In my last post, here, I looked at how legal fictions are used to normalise the denial of reality that has been needed for adoption, surrogacy, and the gender industry to flourish. In each of these cases, reductive language has been used to attempt to give substance to a legal fiction.
Initially with adoption, the mother whose child was taken from her was called the ‘natural mother’ Adopters didn’t like this, as they thought it gave her too much respect. They preferred ‘birth mother’ (a term coined by American author and adoptive mother Pearl Buck to support her campaign to increase the rights of adopters) or ‘birth parent’. Natural mothers (who often prefer to be called first mothers) were expected to accept this ‘positive adoption language’, and in so doing accept that their role had been simply to produce babies to be adopted.
The language of surrogacy is even more reductive. The word surrogate means substitute. In reality, it is the commissioning parents who substitute as legal parents for the mother who carries the baby. But it’s the latter who is called the surrogate mother. And even this terminology has become more reductive over time, as the commissioning parents have sought to downplay her role. The ‘surrogate mother’ became the ‘surrogate’, and now, increasingly, she is becoming the ‘gestational carrier’. Over the same time period, the commercial reality of the term ‘commissioning parent’ has been softened by using the term ‘intended parent’ instead.
With ‘gender identity’, it is women as a whole who are degraded by the new reductive terminology. The phrase ‘trans women are women’ used ad nauseam by trans activists, is repeated by politicians and used as a weapon to erode women’s rights. Kathleen Stock, in her book Material Girls (2021), has argued that many who repeat this statement are immersed in a fiction, which they don’t necessarily believe to be literal truth. Whether or not it is believed as literal truth, constant repetition of the TWAW mantra has material consequences. Women are expected to re-define themselves as ‘cis women’, and to accept ‘transwomen’ (ie males) as being as entitled as they are to their spaces, their sports, etc.
The power to name
Dale Spender’s classic account of how male dominance is both expressed in and facilitated by language, Man Made Language (1980`), included a chapter on The Politics of Naming. “By assigning names we impose a pattern and a meaning which allows us to manipulate the world“, she wrote. “Those who have the power to name the world are in a position to influence reality”.
Language has been used by adoption agencies, surrogacy agencies and trans activists to change institutional reality - in each case to erode women’s rights. But it works by gaslighting as well - using psychological coercion to undermine confidence in what is real. First mothers were made to believe that they gave away their babies to be adopted, not that their babies were taken from them. And a surrogate mother is encouraged to believe that there is no bond between her and the baby she nurtures in her womb, only a commercial transaction with the commissioning parents.
Gaslighting operates particularly subtly with ‘transgenderism’. Kara Dansky has suggested, here, that the term ‘transgender’ is a lie, coined to persuade us that biological sex is not real, or doesn’t matter. The words ‘transwoman’ and ‘transman’ certainly seem intended to confuse - it’s only after familiarity with the terms over some time that many people realise that ‘trans women’ (with or without the space) are men who want to be treated as women, not women who want to be treated as men. Nowadays questionnaires routinely ask us if we “identify as a different gender to our biological sex” - and each time, unless we totally conform to gender stereotypes, our brains struggle to know how to answer.
In 2018 a billboard in Liverpool displaying Google’s definition of woman, ‘adult human female’, was removed after a trans ally deemed it “transphobic hate speech”. This week trans activists at Edinburgh University prevented a public screening of a documentary titled ‘Adult Human Female’ from taking place, because, they claimed, the film ”endangers trans people.” The claim is nonsense, and the film can be watched on YouTube, here (if it has not been taken down).
Adult human female is, of course the standard dictionary definition of woman. Or was. Also this week the Cambridge Dictionary added an additional definition of woman - “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. Anyone tempted to continue with this dictionary to understand what the words ‘female’ and ‘they’ might mean would learn, about ‘female’ as a noun, that “Except in scientific writing, most people find this usage of female offensive.” And that the word ‘they’, when not about a group, can mean not only “a person whose gender is not known or does not need to be mentioned” but also “ a single person whose gender is not simply male or female.” As for ‘gender’, this dictionary defines it as shared qualities and ways of behaving “that society associates with being male, female, or another identity.”
The Cambridge Dictionary claims to be “The most popular dictionary and thesaurus for learners of English”. Any learners of English using it to seek clarity about sex and gender will now find definitions that are both ridiculous and circular. And they will, almost certainly, end up more confused than they were before they consulted it. Which raises the question - may confusion be the intended outcome?
Perception and safeguarding
“The power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and what can’t be expressed, to control perception itself”.
(Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: men possessing women, 1981)
Using the power of naming to control perception is what lies behind some men’s insistence that we use their preferred she/her pronouns. This is not just about validating a man’s imagined ‘gender identity’ - when we use female pronouns that conflict with the reality of a man’s male sex, our brains are confused into thinking that maybe he really is a woman. The consequences of this are particularly risky for children. As Barra Kerr remarked in an article published in (and then banned by) Medium, misusing pronouns is a form of grooming, akin to the use of the sedative rophypnol by rapists to facilitate date rape.
“Pronouns are like Rophypnol. They dull your defences. They change your inhibitions. They’re meant to. You’ve had a lifetime’s experience of learning to be alert to ‘him’ and relax to ‘her’. For good reason. This instinctive response keeps you safe. It’s not even a conscious thing…. More than anything, I owe this to girls. I don’t want to play even the tiniest part in grooming them to disregard their natural protective instincts. Those instincts are there for a reason. To keep them safe. They need those instincts intact, and sharp.”
(Barra Kerr, Pronouns are Rophypnol, originally published in Medium, May 2019, then reproduced by peaktrans.org, Jun 2019)
My next post will explore how the gender and fertility branches of the medical industrial complex are profiting from, and promoting, disembodiment.