Whenever I look at trans activism, I think: For all your theories about the transformative powers of discourse and the mortal dangers posed by those of us who use the wrong words (somehow it’s always women's words that are the wrong words), language is not half as powerful as you’d need it to be to make the things you say true.
With language you can obscure, distort, delude, deride, dissemble or desperately try to change the subject. You can say TRANSWOMEN ARE WOMEN all you want but you won’t make it true. Language can’t make the empty promises of transition real. Words can’t turn a girl into a boy or a man into a woman. Words can make a claim but words can’t make it fair for Lia Thomas to compete against women.
All you have are words. What actually is is something else.
A powerful man can create a climate of fear and use his power to warp reality for everyone around him. He demonstrates his power over others when he compels them to submit to his view of himself. But such a fiction is a fragile creation, an easily broken spell. An abuser can appear to the world a decent man—but only as long as his victims never speak or only as long nobody believes them if they do.
So more important than language—which obscures or clarifies but doesn’t ultimately transform reality—is enforcement: punishing those who refuse to play along. In the presence of fragile all-important narratives, no one must be allowed to speak freely, crack jokes, or make uncomfortable observations. These fictions can only become true in the sense and to the exact extent that the world around you pretends along with you.
A liar or dissembler can fool an audience if the truth never speaks or if people who speak the truth get smeared as bigots before they even open their mouths. You can prop up a fiction by frightening people out of talking—and out of listening.
Language can’t make a monster out of a children’s author, but it can hound her out of publishing.
Language—or shall we call it libel?--can’t make a bigot out of JK Rowling, but vicious words can make an example out of her that intimidates women who share her concerns into silence.
Language can’t make me a terrible person for researching a controversial issue like how young people come to identify as transgender, but it can twist my most carefully chosen words. That's something, no doubt, and god knows it makes my work difficult, but it's not nearly enough.
But when you abuse language like that—using it to obscure and not to clarify—you are not performing magic. A keen listener can tell the difference and will go elsewhere with their questions. That’s why—despite activists’ insistence on the power of language to transform reality—trans activists clung to ‘no debate.’ On some level, trans activists know there are limits, that you can’t play gender mad libs in an open society and get away with it for very long if the things you insist on just aren’t true.
Live like this and you will make yourself the sworn enemy of something you can slander, twist, and smear but never overcome: the reality of what you’re doing, a reality that will persist no matter what you say about it, to be uncovered by anyone willing to look for themselves. Make yourself the enemy of reality and you will never rest. Every free word and untutored observation will threaten you. Every principle you once held you will turn inside-out in your impossible quest to defend the indefensible.
The story you weave can be unraveled by tugging a single thread, and it doesn’t matter how much time you spent spinning it, how fine the yarn, how cunning the pattern, how many the weavers: only that it will come apart.
Eppur si muove
Very well said, as always. Glad to have such a clear voice of reason in the "reality" corner, and only wish I could write as well!