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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Notes -
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:
A coordinated strategy to move the needle.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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