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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3492 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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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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.

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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