Dr She/her defends “bonus hole”
Dr Helen Webberley of Gender GP fame notoriety leaps to defend the use of “bonus hole” as an alternative to “vagina.”
It is of course not even slightly true that “no one batted an eyelid when we moved on from Ye Olde English” – whatever tf that’s supposed to mean. Of course people batted an eyelid at changes in the language. People always do.
More to the point, yes this is “different” in the sense that it matters more than the subjunctive with counterfactual “if” or “like” vs “as” – this is about a deliberately insulting way of naming the part of the female body that is the entryway to life. “Hole” is insulting and “bonus” is insulting. Both are meant to be insulting. It’s yet another way this loathsome ideology treats women like so much rotting garbage.
The reason it’s newsworthy is not because it’s “about the trans community,” which it isn’t, but because it’s about women – half of humanity – the bullied half.
What is the problem with using new language? Who does it actually really hurt if we use a different word or phrase?
The problem is not using “new language”; the problem is using this “new language.” Whom does it hurt? Women, obviously. Derogatory language does harm people, all the more so when it’s systematic, all the more so again when it’s defended by fools like Helen Webberley.
True inclusivity means making sure that everyone in our society is comfortable and welcome, and part of that comfort means embracing inclusive language.
What tf is “inclusive” about “bonus hole”? True inclusivity means not inventing belittling insulting terms for other people’s body parts and then telling them to put up with it for the sake of inclusivity.
I just don’t understand this. In what way would “bonus hole” be more inclusive than “vagina”.
Whichever term you use, trans men will have it and it is a reminder that they are really woman.
It seems a perfect candidate for the euphemistic trendmill but with the remarkable notion that most woman won’t experience this as a euphemism.
Not just meant to be insulting but carefully crafted to be vulgar, derogatory and juvenile all at once. I had honestly thought that we had moved on from such open contempt for female biology. I think we had. It continued to exist, no doubt, but hidden away in the interstices and I was lucky enough to be able to avoid it for most of my life but here it is, back on full public display and given the imprimatur of progressive ideology. It makes me feel nauseous and I have a pretty strong stomach.
“New language” my arse. Just the same old same old misogyny with the barest of coatings of hipster irony.
@axxyaan
I don’t think at this point they’re even trying to spin it as “inclusive”. This is about openly stating that biology is irrelevant (and, equally openly, denigrating it). Of course, at some point somebody will point out that a bonus is a good thing and that therefore the term privileges women over transwomen and they’ll have to find something else.
Inclusivity sounds all warm and fuzzy until we get to the part that says “you will feel comfortable and included”.
All this dancing around dicks and pussies (excuse my French) stems from one certainty about being trans:
Of all the features and characteristics of being male or female—body shape/size, hair/no hair in certain areas, appearance and comportment — the primary ones CANNOT be faked, duplicated, or transplanted.
Trans ideologues must diminish the gonads and their delivery systems because they simply cannot have them.
Therefore, male and female have to be defined as anything other than the primary sexual characteristics.
Hence, bonus holes and lesbo dicks. Anyone who asks me to use such terms can kiss this gay man’s primary hole.
Ugh, so many misconceptions in such a short tweet.
First, a small one that bugs me: the “y” in “ye” is not really a “y”. It was used to represent a thorn (þ), an old rune that was used in English and northern Germanic languages to represent the “-th” sound (it’s still used in Icelandic). When movable type printing came to England, the printers’ type imported from Belgium and the Netherlands lacked a thorn, and so printers initially used “y” to replace it. Eventually (probably because it caused confusion, e.g., between the article “the” and the pronoun “ye”) it was replaced by the digraph “th”.
All of that occurred in the 17th and perhaps 18th centuries, during the early modern period of English. Shakespeare is not old English. Neither is Chaucer (he’s generally considered to be middle English). Old English is generally used to refer to the period starting with the Germanic migration to Britain till around the Norman invasion. Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon chronicles. If you’ve ever tried to read them, you know that you’re dealing with a very different language, one with much more extensive nominal and verbal morphology (we’re talking datives!). But also in the absence of media, easy travel, and widespread literacy, dialectal differences were likely much greater. You could probably understand the people in the next village over (unless they were speaking Welsh) and even a few villages beyond that, but then they probably started sounding a bit strange. And if you went from Wessex to Northumbria, you might think they were speaking an altogether different language.
As for language change, yes, it happened, and perhaps the old folks shook their heads at the way the young ‘uns were talking (“kids these days! in my day ‘silly’ meant ‘holy’!”), but again, there wasn’t much in the way of written language, and of course no audio recordings, so the only way most people could know about such changes was by memory, and memory is short. (Literacy tends to make language more conservative.)
As for “vagina”, that came into the language in the late 17th Century as a medical term, replacing “cunt” which was by then considered obscene. “Cunt” itself is first attested in 1280, though I suspect it’s much older. Surely there’s always been a word for the thing. (You can find the etymologies here.) Of course words for female anatomy are going to take on dirty connotations; that’s not a function of the word itself but of societal misogyny.
Anyway, if trans women are supposed to be women, shouldn’t they want to have a vagina?
@WAM, #6, this is actually language used by trans ID women because they want gay men to think of their anus first, and then their vagina as additional, optional, receptacle for sex. It’s another way to say “bussy.”
@Mike,
Ah, ok. So hard to keep all this straight.
At what point does the number of times per day that the average person says, “oh for fuck’s sake!” become a sign of the coming apocalypse?
Ah, ok. So hard to keep all this straight.
That’s the point.
As What a Maroon has already said most of what I was going to, I’ll just reiterate my frustrated boredom with Genderists’ continued ignoratio elenchi and obfuscation. Obfuscation is kind of the point of the entire enterprise, so it’s not unsurprising. It’s gotten to the point that I can’t tell the difference between moronic and mendacious, if there ever was one to begin with.
Well that’s a first. :)
Nah, you actually do it quite often. You were just so thorough this time I thought it bore mention. :D
Well, thanks. Linguistics is one of the few areas where I feel confident that I know more than most posters here.
I know this is belaboring the obvious, but “a word can’t hurt us” coming from the Pronoun People Being Genocided Into Nonexistence demonstrates a critical lack of self-awareness.
It’s always worth belaboring the obvious on this subject, because there’s So Much that it’s easy to miss even the blindingly obvious. I had missed this particular obvious so I’m GLAD you pointed it out, glad I tell you.
What is the problem with using existing language? Who does it actually hurt if we continue using the ordinary word or phrase?
If words are harmless one way, why not the other? The argument usually stated here is that the new language (such as birthing person) technically includes women while the old language (mother) excluded trans men, but that cannot reasonably be argued when the language being changed is an item of anatomy. Women aren’t vaginas and vaginas aren’t women.
It doesn’t matter that some female people consider themselves men, that anatomy is still a vagina. Wasn’t it the whole point of trans theory that sex and hence anatomy need not be a match for one’s gender identity? Where the hell did that go?