7/30/23
Words. Words. Words. Words.
This is number twenty-one in the blog series, “My Life In Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
I WAS SURPRISED when one of my best friends, a former business partner, announced that she was trans. She’s starting on hormone therapy soon, but needed to come out now.
That was a surprise, but more power to her. It was more of a shock when my ex-wife told me to never refer to her as cisgendered. No, she isn’t trans, but objected to a modifier being added to her status as a woman. My ex is a liberal and is completely accepting of everyone anywhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. But the term ‘cis’ has been so maligned in popular media that she considered it an insult.
Let’s get this straight (so to speak). Cis is a Latin word meaning ‘on this side of.’ It has an antonym: trans. Trans means ‘on the other side of.’ When used as a prefix to ‘gender,’ cisgender means on the same side as assigned gender. Transgender means on the opposite side of assigned gender. There is no negative connotation to either word other than what we have allowed to happen to them as derogative sneers at people. I found my ex’s vehemence to be the same as telling me ’don’t call me what I am.’
My friend who just came out as trans is well over fifty years old. She has a wife and two kids. And she’s afraid to come out at work. I asked why the ‘sudden change.’ That’s a typical response from a cisgender male. Why did she suddenly decide she was a woman? She explained that she’s always known, based on her experience in life, but didn’t have the words to express it. She’d simply always been called ‘weirdo,’ ‘queer,’ ‘freak,’ and other pejoratives.
It’s called ‘heuristic injustice.’ It is similar to the commonly known term, ‘epistemic injustice,’ which is silencing or excluding a person because of what he or she is. That is the fundamental injustice behind “Don’t say gay.” Heuristic injustice, however, comes about when there are no words to describe a person or condition, or the words are simply unknown. Thirty years ago, ‘trannies’ were freaks, weird, queer. We didn’t come to an understanding of gender until much more recently, and even that is laden with the popular slurs of times past.
When my friend struggled with her identity as a child and later as an adult, she didn’t have the words to describe what was wrong. It was an injustice based on the linguistic misunderstanding of perfectly good terms.
Hence, it is a patent falsehood when people say, “We never had trans people and gays when I was young.” Yes, we did. We didn’t have the words available for people to describe themselves without being mocked or discriminated against. That is truly the motivation behind removing certain books from school libraries and forbidding the use of words like ‘gay.’ If people (I include children) don’t have the words, they can’t express themselves and therefore, the problem ‘goes away.’
The thing is that I find many words in our daily language that have undergone a popular media transition from what the word actually means to the derogative term it became.
Take the term ‘antifa,’ a perfectly good word that has been around for nearly a hundred years, originating in the anti-fascist movement in Hitler’s Germany. It means ‘anti fascist.’ When fascists were being called out by people calling themselves antifa in the late 2010s and early 2020s, it became popular to identify it as an organization of anarchists dedicated to tearing down whatever it was one wanted to protect at the moment. The very idea of calling something an anarchist organization is ridiculous. ‘Anarchist organization’ is an oxymoron on the order of jumbo shrimp and military intelligence. But Antifa gave us a focus for something to hate and blame for our troubles. There was no racial upset resulting in riots. There was Antifa stirring up trouble.
Sometimes we have to see the humor in a drive to eliminate a word or change its meaning. In the late sixties and early seventies homosexuals rebelled against being called queers and faggots. They adopted the less pejorative term ‘gay.’ Yes, that’s the word you aren’t supposed to say in Florida. We forget that there was an entire decade when everyone was gay: The Gay Nineties.
Once in the early seventies—an era in which I actually had a secretary!—I addressed a letter to a gentleman whose first name was Beverly. It was an uncommon first name for a male in the US. My secretary painstakingly corrected the typo “Mr.” to “Ms.” I received a reply chastising me for assuming gender without checking the gentleman’s bio. The secretary responding to me (also a male) further instructed me that the term “Ms.” was not a title, but was the abbreviation for manuscript and should not be used in referring to women, who were always and exclusively either Miss or Mrs.
When I was young, I would (rarely) take a dough ball and my fishing line to a spot where I knew there were catfish. We went catfishing. Now if you are catfishing, it’s a very bad thing! Catfishing is to deceive someone or many people by creating a false personal profile online, often with malicious sexual or financial goals. And it can definitely be either a male or a female. I often see profiles of women on my Twitter feed that are only there to entice one to pay for access to a site where pornographic photos and movies are sold.
Perhaps my favorite distorted term is woke. It means “alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination. Attentive to important societal facts and issues.” Consider the implication of not being woke. “Not aware of and don’t care about social injustice and discrimination.” And thus, people who are not aware of or concerned about it slur people as woke suggesting they are only people who are “politically liberal in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme.” Wokeness is interpreted as the opposite of its meaning, suggesting it is a list of rules and limits on how we speak and act. It is a poor world in which only political liberals are concerned about social injustice and discrimination.
Some people have thrown the term at so many concepts and issues that it ceases to have meaning at all. It is used to declare that there are no social injustices or discrimination at present. The only issue is that people are concerned about them. It is used derogatorily to mean “Your issues don’t concern me; therefore, they aren’t real.” It results in such stupid statements as “Some enslaved people extracted a personal benefit from technical skills they learned in captivity.” Funny. That’s roughly what slave-owners tried to sell before the Civil War.
Language changes. Words do change meaning over time. Biblical historians should consider that. Oops! That was another oxymoron. Sorry. There is a constant evolution in language that affects words, punctuation, spelling, grammar, and understanding. But when one uses a word to expressly treat it as the opposite of what it means, they need to clarify their new definition so everyone else knows they aren’t using the same word.
Sometimes I try to understand what I’m writing. Believe it or not. And words come into play that surprise me because they describe something I didn’t know there was a word for. Like “acyrologia,” which means an incorrect use of words, particularly replacing one word with another that sounds similar. Next week, I’ll take a look at “Bildungsroman vs. Künstlerroman.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
