The Simplistic Complexities of Language

The Trans and Intersex communities cannot be erased & how we do not legitimize dehumanizing rhetoric.

“Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words: here is Plato’s man.”¹

When I initially began writing this, I started with the intention of seriously addressing some very unserious arguments. Halfway through writing that piece I realised that what I was doing was engaging in an argument that aimed to dehumanise specific groups of people due to no other reason than the circumstances of their birth.

We do not do that.

We do not engage in debate with, nor do we compromise with people who wish to erase people from existence. Engaging in debate with them validates their nonsense. One cannot compromise on the existence of a human being.

While TERFs and fascists are not serious people, nor do they make serious arguments, their fringe beliefs have been pushed into the mainstream by manufactured “centrism” from such publications as The New York Times.²

What I do take seriously about both these groups is their common goal of the erasure of trans and intersex people.

With that in mind I aim to discuss the threat that these people pose to the very real lives of very real people, while attempting to minimise any validation of their blatantly ridiculous claims.

We are going to be talking about people who claim to believe in "basic biology”, deciding that their very best source of biology is… lexicographers.

Adult, Human, Female

The term “adult, human, female” has become an oft-bleated phrase of both TERFs and admitted fascists. Two groups of people who believe that they can distance themselves from each other while simultaneously praising each other’s work.³

Three simple words are used to summarise an entire human being. Meanwhile, there is an interesting dearth in the use of “adult, human, male”.

In 2005, Julia Serano (an actual biologist) wrote:

“…the media tends not to notice—or to outright ignore—trans men because they are unable to sensationalize them the way they do trans women without bringing masculinity itself into question. And in a world where modern psychology was founded upon the teaching that all young girls suffer from penis envy, most people think striving for masculinity seems like a perfectly reasonable goal.”⁴

The choice to repeat “adult, human, female” and not “adult, human, male” is a very conscious and misogynistic choice on the part of both TERFs and fascists. The aim is to control women. All women. The tool is not biology (too messy) but linguistic prescriptivism.