The Map and the TERFitory
Remember Freud? He's back! In transphobe form!
“Reclining Woman,” Jean Lurçat, 1925
Content warning: discussion of transphobia, hate speech, sexual assault
At the risk of ruffling feathers, I’m going to come out and say that language is probably my number one way of interpreting reality. I mean, I would say that: I make a living as a writer and editor, I love talking to people, and Duolingo has yet to offer a course in communicating through common mycorrhizal networks, so we have to make do with what we’ve got. The English language in particular is a needlessly complex yet gloriously malleable, playful and adaptable tool for externalising and explaining all that hard work done by your synapses and senses.
Having set out my stall as the Original Bad Boy Of Niche Newsletters with that opening take, I’m now going to risk stepping on a few more toes when I suggest that while language is certainly my primo, top tier, GOAT reality-understander, I find that we increasingly run into trouble when we mistake words — the rhetorical device we use to signify concepts — for the things themselves.
Not sure what I mean? Okay, by means of an example, you know that very short Borges story, “On Exactitude in Science”? You should read it, it’s great. Presented as a found document from the 17th century, it tells the tale of an empire whose cartographers set out to produce the most accurate possible map of its territory. “Most accurate” in this instance means a 1:1 scale, exact size representation of the empire. So, what is meant to be a symbol of something becomes almost indistinguishable from the thing itself. One should not make the mistake of confusing the two however, since a map is still just a big bit of paper with a drawing of the territory on it. The territory itself is the territory. The signifier cannot supersede the signified, no matter how close it manages to imitate it.
This is tantamount to Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, which he used back in the day to trash art as a poor substitute for reality. A drawing of a table, in this argument, sucks because you can’t actually use it as a table. Purely attempting to represent reality in art is doomed to failure. The word table is even worse, because it doesn’t even look like a table. It’s just a noise with attached meaning to and all generally agree on. However, I will contend that the word “bed” looks a bit like a bed.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the conservative establishment of the day are currently preoccupied with (among other made up things) the “war on woke,”1 which is all about the agreed language we use to refer to certain groups. It’s almost entirely identical to earlier “conflicts” regarding political correctness, in that it’s been triggered by marginalised groups requesting they be granted the barest shred of dignity by dint of being accurately described. In response to this, bigoted morons act as if doing so is an infringement upon their civil liberties, usually with reference to one of the great philosophers of the day, rather than ratty old Aristotle.
In the eighties the outrage centred on changes to the terms used to describe anyone who wasn’t white, and was ridiculous. It’s no less so now that the argument is centred around anyone whose gender identity does not fit the accepted binary. In case it’s not clear where I fall down on this “debate,” it’s that trans people obviously exist, non-binary people exist, you get taught about pronouns — including non-gendered third-person pronouns — in literal primary school, shut the fuck up!
Unfortunately, as the saying goes, you cannot keep shouting “shut the fuck up” at Comment is Free articles and expect them to change, so we’re going to have to address these idiots. Language is a particular bugbear in these arguments, and pronouns come in for a particular drubbing. I’m focussing specifically on the language side of things because this is the issue that the more scattershot ignorance of your average reactionary focus on and which, when you get down to it, appears to be the main issue trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, have. It’s also a textbook example of a group using language not to explain reality, but deliberately obfuscate it; keeping your attention on the map, not the territory.
The truly bizarre and depraved transphobic cottage industry which began on the Mumsnet messageboards and has taken root within the liberal intelligentsia has two particular shibboleths it continually returns to, borne back ceaselessly up their own arses: 1. That the definition of the word “woman” is under threat by acknowledging the legitimacy of transwomen, and 2. That transwomen are simply men looking to gain access to women’s bathrooms under false pretences, with dastardly intentions. The latter of these completely illegitimate and made-up moral panics can be immediately debunked, because there is absolutely no record of this ever happening, and because on at least two occasions I’ve been absolutely hammered and accidentally walked into the women’s toilets at a club or bar, and nobody has stopped me.2
So what about the other thing? That words have become the primary battleground for the culture wars makes sense, because the amount of time we spend interpreting reality through written and spoken language has reached levels Steve Guttenberg could only have dreamt of when he invented his printing press. There’s a common meme within the literary world suggesting people barely read nowadays, and a perhaps even more common meme countering that: actually, people read more than ever before, because they scroll through their various social media timelines, they read articles, they read comment sections; even video content designed to be watched on mobile, posted on Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok, include captions because they’re usually muted by default. We’re in the middle of a real boom period for the written word — it’s just that a lot of it sucks, is actively disingenuous or else entirely misguided.
Words have meanings, language is important, and everyone is aware of this, but some welcome disruptions to the accepted way of things more readily than others. Mainstream acceptance of language like “cisgender” (meaning someone whose gender identity is the same as their sex assigned at birth), concepts such as gender as a performance as distinct from biological sex, and the use of pronouns beyond he/him and she/her, are not the primary goal of trans or otherwise gender-troubling activists. These are the bare minimum of acceptance, as with the political correctness of decades past, which sought to use more inclusive (but not assimilatory) language with regards to race, sexuality and disability as the starting point. The important thing is improving the material reality of life for non-white, non-straight, and disabled people. Accommodating changes in your vocabulary is a first step towards accommodating the reality of non-binary and trans people’s existence; the signifier and signified are both important, but the latter more so.
“The Skeptic, plate two from Baroques,” Jean Lurçat, 1925
Yet it’s language, not material reality, which remains the primary locus for the performative outrage of transphobes. There’s a growing, perverse vein of TERFism centred on the Unmissable Cow site UnHerd. If you’ve never, um, heard of it before, well, good for you. It’s a dreadful bovine graveyard for newspaper hacks whose opinions have become to spicy for the broadsheets — a sort of journalistic Change UK. Very embarrassing for everyone involved, but nevertheless, it persists. Erstwhile Grauniad columnist Hadley Freeman recently appeared in a live debate chaired by UnHerd, where she suggested the current struggle for acknowledgement and acceptance of non-gender-conforming people was simply “young people [wanting] a civil rights fight of their own,” and that “gender ideology is a ‘great way’’ for younger women to tell their mums off.”
Without wishing to give old Hadders all the credit, she’s parroting the company line which originates with UnHerd contributing editor, columnist, and all-round wrong ‘un Marry Harrington. Harrington blogs under the name Reactionary Feminist, which is good of her, because you know immediately not to take her seriously [Insert old Arrested Development image macro of DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT scene]. Harrington’s Hot Take is that the current division between the hateful, bigoted “feminists” of yore and today’s overly-sensitive snowflakes is symptomatic of “matricidal mother/daughter dynamics,” which is the sort of thing you’d say about the leads of an ITV detective drama for a joke with your irony-poisoned internet friends. Except Harrington is being serious and, I assume, has no friends.
In a truly baffling blog post tangentially related to Amia Srinivasan’s (very good) book The Right to Sex, Harrington lays out her read on the unfolding culture war. She reckons that following the Suffragette movement there was a rejection of “mothers’ homespun skills…in favour of ‘experts’, and crafts in favour of a newly consumerist expert-led womanhood.” She quotes from “Susan Faludi’s superb 2010 essay American Electra [which] discusses the matricidal streak in the feminist movement.” She fawns over another book which “seeks to recoup Mary Wollstonecraft from her current role in the pantheon as proto-liberal.” Harrington goes on to speak on the virtuousness of being a mum and having babies, something which (apparently?) all waves of feminism have been very much against, leading to our current Children of Men-esque dystopia of a dangerously shrinking population.
Harrington’s argument is almost impossible to get your head around, since it makes absolutely no sense and throws in references to yer man Aristotle, Rousseau, and the like without apparent reason or understanding. She could have saved us all a lot of bother by just saying she’s a proud tradwife. Her leitmotif of the Electra complex, Jung’s advancement on Freud’s Oedipal framework for understanding psychosexual development in young boys in relation to their parents, is the interesting part. Freudian psychology has rather fallen out of fashion, and mostly for good reason. An understanding of the unconscious processes which guide our behaviour, desires and needs which is rooted in symbolic invocation of Greek tragedy only has so much utility in the modern age, and the lack of empirical evidence or relevance to scientific understanding of child development means these particular concepts are rarely used within actual psychological treatment today.
This is not so much the map being mistaken for the territory as it is, I don’t know, the analogy doesn’t stretch this far because the position Freeman is taking is so completely moronic that you don’t want to despoil Borges by bringing him into it. But you can see how you would come to this conclusion, sort of, if you see reality purely through the signifier and not the signified. The fight against transphobia is about real people who are at a significantly increased risk of suicide, murder, and sexual assault. It’s not a theoretical Freudian battle for emancipation from a symbolic or literal mother, but an actual fight for survival, and to frame it in this way is not just idiotic but morally abhorrent and disgusting.
What’s the value of the TERFs of today wanging on about it, then? Freudian psychoanalysis found itself back in fashion thanks to the cultural theorists of the seventies, albeit deployed in a postmodern and critical fashion, with Laura Mulvey in particular leaning on his allegorical conception of sexual desire for her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (from which the much-ballyhooed and even-more-misunderstood concept of the “male gaze” originates). There was an implicit understanding of these concepts as purely symbolic, however, since these theorists had also read the post-structuralists, and were not members of the privileged media elite who need to develop outré opinions to a deadline, for money.
There is absolutely no value to invoking the symbolic killing of mothers in the discussion of trans rights. Doing so does not signify anything real. What it does, however, is allow TERFs to pretend as if some form of violence is being done for them. It’s truly repugnant to suggest they are in some way the victims of some sort of lexical violence, because they are being asked to adjust the definition of “woman” in a way that is not biological-essentialist,3 when non-gender-conforming individuals are often the victims of actual violence. Bigots exemplifying Baudrillard, what a time to be alive while wishing you weren’t!
This is in keeping, too, with the TERF assertion that the very term — descriptive, accurate — might be deemed a “slur.” We find ourselves on linguistically and intellectually dishonest ground once more with this, since one is not likely to find the material conditions of their life worsened by the normalisation of the term TERF, whereas the legitimising of transphobic language and refusal to acknowledge people’s identity absolutely does have a real, measurable effect. By keeping the conversation focussed solely on language, it keeps the material conditions being fought for out of the conversation entirely, so as to maintain a status quo by distracting us with arguments over semantics.
In The Right to Sex, Srinivasan writes about anti-sex work feminists who work primarily on a “symbolic,” rather than literal, plain:
“Symbolism, of course, matters: patriarchy establishes itself at the level of words and signs, not just bodies. But the demands of the symbolic can stand in tension with those of the real women who must pay their bills, feed their children, and sometimes are assaulted by the men to whom they sell sex. When these women are assaulted, will they have any recourse — or will they be trapped in a confined space with a violent man, a quiet sacrifice in a war of symbols?”
This is a broader approach for the state at large, at present. The wider culture “war” encourages the disenfranchised to squabble amongst themselves over nonsense, to believe stickers promoting COVID conspiracies and listen to Joe Rogan entertain white supremacists, to be distracted by all of the words to the point that they can’t discern the symbols from what they actually see and experience. How much more do you understand the struggle between previous and current day generations of feminists if it’s put into outdated psychological metaphor? Not in the slightest. It’s a deliberate misuse of language. Instead of using words to interpret reality, it’s about obfuscating it. We should stop letting them get away with it. Wipe our arses with their map, flush, and instead deal with the actual ground beneath our feet.
Looks like I’m doing newsletters again! Rather than following the structure and monthly schedule of last year’s, each of these will be a single, semi-self-contained essay. They’ll usually all be on the same sort of topics as the mini-screeds in little ghost, though: technology, films, art, language, leftie politics, mental health. They’ll be sent out whenever they’re done. Feel free to read or skip any you’re not interested in.
Currently on the docket (ie half-written and/or waiting to be edited) are pieces on NFTs and Ways of Seeing; Boiling Point, Pig, and the anarchist case for abolishing restaurants; and an extension of this edition’s concepts, talking about mental health and the proliferation of DSM-derived language on social media. I promise I’ll try and lighten the mood in each with some quality gags and punning headlines.
If you do enjoy any of these essays, please do share them — forward them onto people you think would be interested, link to them on your timelines, etc. That’s the only way you grow an audience, I hear!
Take care of yourselves,
Tom x
The language used — the war on woke, culture war — betraying both the right’s bloodlust and conflicting desire not to actually have to fight anyone; see also the war on drugs and war on terrorism, which were primarily about curbing the rights of already-oppressed communities
I should note that in each instance the toilets were empty and I turned on my heel and fled instantly upon noticing the absence of urinals
In Srinivasan’s book, she quotes from an interview with Catharine MacKinnon: “Male dominant society has defined women as a discrete biological group forever. If this was going to produce liberation, we’d be free.”