I hate the kind of classist ableist activism that holds language purity as the highest form of acceptance.
This is most common in identity politics and in particular within transgender politics, which I will focus on for this post.
What I’m talking about is language purity: the idea that there is a universally accepted set of words that are okay to use and a universally renounced set of words that are not okay to use. This is accompanied by the idea that you can recognise a good activist or ally by the fact that they always use the right words and a bad activist or ally by that they use the wrong words.
On Tumblr, being a super language dense place by nature, activism tends to focus even more on language and the results are often messy.
There’s more than language
Language has power, language mattters, but so do actions, attitudes and mindsets.
Not every transgender person treats ‘always get my pronouns right and use the right terms to describe me’ as the ultimate bar for good allyship. For a lot of people, allies are people that drive you to your doctors appointment, that allow you to have a break down about spilled coffee after a particularily hard day, that see you for who you are, that attack transphobes on your behalf and whether those people always get the language right is a minor thing.
At the same time trans positive language can not get us out of poverty,
trans positive
language can not end capitalism or destroy the prison system. We need to keep in mind that there is much more to be improved in our lives than just what people call us.
Language purity can be ableist and classist.
Memory issues are real.
Constantly learning and using new vocabulary isn’t easy for everyone and comes way more natural to people farmiliar with academia.
A lot of words are unnecessarily long and hard to spell because language purists prefer latin rooted words over far easier intuitive alternatives.
It’s very easy to intentionally or unintentionally cut lower class people and people with learning and memory difficulties out of conversations by making sure their voice only matters if they all use the right language.
Activist spaces online and offline are virtually always middle class dominated, higher education dominated, abled dominated spaces where a lot of people use language to score ‘good activist points’ and use it to bully people who are not like them out of the community.
The ones most hurt by oppression are often the least able to invest time and effort in learning the ‘right’ language and also the least interested in learning the ‘right’ language. They’ve got other shit to worry about.
Because of this, language purity can be a tool to exile and de-radicalize, used to push out the ones least likely to settle for diplomatic compromises and slow change and the most likely to call for change right fucking now.
We can do better.
Does that mean we need to abandon all attempts to move towards a more progressive language that humanizes us? Does that mean the people that complain about ‘political correctness gone mad’ are right? Of course not. Language has power, language mattters, but language also has the power to do harm when we wield it ourselves and it has limits too.
We simply need to be a bit less dogmatic about enforcing the ‘right’ language and a bit more sensible about who is using a kind of language and why.
We simply need to be more aware of moments when the language we use and the way we handle language ‘rules’ make our spaces inaccessible, ableist and classist.
We simply need to recognize language purity being used as a tool of power to bully, exclude or deradicalize.
We simply need to keep remembering that we have a lot more work to do than just fix our language.
