In Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony, the presenter J.K. Simmons described The Danish Girl as a film about someone who had undergone “gender-confirmation surgery.” I immediately recognized the phrase -- which I wasn’t aware of encountering before -- as a foot soldier in a political war. That is, Simmons’s formulation implicitly cast aside other terms for the same thing, such as “gender-reassignment surgery” or the old-fashioned “sex-change operation,” so as to advance a point of view. As a plastic surgeon has written on Huffington Post, the older names
suggest that a person is making a choice to switch genders. From the hundreds of discussions I’ve had with individuals over the years, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not about choice; it’s about using surgery as one of the therapeutic tools to enable people to be comfortable with their gendered self. ... if such surgery helps confirm the way a person feels he or she was meant to be, shouldn’t the name reflect that truth?
A term like “gender-confirmation surgery” almost begs to be mocked as “politically correct,” the implication being that right-thinking people are hijacking the language in order to force their point of view on everyone else.
There is no question that a cause is behind the wording, and there is no question that examples of this sort of thing abound. Not long ago, I listened to an interview with Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, on the public radio program Here and Now. I was struck by the way she consistently referred to people “having obesity,” for example, “we also see that employees who have obesity are more likely to be fired or terminated from positions because of their weight.” Elsewhere in the interview, she addressed this wording, saying she favored, “people-first language with obesity, which involves putting people first rather than labeling them by their disease or disability. ... Essentially it involves referring to people who have obesity or are affected by obesity, rather than an obese person.”
The “have obesity” thing is relatively new, but people-first language has been around for decades. It has been criticized all the while, and in fact advocacy groups for the deaf and blind have both publicly rejected it. The charge -- not without merit -- is that it promotes euphemism and stylistic awkwardness. One advocacy group actually advises replacing a sentence like “Schizophrenics have a mental illness” with, “Individuals affected by schizophrenia are considered to have a mental illness.”
That’s easy to mock, but I don’t criticize the effort or the purpose behind it. Today, language is very often the crucible in which attitudes and subsequent policy are forged, and any side that ignores this fact suffers for it. And it’s not as if these efforts sully the language, because no language is pure. After all, “gender-reassignment surgery” advances a worldview of its own.
The Republican pollster Frank Luntz is recognized as the first person to fully exploit this idea, most famously when he persuaded the party to campaign against “the death tax” rather than “inheritance taxes.” All of a sudden, the public was irate about a longstanding and hitherto uncontroversial levy. Liberals -- excuse me, “progressives” -- have followed suit, and had some success when they rebranded “global warming” as “climate change.” They are currently trying to replace"gun control” with “gun safety.”
Neither side, of course, mentions abortion in their abortion-issue framing. It’s “pro-life” versus “pro-choice,” and it appears to be a standoff.
I have always felt that perhaps the most subtle and clever piece of political naming is homophobia. The term was used as early as 1920 as a rare medical condition, defined (by the OED) as “Fear of men, or aversion towards the male sex; also, fear of mankind.” But then in the 1960s some genius thought to use it to mean hatred of homosexuals. The genius -- and perhaps the reason it caught on -- was in medicalizing that hatred, as a phobia. I’m not saying it’s not true that people who hate homosexuals secretly fear them; I’m just saying the word is a great, more or less irrefutable, way of marginalizing the haters. It’s certainly a lot more potent than anti-Semitism, the root of which, weirdly, denotes a group of languages that include not only Hebrew but also Arabic and Amharic.
A comparable term that’s been in wide circulation of late is Islamophobia. An essay by Jennifer Oriel in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Australian, “Pathologising Free Thought Over Islamists,” calls the word an “ever-amorphous yet strikingly censorious tool of denunciation.” She charges, “by deeming politically incorrect thought a mental illness or phobia, the modern Left is resurrecting Soviet-style thought control.”
That seems a little extreme, but it’s worth noting that in 2012, the Associated Press style guide came down against both homophobia and Islamophobia, on the grounds that they are political constructions not appropriate for news coverage, other than in quotations.
The bottom line is that it’s a free country: Anyone can throw out any piece of terminology at any time, in the hope of advancing any point of view. But acceptance and survival are a different story. It’s a harsh semantic world out there, red in tooth and claw. Some political wording makes the grade -- besides the examples mentioned, see Ms., Native American, and African-American -- while some gets left in the ash heap of history. When was the last time you saw someone write womyn with a straight face?
As for gender-confirmation surgery, I have my hunches. But who knows? Let’s meet in 10 years and see if it’s still standing.
