Who's Erasing Who?

Yes, I know it probably should be “Who’s erasing whom?” but I liked the symmetry in the grammatically incorrect version.

And as much as I’d like to erase the WHO, I’m not talking about them, either.

I’ve detailed before how I was blissfully unaware of the seismic shifts bubbling away in society over the last decades and only became aware of them in 2016 when I saw the videos of the Yale Halloween incident.

So much of it, and much of my own subsequent confusion about all things ‘woke’, has centred around language. The word racism got re-defined, but used with the full knowledge (and expectation) of the revulsion its original meaning would evoke. Try unpicking the meaning of things like “systemic racism” or “white privilege” in any serious way and you’ll soon realise these terms might as well have been taken from Klingon.

And this is how I think of wokian, or blue-hair-colour-speak (BHCS) - it’s a strange language invented by some weird fan peeps and lovingly spoken at various gatherings. Those of us who don’t share the same hobby look on in bemusement and wonder what the hell is this gibberish.

Academics, of course, have always prided themselves on their ability to speak Klingon - and as an example of this here’s a particular dialect of Klingon known as Butlerish

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. (Judith Butler)

I’ll give you a few moments to reach for the ibuprofen to help with the headache that trying to understand that has given you.

Better now? Let’s continue.

My recent focus has been on gender ideology and it’s replete with Klingon. Even its most fundamental word, gender, is a vague amorphous blob of a thing. A bit like how the UN views women, in fact.

I feel better knowing that trans women are women after 9pm. I’m also quite pleased to have my underlying misogyny confirmed - I’d always thought that women were the spawn of Cthulu.

As a man, I feel it is my duty to explain things. It’s all part and parcel of the toxic masculinity training we get. Mansplaining, or correctile dysfunction, is a vital part of learning to be a man.

I’m really pleased, after several decades of onslaught, the patriarchy has finally girded its pointy loins and begun the process of erasing women. In a stunning coup d'état we’ve managed to enshrine into law that anyone can be a woman by the simple expedient of declaring oneself to be one. That’ll teach those feminists to get so uppity.

We have also erased the problem of mansplaining with this genius stroke. Accused of mansplaining? Easy - just say that you were identifying as a woman whilst doing so and you’ll leave them without a (third) leg to stand on.

And it benefits women too. Period pains? No worries. Just identify as a man for a few days every month and, hey presto, the problem magically goes away.

The world hasn’t become unhinged, it has become unminged. (For non-UK readers I suggest doing a quick search for the slang meaning of the word ‘minge’).

As seems to be rather common, things in reality are often an inversion of the BHCS version of events. In BHCS we’re told that trans people are being ‘erased’ or that their ‘existence’ is being denied by those horrible non-progressive types.

But what is actually being erased is the very notion of woman and womanhood. By allowing gender self-identification to have legal force, the entire category of ‘woman’ becomes meaningless - formless and limitless. A category without a boundary is not a category at all. Women are limited and it’s necessary for them to be so. Without those limits one cannot properly say what is and what is not a woman.

There’s another erasure going on with this gender-identification malarkey. Trans people are being erased too. If all it takes to become a woman is simply to say that you are, then what of the years of struggle and distress that someone with gender dysphoria goes through? That all becomes meaningless too.

It’s kind of like erasing student loans in the US - all of those people who struggled for years to pay theirs off might be asked to pay (via taxes) to erase the loans of those who did not. I’d be seriously pissed if that was me. I paid my loan off and now you want me to pay some more to pay yours off? And whilst I’m not normally one to get angry or envious at the fortunes of others I think this proposed measure is deeply unfair - and infantilising. You took out a loan? Well, pay the fucker back, you arsepipe. But the word ‘responsibility’ doesn’t exist in BHCS.

The post-modernist pillocks have been banging on for ages about the power of language. And, of course, George Orwell pointed it out rather more effectively, succinctly, and understandably in his book 1984. Orwell was one of those old-fashioned dead white guys who believed that the purpose of writing and language was to communicate, to be understood.

But if you follow the post-modernist program you’ll realise that practical post-modernism (which is another way of viewing ‘woke’) is about the erasure of meaning. Confusion, via ‘deconstruction’, is a desirable goal.

It’s almost Zen where the purpose of a koan is to use a seeming paradox or puzzle to bring enlightenment - except it’s inverted with ‘woke’ where it’s used as a weapon to bring about dis-enlightenment.

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