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Steve QJ's avatar

“ But if that was true, black people would've won full equality when the polite name was changed from Colored to Negro”

Hmm, not really seeing how this follows. The various changes in the way white people refer to black people *have*, generally speaking, marked an increase in societal respect for black people.

Full equality will be reached when we all stop thinking that we *need* a term to refer to black people. “People” works just fine. “Black” when it’s useful as a descriptor.

But that’s separate to the effectiveness of obfuscating language.

Just 10 years ago, nobody would have hesitated to define a woman as an adult human female. Today, there are a shocking number of people who sincerely can’t define it in coherent terms. And this leads to all kinds of other confusion like “non binary.”

This couldn’t have been achieved without a conscious effort to change the meaning of the word in peoples minds.

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Will Shetterly's avatar

I should count up how many names have been the respectful name for black Americans, only to be discarded in the belief that the new name would change reality. I don’t think any of them did. Laws changed, and opinions changed, and people adopted the new names, but the new names followed the social changes. If the names mattered, the NAACP should’ve changed its name a century ago.

Agreed that colloquial terms like white and black should be adjectives, but when they’re used as nouns, they should be no more meaningful than “the redhead”.

I also agree it’s ridiculous that the gender crowd is trying to erase sex. Gender and sex are very different, which would be clearer if we had different pronouns for them.

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Steve QJ's avatar

“ I should count up how many names have been the respectful name for black Americans, only to be discarded in the belief that the new name would change reality. I don’t think any of them did”

Ah, yes I agree. I should have been clearer. I don’t think the change of word created more respect, I think the thought about how to be more respectful , and the societal willingness to change the language yet again, is a sign of growing respect.

The chicken and egg were the other way around.

But again, I think the trans ideology language changes are very different to the “what to call black people” language changes.

Even here, you say that gender and sex are very different. But what would you have said 10 years ago? Likely that they were synonymous. But now, to some degree, the idea that there’s such a thing as a “gender identity” has crept into your mind.

I’m not criticising you or anything here. I say this because I noticed the change in myself a few years ago and wondered why it was there. After all, I don’t have a gender identity, nobody I knows has one, no trans person I’ve ever spoken to has been able to describe it beyond misogynistic stereotypes. But somehow I’d accepted that there was this thing called a gender identity, that was somehow comparable to sex in its significance, just because I’d heard the “sex is different to gender” slogan often enough and wanted to be kind.

Not for nothing, but sex is different to gender has now been almost completely abandoned by the ideologues as they try to erase the distinction between males and females in law.

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Will Shetterly's avatar

I've been close to this nonsense for longer than you, so I have been aware of the difference between gender and sex for decades. My current best explanation is that just as race is built on a superficial understanding of ancestry, gender is built on a superficial understanding of sex. That both are social fictions can be seen in how they vary so much from time to time and society to society—obviously, women's gender roles are very different now than they were a century ago in the US or than they are today in many conservative religious societies.

I wish I could just announce that I'm using sex pronouns instead of gender pronouns and ignore the whole issue, but I can't. Besides, using different gender pronouns is ancient--drag queens went by she and butch lesbians went by he long ago. I agree with you that it's very odd to try to legalize a social convention, but then, the law has always been subect to fads.

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Florence Glass's avatar

Very interesting conversational thread, thanks.

Two missing elements, by my estimation:

1. The impact of increasing cognitive load by muddying language. Thinking and speaking (or writing) are not really separate tasks. Increasing the cognitive load by introducing neologisms makes it harder to think unless one dispenses with them immediately.

2. The younger generation will inherit a muddied lexicon, thereby making clear and articulate thinking on this issue next to impossible. I've experienced this myself many times as a student--things I had already thought but hadn't been able to articulate suddenly became easy to express once my vocabulary expanded. Reducing or destroying the lexicon doesn't prevent us from having thoughts, but it does prevent them from being articulate.

In other words, the extent of the power of language *itself* isn't the main (or even most pressing) issue. It's the other elements that hitch along for the ride.

I would also differentiate between the deliberate obscurantism at play here with the euphemism escalator* (re: "colored" vs. "Negro") argument as they are fundamentally different things.

*Euphemism *treadmill* is the term, I believe. My bad--I'm up past my bedtime, ha.

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