouldn’t be long before I was a Big Bad Witch to many people I’d known for years. Nor would it be all that long before a group of them would have a casual discussion about whether it would be ethical to guillotine me. Much in the manner of people, at a party, discussing the trolley problem as they pass around the Bombay Mix.
Before things got there, though, my equally heretical friend and I spent hours on the phone picking over the ideology as it had been presented to us. I learnt about Michfest, the harms of puberty blockers and the assault on Maria MacLachlan at Speakers Corner. I became extremely concerned about Self ID and wanted to talk about it.
I joined the Terven, in 2018, to fight the good fight with all of you but I brought with me what I now consider to be the hacking of my own brain. I exclusively used words such as “transwoman” and “transman” and still considered it merely polite to use the pronouns people asked me to. I didn’t see the conflict between my understanding that men are not actually women and the language I used.
I still hadn’t realised that the inability to name some men, as men, gave my brain a message to reframe this category of men as “not men” and that this mattered. Saying “she” and “her” also communicated to others that they were somehow, in some way, Not Men which is a great disservice to do to other people.
Language may be the most fundamental tool we have. It is certainly our primary tool for communication. It’s how we convey meaning to each other. It is language which helps us create a shared description of every aspect of the world. There’s no part of reality I can think of that we don’t convert into language in order to better understand it. Language helps us describe material things around us and to explain our own experiences. While there will always be some subjectivity in our individual usage of language, if it’s to be of any use at all it must contain meaning. It’s that meaning, and the transfer of meaning from person to person, that gives language all its coherence and utility. We cannot communicate effectively, as human beings, if our shared language becomes void of meaning.
If the way we use language denies reality, even as we seek to defend that reality, we also set up a conflict in our own brains. We give ourselves cognitive dissonance.
The conflict I’d set up meant that despite the arguments I was making about the importance of sex, I still had a picture attached to the word “transwoman” in my head and it was one of a vulnerable, feminine male who needed some special consideration and protection from me that other men do not need.
It impacted my perception of individuals. To give you an example; even as I spent those early days on Twitter explaining sex mattered I befriended a man who I called a transwoman and she/her. My evaluation of his potential risk to me was simply different to what it would have been if I had called him a man. I know this because I invited him to my home where I spent time alone with him and reacted differently to his behaviour than I would’ve done if I had straightforwardly considered him a bloke. It was only in retrospect that this became obviously concerning.
I don’t think this was unique to me. I think all women who call men “she”, are altering their perceptions. They’re reducing their ability to evaluate these men as men, and fully understand them as such. Whether they really believe men are women, or not, when they invoke the word “she” they will not understand it in the same way as “he” because he and she *are* different. Both in our species and our society.
Male violence exists, and any man may commit it, so this linguistic minimising of the risks of one group of men is straightforwardly dangerous. Just as anything that blunts our instincts, or slows our reactions, will necessarily be.
Now we live in a time where there is a wider conversation also blunting (and demonising) women’s instincts. Including in the media, academia and law. The message, constantly, is that one group of men are Not Men and that to recognise them as men is a form of hatred.
On the phone, just a week or so ago, @babybeginner and I got talking about language and why we both think it’s critical. We were talking about the real world consequences of language. How it impacts womens’s safety, as well as our rights. She put it beautifully, with a clear example. She said “ if you were alone at night and someone told you there were six women behind you that would be very different information to if someone told you there were six men”. We talked about how, if the person giving me this information thinks the definition of the word woman includes men, I am unknowingly put in potential peril. The “women” behind me may now, again, be six men and I am unable to glean this from what I’ve been told. She added “if they told you there were six people behind you, you wouldn’t really know what they meant”. Except, of course, if someone said that to me I’d assume it was a mixed sex group.
The language of “people” lacks specificity which would seem to imply it has been chosen because neither “men” nor “women” is accurate. If the push for gender neutral language meant that someone described a group of men behind me, in the dark, as “people” I’m again misled. For women, especially in any vulnerable situation, misuse of language is a problem that can have huge effects. It may even put women’s lives at risk.
It made me think about how much we rely on people to be honest in the language they use. Even beyond the expectation they’ll tell us the truth in personal interactions, we rely on each other to speak accurately about material facts. When people fail to do so they cause us all kinds of consequences. Unintended or otherwise.
If you are a woman and I invite you round to my house to have a curry, and stay over as a guest, with me and someone called Emily, and I tell you “she’s so lovely, you’ll love her” you need to be able to rely on the fact Emily is not a man in order to make an informed decision.
For women, it is crucial, then, that people use language that describes something as relevant as sex in a way that conveys meaning, and not as a personal favour to individuals.
I know there are women who continue to disagree on this, and can feel harangued when others point this out. I recognise that every woman must think this through for herself, and speak for herself. I really do believe, though, that the arguments stand for themselves. So I hope they will one day convince her. Language is not an incidental aspect of any of these conversations.
It is further important when it comes to how we speak to children. Society cannot ethically tell a child a man is “she”, or suggest that child must refer to men as women because in a crisis, or dangerous situation, we need every child to know which group of adults is the safest for them to turn to. They must be absolutely clear about who is, and isn’t, in that group. Calling my nice new imaginary friend Emily “she” in front of my equally imaginary children may seem benign but, in fact, also sets them up to see Emily as “Not a man”. It is precisely because none of us can tell which man is liable to commit male violence that this is such a problem. We are reducing his risk profile in other people's heads, without being remotely able to reduce his actual risk. Whatever that may be.
I realise, too, that if we call men “she” on their request, sooner or later, we will call a woman’s rapist, her abusive husband, her sexual harasser or her local misogynist “she”. We may not know this because, after all, abusers can be charming and men who do these things wear ordinary faces. To refuse to grant the language of our sex to any man feels like an important act of sisterhood. We all know that some men hurt women. Those women deserve our respect, and compassion, over and above the men who hurt them.
There is another issue that underscores the vital need to care about language; there are women in prisons being threatened with further time on their sentences if they name the men they are caged with as men. There are women in other countries being threatened with the force of law for naming men. There is even a push to make “misgendering” a legal issue in several places.
If it matters to us that women and girls are allowed to understand men as men, and name them as such, we each have a responsibility to speak clearly. If society cannot name men, except on their say so, it cannot protect women and girls from male violence. If members of a society cannot name men, they cannot fully understand the problems we are seeing trans ideology cause. Or grasp how to sufficiently address them.
Since my own peaking I’ve had a lot of learning to do, and the importance of language has been one of the most crucial things I’ve woken up to. It has helped me cut through so much nonsense. The people who showed me how vital language is, and who encouraged me to better hold the line, were other women. I’m very grateful to them for that. Many of them have already written on why language matters, and far better, too. It just seems important to add my certainty to theirs. Especially as language continues to be a fault line even within the Terven.
Of course, we can all agree that language does not change a person’s sex and men are not transformed by pronouns. When a woman calls a man she, she doesn’t make him anything other than he is….but that’s kind of the whole point.
We may all recognise that language is not that kind of magic but the answer is, still, to refuse to participate in any attempt at casting the spell.
Great piece Lorelei.
Really interesting to think about how language has changed so dramatically over just the last five years, which I think is unprecedented.
I also really appreciate that you write a piece where, to some extent, you are feeling your way, and giving a really honest account.
It's refreshing.
"Language may be the most fundamental tool we have. It is certainly our primary tool for communication. It’s how we convey meaning to each other. It is language which helps us create a shared description of every aspect of the world."
Amen to that. ICYMI, a very good essay by Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic on "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid" drawing parallels with the Tower of Babel; archive and bare links though you'll need a subscription to read the latter:
https://archive.ph/mbrZh
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
Relevant quote therefrom:
"The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension."
"mutual incomprehension" seems a fair summary of what has been "engendered" by the transgender "debate". Though much of feminism has to take a great deal of responsibility for that sad state of affairs since its conception of "gender" is a dog's breakfast of antiscientific claptrap and motivated reasoning.
In any case, you might also have some interest in an essay on the situation in Sturgeon's Scotland that is the direct result of the SNP betting the farm on the "trans women are women" mantra:
https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/death-of-a-slogan
They might just as well have tried passing a law stipulating that "2+2=5"; Sturgeon and company should be tarred and feathered and then ridden out of town on a rail for that policy. Nice to see that she is getting hoist by her own petard, being forced, via a reductio ad absurdum of events, to face the odious consequences of it.