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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3812 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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When do you recall hearing the phrase "gender-affirming" start being used? Google ngrams suggests that it's very recent, my own recollection is that I don't think I heard it until perhaps 2018 or so, but now I see it everywhere in putatively neutral news writeups. The term seems massively epistemically loaded and grants fully that gender is strictly flexible at the determination of the individual, which makes it seem pretty useful to get everyone using it. I think this is a pretty good case study in the value of linguistic change to move the cultural needle on a topic.

Does it grant that premise?

I’ve seen hair implants and other anti-middle-age interventions described with the phrase. That’s sex-linked for sure. Though I figured it’s an afterthought. What’s the word for coming up with a theory, then working backwards to maximize the audience?

Anyway, it certainly has ended up a loaded term, and it has also gotten much higher saturation. I could think of a couple possibilities:

  1. A coordinated strategy to move the needle.

  2. Memetic fitness, where authors who see the phrase tend to adopt it over whatever else they were using. Could be due to thinking it’s better or just more fashionable.

  3. Random walk settling on a phrase which offends the fewest (of the expected audience).

Wild guess, I’d go for 2 or 3. Maybe DSM-whatever or WPATH released something in 2018? Either way, I expect it spread by fashion and tribal signaling rather than any particular strategy. I’d describe that as cultural change informing linguistic instead of the opposite.

I’ve seen hair implants and other anti-middle-age interventions described with the phrase.

I mean, that's totally absurd and just a way to make transition surgery sound more palatable by creating a category that includes it and wearing platform heels. Nobody on the face of the earth would describe shaving your beard or getting breast reduction surgery as 'gender-denying'.

I was actually going to use “growing my beard” as an example of affirmation in ymeskhout’s thread.

So…yes, it’s working backwards to relate the phrase to as many things as possible. Users would like to borrow that legitimacy. I think, however, that doesn’t necessarily make it invalid. More like a natural corollary from asking advocates to come up with a whole theory of “gender.”

Does it grant that premise?

Yeah, the logic seems backwards. "Gender-affirming care" does not make anti-hair loss or other such interventions supportive of malleable gender, those who want to push that view of gender decided to start calling things that cis people do to feel better about themselves "gender-affirming".

Wild guess, I’d go for 2 or 3. Maybe DSM-whatever or WPATH released something in 2018? Either way, I expect it spread by fashion and tribal signaling rather than any particular strategy. I’d describe that as cultural change informing linguistic instead of the opposite.

How would you test that theory?

Anyway, "something got published in 2018" doesn't fit the chart he posted. The last data point is 2019, and the inflection point is at around 2010. I don't really subscribe to the idea you can change culture with language (or at least not with mere word replacement), but I do think the idea these cultural changes are driven bottom-up is intellectually bankrupt, for example you can literally see the Eunuch Archive people discussing among themselves how they'd like to change another term:

The draft for the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-5) suggests ‘Gender Incongruence,’ which I much prefer,” he wrote, “The body and mind are out of sync, with no mental illness implied!

This was also in 2010 when, as another poster pointed out recently, gamers still called each other "fag" as a matter of course. The ngrams chart for "gender inconcgruence" looks pretty similar to the "gender affirming" one, so it seems pretty clear these language changes are imposed top-down.

Good points.

“Intellectually bankrupt,” though? I’m not even trying to argue a bottom-up theory. There are obviously a small subset of people with much more investment in gender politics, and I expect new language hits then first. The question is how it propagates from them to the general public.

I’m inclined to view it as trickle-down. The language of authority figures gets adopted because followers defer to their experts. Could be due to trust or ingroup signaling. Appealing to authority is effective! People want to win their internet arguments with “well, the WPATH standards say…”

This is in contrast to the more aggressive model implied by the OP. I think it’s very tempting to assert that outgroup leaders are building a party line by force. I also think that’s unusual, given the number of more pedestrian reasons for followers to buy in.

I think both the true believers and the cynical operators of WPATH are at play. There were people who were very conscious of the need to thread the needle of, for example, taking a human rights-framing vs the need to describe it as "medically necessary" for insurance purposes, or the need to cover off liability risks against opening up the gates (removing age limits etc) It's a mix of calculated and true believers.

I mean, public opinion has been moving in the opposite direction, so it’s not as if this is a case of different terms changing the public opinion successfully.

Has it? In specifically the US? I have read some saying this but I am not privy to any reliable polling source that suggests this is so. I am not saying such a source or such sources do not exist, just hoping to be poiinted towards them.

In my country at least polls show most people disagree with the ideas of gender ideology, self-ID. But it is the cultural hegemony that matters, that sense of which way the wind blows that actually influences how people behave.

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