Language: The God of All Sides

Everyone worships the same master

The Great Fire of Rome, Eduard Buchler

When people on my own side of the gender ideology debate find out my stance on preferred pronouns (sex-based by default, might make some rare exceptions where I see fit, and will not control the words you choose to use), they often try to impress upon me how important language is—as if it is something I take flippantly. Trust me, the stance I take is precisely because of how important and powerful I know language is. It’s why I insist that nobody on any side should confuse language with reality itself.

I can certainly respect the decision to never use opposite-sex pronouns for someone on principle. Gender ideology has gone way too far, and drawing a hard line can feel like a small but important way of fighting back. Or maybe it’s just a matter of personal comfort, which is completely respectable and doesn’t require any further explanation.

However, there are those who insist that we must never, ever use opposite-sex pronouns to refer to someone in our personal life (which is a fine stance to take) on threat of ex-communication and shunning (which I find abhorrent). If it is discovered that you do, then you can expect to have your work, your motivations, and your character relentlessly attacked, as I have been experiencing for over a month.

That people will go to such extremes to control the private speech of someone they consider themselves to be allied on very important issues with tells me one thing: they imbue language with as much power as the trans activists do. It looks like a fear that the trans activists are right—that language does indeed create reality and that referring to a man as a woman makes him one. But a man is not a woman regardless of what clothing he wears, what hormones he takes, what surgeries he has had, or what pronouns he is referred to with.

For me, it comes down to the fact that we should be able to recognize reality even if it isn’t always reflected in our speech. Language is a representation of reality, but it isn’t reality itself, and I am very cautious about imbuing it with more power than it should rightfully have. Yes, we want and need our representation to be accurate, but insisting that it lines up perfectly signals, to me, a fear that reality is not directly apprehendible.

And, honestly, we have good reason to fear this. The number of people who have bought into gender ideology is truly frightening. Sure, most are just going along with it and don’t really believe that people can change sex. However, some indeed are true believers and can look at an unambiguous man and insist that he is a woman because he says so.

But I won’t give up on the idea that most of us can recognize reality as we see it, otherwise, I would lose all hope in humanity and give up on fighting for anything at all. And when people know what’s real and what isn’t, I don’t think that being flexible with language is a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s an admirable human trait that we can be flexible and make allowances for loved ones, regardless of social and linguistic rules that say otherwise.

Even the people who might disagree with me on this and insist that language must always represent reality perfectly do not, I am sure, always bear this out in their own lives. They participate in social niceties, they tell little white lies (or big ones!), they soften their words to spare a friend’s feelings… the examples could go on. Essentially, everyone has special rules for people they respect. I think you’re lying if you say that you don’t.

But some have decided, on principle, that social niceties can never include opposite-sex pronouns, and that’s fine with me and entirely their prerogative. However, I will continue to hold that it is possible to opt to use them and have no confusion about nor intention to hide the sex of the person being referred to. I have personally never misled someone about another person’s sex.

Then there’s the argument that using “preferred pronouns” was the slippery slope that led to all of the insanity we see today, including men in women’s prisons. But I simply don’t agree with this simplistic interpretation of what led us here. In all of the research I have done into the origins of the trans movement, I have learned that the pieces were all in place well before “preferred pronouns” became such a central tenet of this ideology.

Take the issue of men in women’s prisons. In Canada, for example, the transfers began in 2001 when the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled in favor of a trans-identified man named Synthia Kavanagh (born Richard Chaperon) who insisted that his human rights had been violated due to his placement in a male prison after he murdered his roommate. Kavanagh had his “sex reassignment” surgery paid for by taxpayers and was transferred to a women’s prison long before anyone had heard the term “preferred pronouns.”

At issue was the fact that enough people bought into the insulting idea that a man who no longer had a penis was now somehow less of a man and more of a woman—in other words, that women are just penisless men rather than human beings in our own right. I think this was the reality denial that came first, not the fact that some people (like his lawyer, Barbara Findlay), may have been referring to Kavanagh with female pronouns. At the time, it was his surgical status that mattered, as Canada had not yet instituted self-ID.

Don’t get me wrong, the coerced use of opposite-sex pronouns for individuals like this certainly doesn’t help the situation, especially not today when self-ID is the norm (which is why I fight against that, too). But the line from “preferred pronouns” to “men in women’s prisons” is not one that can be as neatly traced as some people pretend it can—if it can be traced at all.

Plus, if pronouns were truly the initial cause and continue to be the main factor propping gender ideology up, then how do we explain the fact that trans-identified females who use male pronouns still go to women’s prisons, still participate in women’s sports, and very often still use female single-sex spaces like washrooms and changerooms? Because nobody actually believes they are men and realizes they would either be at risk or at a disadvantage in men’s spaces, despite the words others might use when referring to them.

This highlights another layer of the issue, which is that this movement is driven not just by words but by the upside-down morality of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. Trans-identified women get to call the shots on how other people see and refer to them while also calling the shots on what spaces they use because they have been positioned as an oppressed class, which actually gives them social capital and special privileges. The same goes for trans-identified men, only they by and large do prefer to use the opposite sex’s spaces, and so they are accommodated. I would say that trans-identified men are generally painted as the even bigger victims, which is why they get to run roughshod over women with complete impunity.

Ultimately, I believe what led us here is a postmodern, reality-denying philosophy that uses a relativistic self-referential lens to look at the world. Postmodernism uses language to warp our view of the world. It gave language exactly the God-like status that trans activists use to insist that “trans women are women.”

I don’t think that the way to fight this philosophy is to treat language in the same way. I don’t think the way to fight this philosophy is to recognize that language is immensely powerful and to seek to use that power only for ourselves. I think we need to strip language of its power and God status entirely.

I am disappointed that some people can’t see this. I think that if they focus more on the issue of pronouns or if they think they can extricate gender but continue to tacitly accept the oppression hierarchy, then we aren’t going to succeed in fully eschewing postmodernism and “woke,” which is what gender ideology is based on. But I don’t think such people are bad, stupid, or morally reprehensible, as I feel I am often regarded for my views. I just think we just have a completely different way of conceptualizing the problem, and I am okay with that.

(FYI, I think it is completely possible to hold a hard line on pronouns and to realize that gender ideology is part of the larger woke problem. But I also maintain that many “holding that line” are still using the lens of oppression and very often fall back on standpoint epistemology to make their point.)

I realize my position is likely the less popular one within the “gender critical” community, and that’s okay. If I cared about that kind of thing, I never would have spoken out against gender ideology in the first place. And trust me, if what I was after was followers, subscribers, fans, and flatterers, I could speak very passionately and convincingly about the need to never use anything but correct sex pronouns.

I don’t think differently for lack of understanding the other side’s arguments, nor for lack of respecting them. I do understand where people who disagree with me are coming from and I accept it. I will continue to defend it as well, as I have done in the past:

I don't blame people, mostly women, for drawing a very hard line in the sand. Many draw it further than I do, but I am often grateful for them. And their reasons for doing so are rarely thoughtless and simplistic.

But I’m not in a fight for language, I am in a fight for reality. And those are not the same thing.