My brain has the turning circle of a freight barge whenever it hears some of these terms. "Transwoman" I intuitively interpret to mean what it says, a woman who is trans. Of course, the knowledge/memory part of my brain then reminds the logic/consciousness part that this is not what it means, and that it is supposed to mean a male who presents as a woman.
There's something disturbing about the idea that given enough exposure this corrective loop would diminish to the point where the word and its component pieces ("trans" and "woman") come to intuitively mean something new.
I think you're right to reject the linguistic framework because that's really the entirety of the project. Any basis in an empirical or medical framework would require an acknowledgement of sex as a biological reality and an interrogation of gender as a functional or useful term. It is distinctly Orwellian that a linguistic/memetic project has altered concrete realities previously held to the utmost evidentiary scrutiny (elective medical procedures on minors, e.g.).
It's no great surprise I suppose when the doyens of this thinking are the likes of Judith Butler, whose recent piece for the Guardian tries to coin "the anti-gender ideology movement" as if it were an actually intelligible or useful phrase. But what characterized that piece more than bad writing was her contempt for the notion that she might have to explain herself to other people. There is a brattish strain among her ilk that seems to regard expressing their ideas in a universally understandable language, or within the confines of common sense, as beneath them.
This has long been ridiculed (with Butler especially) as a cowardly maneuver to disguise moronic/incoherent ideas in an impenetrably complex syntax and thereby inoculate those ideas from criticism. But thinking about what you wrote I realized there's another dimension to it that I hadn't really grasped. It's that the language is the product itself. That's the output, the actual fruit of the work. The essential manipulation or distortion of meaning baked into these unwieldy phrases and neologisms. To ask them to reformulate is missing the point - like asking an engineer to take all the cogs out a machine.
I feel seen. The speed at which the language changes and what was fine last week becoming bigotry this week would give more people pause if we were not being induced into thinking like goldfish.
My brain has the turning circle of a freight barge whenever it hears some of these terms. "Transwoman" I intuitively interpret to mean what it says, a woman who is trans. Of course, the knowledge/memory part of my brain then reminds the logic/consciousness part that this is not what it means, and that it is supposed to mean a male who presents as a woman.
There's something disturbing about the idea that given enough exposure this corrective loop would diminish to the point where the word and its component pieces ("trans" and "woman") come to intuitively mean something new.
I think you're right to reject the linguistic framework because that's really the entirety of the project. Any basis in an empirical or medical framework would require an acknowledgement of sex as a biological reality and an interrogation of gender as a functional or useful term. It is distinctly Orwellian that a linguistic/memetic project has altered concrete realities previously held to the utmost evidentiary scrutiny (elective medical procedures on minors, e.g.).
It's no great surprise I suppose when the doyens of this thinking are the likes of Judith Butler, whose recent piece for the Guardian tries to coin "the anti-gender ideology movement" as if it were an actually intelligible or useful phrase. But what characterized that piece more than bad writing was her contempt for the notion that she might have to explain herself to other people. There is a brattish strain among her ilk that seems to regard expressing their ideas in a universally understandable language, or within the confines of common sense, as beneath them.
This has long been ridiculed (with Butler especially) as a cowardly maneuver to disguise moronic/incoherent ideas in an impenetrably complex syntax and thereby inoculate those ideas from criticism. But thinking about what you wrote I realized there's another dimension to it that I hadn't really grasped. It's that the language is the product itself. That's the output, the actual fruit of the work. The essential manipulation or distortion of meaning baked into these unwieldy phrases and neologisms. To ask them to reformulate is missing the point - like asking an engineer to take all the cogs out a machine.
I feel seen. The speed at which the language changes and what was fine last week becoming bigotry this week would give more people pause if we were not being induced into thinking like goldfish.