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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?

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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.

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".

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