Nuanced
Christ on a bike. Hi, parents, here’s how to help your children do whatever they want all the time, without asking any tiresome outdated parentish questions. It’s from the BBC, too, so it must be sensible and official and not harmful at all in any way.
An A-Z of LGBTQ+ language for speaking to your child
If your child opens up to you about their sexuality or gender identity, it’s likely to be a really significant time for both them and you.
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The language around sexuality and gender has changed over time and your child may be using terms that you might not fully understand.
You are the one who doesn’t understand, here: you, the adult, are lost and confused, while your child of any age [the BBC hasn’t bothered to distinguish between 5-year-olds and 17-year-olds so far] knows all about it and is your instructor. You must work hard to understand your child’s profound knowledge.
Jess Borthwick is a Family Support Worker at the charity All Sorts Youth Project which connects and supports LGBTQ+ children and their families.
She says, “It’s okay not to understand, and the varied terminology and language can be overwhelming! The language is complicated, nuanced and moves quickly, and the meanings are often very personal to the individual.”
Well…that is to say, the language is the jargon of a staggeringly wrong-headed ideology centered on the magical belief that physical sex is infinitely mutable. The language is “complicated” because it’s about complete and utter bullshit. It’s people making shit up as they go, and working hard to make everyone grovel before their absurd belief system. They’re a bunch of wannabe popes.
Sarah Furley, Vice Chair of FFLAG, a charity that offers peer support to the parents and carers of LGBTQ+ children, agrees that asking questions is a good idea and also thinks that you can take a proactive approach.
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She adds that although what you’re hearing is new to you, it’s likely something your child has been considering for a while: “Remember that your child has probably been thinking about and exploring this for some time – whereas you’ve just found out and you now need to go through that process of learning and discovery too.”
In other words your child – whether 5 or 17 – is the expert and you are the apprentice. Your child knows all about it, and you are completely ignorant. Let your child guide you through this new magical glorious belief system. Don’t interrupt, don’t laugh, and don’t you dare disagree.
It’s normal to be nervous if you’re talking to someone about a subject you’re not an expert on, especially one where there’s emotions involved.
And obviously parents can’t be experts on sex and gender, or how much their children understand about sex and gender, or how easy it is to change one’s sex or gender, or what the consequences might be of trying to change one’s sex or gender.
Also, this is the BBC. “where there’s emotions involved”? Really? They can’t even do a quick “there are”?
A child might start using certain language to describe themselves and then change the terms they identify with.
Jess says, “This is a normal and healthy part of identity exploration. The more they are able to explore, the more they are able to find out what fits. Don’t be alarmed if they find something that’s a better fit – most young people will settle into a more consistent identity as they age. However if they don’t, this isn’t something to worry about.”
Ah yes, it’s totally normal and healthy to pick up gender ideology from your fellow children and social media and then keep picking up the latest tweaks for the next ten or twenty or fifty years. Or, it might be more efficient to go to clown college and make it a career.
Lisa says, “Language evolves over time and LGBT+ terminology is no different. Often terms get added as people want the comfort of words to describe their identity. As time has gone on and our understanding of gender and sexuality has expanded, some definitions have been updated to match this. That’s why the + in LGBT+ is so important as it encompasses and celebrates all identities.”
So much expansion! Keep going! Keep expanding and expanding and expanding until you explode!
“Language evolves”. Well, yes, it does, but evolution in language (as in biology) is morally neutral; it doesn’t mean that language gets better (or worse). As in biology, there are several motors for that evolution; one is adaptation to new circumstances, which especially affects vocabulary. If you create a new technology, for example, you need to create new words (or adapt old words) to describe it. Of course sometimes there are maladaptions which need to be discarded (see YNnB’s comment on phlogiston, etc.).
Most linguistic evolution is something akin to genetic drift, as pronunciation, morphology, and syntax change from generation to generation (e.g., the Great English Vowel Shift, which is partly responsible for our fucked-up spelling); I suppose there’s also a degree of sexual selection.
But anyway, this is a case where ignoring (intentionally or not) the distinction between the popular meaning of a word and the technical meaning leads to confusion and moral grandstanding.
Pure descriptivists make some of the most prescriptive pronouncements you’ll ever hear. I find this amusing most of the time, because it usually doesn’t matter in the real world.
It’s funny how often they slip in clues that this isn’t as ‘settled science’ as they want to claim it to be:
“A child might start using certain language to describe themselves and then change the terms they identify with.”–but make sure you make as many long-term or permanent changes as you can immediately after they start using a new term, rather than just being boring and letting time take its course.
“… and the meanings are often very personal to the individual.”–Paging Mr. Dumpty, paging Mr. Humpty Dumpty…. (“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ‘ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things. ‘”)
Of course, such language evolution is fueled by social media, and “experts” are peers who make up genders as they go because their experience of being a hormone-addled mix of horniness is not adressed by the descriptions of the myriad genders and sexualities whose roots are in a generation of kids with experience in more than 400 pokemon all with unique abilities and powers and evolved forms.
It’s a fucking game, BBC, and you’re being played like one of the 98 official sets of Pokemon cards. These social workers are being played, too, believing that if a kid states something it must be true.
@Nullius,
I’m a dedicated descriptivist myself; it comes with the training. I don’t think I’d describe myself as “pure”, in that or any other area. I’ve had some disagreements with Ophelia in that regard.
I don’t consider what the gender ideologists are doing descriptivist; it’s really a sugarcoated form of prescriptivism. But it’s not really linguistic prescriptivism, even though that comes along for the ride. They’re not saying “ain’t ain’t a word” or “use the subjunctive in counterfactual conditionals”. What they’re doing is ideological prescriptivism: “you must learn to accept our ideology and to use the language that goes along with it.” It’s like Christians telling you who’s a heretic, or Fascists telling you who’s subhuman.
Thank you BBC; I will be stuck with The Times, They Are a’Changin’ as an earworm for the rest of the day now!
The trans doctrine doesn’t allow for gender descriptions to merely describe. These gender descriptions are asked to also ‘define’ people, or become an ‘identity.’ As if hair color, height, or weight on one’s passport were asked to define a person. For example someone could say their ‘identity’ is blonde, or tall, or obese, and that somehow ‘defines’ them. It’s narrow and rigid (and absurd). But rather than clarify, they promote the confusion and ask people to accept and advance the unacceptable. It’s not the case that children have navigated their way through the confusion, it’s the parents who need to be indoctrinated in order to promote this ideology and explain it to their kids according to trans doctrine. Clear and simple explanations are not allowed. Disagreement is not allowed. We must all be trained to be well versed in trans hogwash.
WaM:
That was basically what I was pointing to. There’s very little space between “use the subjunctive here” and “use inclusive terminology there”, except that the latter additionally carries ideological content. Both are imperative prescriptions of what one ought say grounded in a particular view of linguistic correctness. Both are intelligible only if one assumes an objective-realist metalinguistics in which some use of language is fallible (i.e., correct or incorrect), regardless of how widespread (or not) or commonly accepted (or not) that use may be.
But you’ll notice that the Genderists’ explicit justifications take the form of descriptivism, because to many, too many, descriptivism amounts to little more than the idea that the old fuddy-duddies can’t tell you you’re wrong. Which, in addition to being wrongheaded, is also a subjective or antirealist view and thus in opposition to the ideological prescriptivism.
NiV,
I was thinking of it as “prescriptivism in a descriptivist’s clothing,” but I couldn’t work that in.
WaM: Ah, yeah. That’s an appropriate metaphor.
Pay no attention to those TERFs with their talk of ROGD! NO SOCIAL CONTAGION TO SEE HERE, FOLKS. YOUR CHILD HAS BEEN THINKING AND EXPLORING, SO SHUT UP AND NOD AFFIRM WHATEVER THEM SAYS.
Notice that there’s no suggestion that the parents cast their minds back to their own experiences struggling with these same issues when they themselves were growing up. Because none of this shit had been invented yet. The Beeb would have been able to connect the old vocabulary used to describe these concepts to the new terms. But they don’t because they can’t. What are being described as new terms are the novel redefinition of old terms, hijacking them and using them in novel, idiosyncratic ways that have no parallel to the parents’ experience of puberty and maturation. Sex words turned into gender words. Sex words conflated with gender words in order to suggest that sex is somehow fluid and malleable, that your personality (i.e. “gender identity”) can and should override the trajectory of your body’s pubertal development.
If it were true that “there have always been trans,” then there would be a rich history of growing up with these struggles with supposed “gender identity” already present in the whole cultural tradition of “coming of age” stories. Sure there’s plenty of lore surrounding growing up, of boys and girls becoming men and women (much of it burdened with sexist, patriarchal stereotypes), even of discovering one’s homosexuality, but there’s no rich tradition of becoming the other sex. It’s all new to parents because it’s new, period. It’s strange and confusing because it’s impossible and can’t happen. Children are being told it can, and, being impressionable, some – too many- believe it. Without outside prompting, this isn’t something the children would be pursuing. It’s no different than if what was being encouraged was trans-speciesism rather than trans genderism. Changing species is just as impossible as changing sex, but advocates of the former lack the power and influence to inject their beliefs into society the way genderists have uploaded transness into the culture. Transness is freshly made up, out of whole cloth, putting the lie to the claim that it has always been around. Parents would have already been exposed to it and in the know if it were as widespread as it is claimed to be, or more importantly, real at all.
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