Thread by @natachakennedy

My policy is always to block “gender-criticals” and such like here on MuskTwit because they are repetitive, boring, dishonest and always act in bad faith.

It is pointless to engage with them, they are, literally, not worth the time/effort.

However, sometimes this means…

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…that I miss the occasional nugget that unintentionally reveals the way they prosecute their propaganda campaign against trans people. And this one is particularly revealing, but only if you unpick the language deployed at a “micro-grammatical”level…

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Here the anonymous MuskTwitt account (whoever it is) is arguing against the existence of trans people by deploying tired old bio-essentialism, something that has been discredited on every level from Judith Butler to the overwhelming majority of the world’s biologists…

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…however it is the language used that is most revealing; “is defined by…” is in the passive voice. It is deployed in order to remove the *person* from the sentence. It avoids the need to say “I define…” by using a grammatical construction that avoids saying who…

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…is doing the defining.

But it is also deployed to make it appear as though the definition is something that somehow exists independently of any humans doing the defining. It is intended, in effect, to essentialise the definition as something that pre-exists the people…

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…doing the defining.

In reality no definition is ever essential, pre-existing or independent of the people who do the defining. Definitions are always the products of people, & people have different biases.

So, what the individual behind this account is attempting…

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…to do, is give their definition a status or authority that it does not deserve by making it *appear* to be something that pre-exists the definer, a pre-ordained (by God…?) definition, which is being expressed in this way to avoid it being challenged, questioned or…

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…contradicted. So it reveals how “gender-critical” narratives function (I am not sure we can give them the status of “ideologies”, they are more like “pretexts/excuses for hatred”).

On the level of the discursive - they are entirely rooted in the (mis-)use of language…

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We can see how transphobic “journalists” - especially in broadsheets like the Murdoch Times, the Guardian & the Telegraph, deploy language to make oppression sound like “feminism” and hate sound “reasonable”. This IMO moves them from the category of “journalist” to…

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…what I would categorise as “propagandist”. This abuse of language and manipulation of semantics is, however, embedded in the way all “gender-criticals” operate. The abuse of definitions is one such linguistic manipulation.

So what are the implications of this misuse…

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Of language…?

The most obvious take-away is that, like their systematic and hermetic exclusion of trans voices from mainstream media, “gender-criticals” cannot make their case without the repeated deployment of misleading language. This, in turn however, also conceals…

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…the total lack of *data* in their propaganda; they have to rely on creative language use to distract from the absence of facts to back up their case, and indeed the existence of a considerable body of data that reveals their narrative to be false.

Ultimately their case…

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…for the elimination of trans people (even here they cannot be honest about their ultimate aim) is extremely weak and would not survive a level playing field in the so-called “trans debate”, which is why they have to exclude trans people from the “debate”.

Fin