Tumbler Trans People vs. Psychology

                We live in an age where people like to toss words around like so many Afghan rocks, some have serious power psychologically/socially/legally such as “nigger,” “peado,” or “rapists.” Others have been (or risk being) so overused as to no longer have any serious meaning despite being very serious indeed, such as “triggered,” “rape,” and “terrorist.” The power or lack thereof of these words is the subject for another post, but for now let’s look at why words are so important, and why you should be afraid of somebody who tells you what you can and cannot say.

                There was a fellow in the early 1900’s called Whorf, back before psychology really existed as a serious discipline, he was an individual who made a career out of studying linguistics. Whorf proposed eventually a theory called linguistic determinism, which is essentially the notion that the words you have access to shape your thinking.  I’ll give you an example, let’s say I took an egg and covered it in mud; how would you describe that egg? Filthy? Dirty? Unhygienic? Tainted? Edible/Inedible? Disgusting? Gross? Each word carries subtle meaning and stipulations to us about the state of my egg, especially if we are describing the egg to another person who has not seen it. A disgusting egg sounds very different from an egg that is described as “still edible”. Thus our command of language and the words we employ in our internal narrative shapes our thoughts and our ability to comprehend and interpret the world around us. It wasn’t until 1948 that George Orwell would create the idea of “Newspeak” establishing linguistic determinism into a literary work. Orwell highlighted that without a broad command of language our ability to think, and therefore create independent opinions and express our motivations is heavily restricted, for example with newspeak all the words I listed for our egg would be disregarded, as only one was needed “Bad” (or even “Un-good)”. “Bad” would be used to describe everything from your child being murdered and your feelings about it through to you missing the train that morning, and as such your own flexibility of thought would be stifled and directed by the restrictions placed on what you were, and were not, allowed to say.

                So why is this worthy of my attention? Well with the current climate seeing these very aggressive and powerful words being tossed around like bullets at a school shooting, individuals, political groups and campaigners are taking action to restrict words that people are allowed to say. “Ban Boss” springs to mind, where prominent influential women were campaigning to make it amoral/illegal to call a little girl (and only a little girl) “bossy”. While the lesser known “#sorrynotsorry” campaign attempted to remove the word “sorry” from the vocabulary of women (and again, only women).

But what really hammered this home were the recent issues with Dr John Peterson refusing to comply with the demand by the University of Toronto who employ him that he use pronouns that students have invented when addressing them. I’d encourage you to look into it, but suffice to say it’s an exercise in watching people abuse some very powerful words like “white-supremacist” and “Nazi” oblivious to irony of them fighting to control the speech of others by using such terms.

                So why do I (as a headshrinker myself) think Dr Peterson refused? Well…. Because it’s psychologically harmful to indulge such things. The average humans mind does not develop fully until they are in their mid-twenties, despite what most university students may think, they still have several formative years ahead of them, and a big part of that is establishing “who they are”. When a child decided because they like coco-pops that is all they will eat from now on, you still persuade them to try other foods and encourage them to experience new things, so when a teenager wishes to declare they are trans and force a person to refer to them as bun, bun, and bunself, it’s not psychologically heathy to stop their development of an identity there, rather it is better to let them try on a few new things and perspectives until they finish developing. Most heathy trans people are content to be addressed with whatever pronoun they are currently presenting as, and undoubtedly cringe when some idiot millennial decides to scream hysterically at somebody because they refuse to use jee/jem/jeir/jemself when addressing them. I doubt Mr. Patterson is trying to malign trans people, but what I suspect he is doing is recognising that by enforcing laws and codes on how others chose to speak you are attempting to exercise authoritarian control, a control that is very popular among those seeking to establish dominance over the hearts, minds, rights and thoughts of everyone else.  Y’know, like the Nazi’s did.