Language authorities. Right-wing politicians. White supremacists and feminists. What do they have in common? They’re all working together to fight gender-inclusive language. But why bring language into this fight? What extra does this give them?
Dr Caitlin Green and Maureen Kosse join us to explain on this big episode.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Dr Caitlin Green on Liberal Currents
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/author/caitlingreen/
Colorado A&S Magazine spotlights work of Maureen Kosse
https://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/2023/03/20/colorado-magazine-spotlights-work-maureen-kosse
Glottlog 5
https://glottolog.org
The Because Language Calendar of Notable Days
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=MGM3YmZmZDYwYzE4MmNlOGEwYzllYmFhOWRiMTFjYmE5N2MyNmFhNGYyMjdjZjJiYzRiMmQ1YzNjNjE3Zjk1OUBncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t
Save Free Speech From Trolls
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/opinion/sunday/save-free-speech-from-trolls.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gk0.eYMz.hpH1VzrS2kdK&smid=url-share
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3479525
[PDF] Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter
https://cs.stanford.edu/~diyiy/docs/jhaver-2021-deplatforming.pdf
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s social media platform is up…kind of
https://www.cnet.com/culture/mypillow-ceo-mike-lindells-social-media-platform-is-up-kind-of/
Deplatforming Reduces Overall Attention to Online Figures, Says Longitudinal Study of 101 Influencers
https://www.techpolicy.press/deplatforming-reduces-overall-attention-to-online-figures-says-longitudinal-study-of-101-influencers/
The Ben Shapiro Cinematic Universe / Part Two: Lady Ballers – SOME MORE NEWS
https://youtu.be/nrsysN_LBoo?si=7lWuLx6Z8rOYW_d9
merk | Wiktionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/merk
merk | Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=merk
Two women arrested after women’s rights protest at Victorian parliament turns ugly
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-23/vic-protesters-clash-with-police-outside-victorian-parliament/103624208
Self-described ‘nationalist’ speaks at anti-trans rights rally on Victoria parliament steps
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/26/victoria-anti-trans-rally-parliament-neo-nazi-allegations-matthew-trihey-organiser-michelle-uriarau-ntwnfb
German far-right party leaders planned mass deportation laws with neo-Nazis
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/01/11/leaders-of-germany-s-far-right-afd-party-are-considering-mass-expulsion-of-germans-of-foreign-origin_6422332_4.html
Caitlin Green: The Lovejoy Trap: Fascism Masquerading As Care
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-lovejoy-trap-fascism-masquerading-as-care/
Judith Butler on Being Attacked in Brazil
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/judith-butler-discusses-being-burned-effigy-and-protested-brazil
Why Conservatives Prefer Nouns
https://psmag.com/news/why-conservatives-prefer-nouns
On the Grammar of Politics-or Why Conservatives Prefer Nouns
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292074794_On_the_Grammar_of_Politics-or_Why_Conservatives_Prefer_Nouns
“80% of conservative outrage is just someone finding out how stuff works for the first time”
https://medium.com/@zygort2/80-of-conservative-outrage-is-just-someone-finding-out-how-stuff-works-for-the-first-time-1a5c2acb6ee2
How anti-trans activists forced Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre into lockdown
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/trans-scotland-mridul-wadhwa-for-women-scotland/
Framing: don’t think of an elephant
https://i2s.anu.edu.au/archive/resources-to-go-to-i2insights/framing-dont-think-elephant/
The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-all-new-dont-think-of-an-elephant/
Are We the Baddies? | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/are-we-the-baddies
Sister Fonda Alamode, The Ultimate Relief Society President
https://sunstone.org/sister-fonda-alamode-the-ultimate-relief-society-president/
Men and women of Gen Z are politically divided in ways that previous generations were not.
https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_300_23a718fa-eee4-4c71-8668-aa0d0311b38a&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ff.prxu.org%2F300%2Ffeed-rss.xml
Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/gen-z-gender-divide-2024-election/677723/’
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: And there’s a cat in the frame.
CAITLIN GREEN: Hello, cat.
HEDVIG: There’s a cat.
DANIEL: Hello, cat.
MAUREEN KOSSE: If I don’t let her do what she wants, I will be assaulted and abused.
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I know what you mean, because my youngest does that. Okay.
MAUREEN: [LAUGHS]
[NOTE: abuse and assault are not funny, but it was funny in context when it was a cat]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. She’s a linguist, a good friend, and somebody who’s easy to buy presents for, just anything in lime green. It’s Hedvig Skirgård. Is that right about the green? Did I get that right?
HEDVIG: You didn’t get that right and you know it and that’s why you said it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I don’t know if Caitlin and our other guests know this, but sometimes when we talk about language and preferences, I say, people have fashion preferences. I don’t like lime green. That doesn’t mean that I tell other people not to wear lime green.
DANIEL: Except on nine episodes. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right. So, because it’s my favorite example, because it’s so silly, because no one would ever think to do that.
DANIEL: It’s a brilliant example.
HEDVIG: But this reminds me that I’ve been thinking that maybe we should release a Because Language corpora search like thing.
DANIEL: Well, I have some good news. LordMortis has done the work so that if you’re on our Discord, you can employ the Because Transcripts bot and search for anything. And that’s in Discord. So, thanks LordMortis for doing the work on that. All right, hey, great to see you, Hedvig.
She’s the author of scholarly tomes and scorching takes, and she recently destroyed wokeness by simply posting a selfie. It’s Dr Caitlin Green. Hey, Caitlin.
CAITLIN: That’s right. Me and Sydney Sweeney are basically the same person.
DANIEL: I don’t know how you do it. [CAITLIN LAUGHS] It’s funny how wokeness is so fragile it can be destroyed by a photo, but so tenacious that it could destroy Western civilisation.
CAITLIN: Isn’t that so interesting the way the historical echoes, would you say?
DANIEL: Mm, I think so. Also, with somebody whose writing has been on my feed and on my library lists, Dr Maureen Kosse of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Hi, Maureen. Welcome to the show.
MAUREEN: Hi. Thank you.
DANIEL: It’s great to have you because I’ve been reading your work on alt-right semiotics. I admire your ability to write that stuff because it’s difficult to be in that world. Would you say?
MAUREEN: I love it. No, sorry. That’s not a good way to start. I hate it. It is difficult.
DANIEL: We don’t love those things, right?
MAUREEN: No. No, we don’t.
DANIEL: But what do you love about it? What keeps you going? Because you’re in there fighting. I see ya. And it’s brilliant. Just like Caitlin does. You’re both a couple of fighters.
MAUREEN: By fighters, you mean Hostile Reply Guy?
CAITLIN: Yes. [LAUGHS] That’s what we are.
DANIEL: Yeah.
MAUREEN: But yes, it’s rough but necessary, I think.
DANIEL: Yup. Okay.
HEDVIG: Because I like conspiracy theories and cults. Some of them are right wing, and I enjoy the sort of absurdism sometimes. Like, JFK Jr. is alive and is an Italian American man with a fedora. That’s just so fun. So, that keeps me entertained. Is there anything like that for you?
MAUREEN: I don’t mean to be a bummer.
CAITLIN: Sorry. You can. Yeah.
MAUREEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah. That’s how I have to preface everything I talk about with my research. But I used to be really big into conspiracies, because I love hearing the kinds of justifications people come up with for stuff. I personally really enjoy flat earth discourse, in general.
DANIEL: Ah.
MAUREEN: Especially, I don’t think they call them globe heads anymore, but there was a period where they were calling round earthers, spherical earthers globeheads.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: The bummer part is it was fun until I realized that 99.9% of conspiracy theories just boil down to antisemitism. And then, all the lizard people stuff, it’s like, aww.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MAUREEN: This was so much more fun when it was like lizard people.
HEDVIG: That is true.
CAITLIN: Yeah. I love a low stakes conspiracy theory where we’re not worried about the global elites conspiring to replace us or whatever, but it’s just something very, very silly, like they’re cutting the Chuck E. Cheese pizza and then retaking the uneaten pieces and assembling new pieces and giving them to us.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] No. I didn’t know they did that.
HEDVIG: Or the alternate timeline stuff.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
MAUREEN: I like that.
HEDVIG: That you can wheel into existing alternate timelines and stuff like that.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MAUREEN: I did think of something funny, actually.
[LAUGHTER]
MAUREEN: But it’s late.
DANIEL: Just in time.
MAUREEN: I’m not good at podcasting or linear thinking.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: But one thing that I have that I never get to bring up in my research, but it’s my favorite piece of data is some 4chan posts about those short grocery carts you can get at the store.
HEDVIG: Right.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
MAUREEN: They were calling them like cuck carts.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, my god. No.
MAUREEN: This is very typical alt right, where it’s like, it sounds and looks really funny and stupid, but you get people sincerely responding like, “Yeah, this is the decline of the Western family. It’s a sign of degeneracy, because you have single people shopping for themselves.” But every time I see it, I’m like, “Cuck cart.”
CAITLIN: We used to be a real country.
MAUREEN: Yeah, we used to be a real country.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: We used to have full-size carts.
DANIEL: With real trolleys.
CAITLIN: Men used to be men.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: Like, me yelling that on my way out of Walmart after shoplifting $600 worth of Legos.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: I can’t fit a whole rack of lamb in here. You don’t want me to be a man.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I love it.
DANIEL: Caitlin, you’re back for your third episode.
CAITLIN: Whoo. Do I get a jacket or a blazer or something?
DANIEL: How does everybody know about the jacket? Hedvig?
HEDVIG: We say it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Daniel, are you aware that when we talk on this show, it is recorded?
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS] It goes out to the public.
DANIEL: Hedvig, nobody listens to this show. Guests don’t listen to this show.
CAITLIN: I am a fan first.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, you’re not a fan anymore, because now you’re an honorary cohost. So, here’s what it means. You get the jacket. That’s number one. Number two, you get to crash any episode you want and be a cohost. Did you know this?
CAITLIN: No.
DANIEL: We decided this recently.
CAITLIN: I forgot about that part.
DANIEL: Yup.
CAITLIN: This made my year.
DANIEL: Not only that, but I’ll give you a link to a website where you can… I’ll give you a heads-up on what episodes are coming up, so you’ll be like, “Oh, I’m in on that one,” okay?
CAITLIN: You’re going to be so sick of me, you guys.
DANIEL: Nope.
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Nope. That’s how we roll. Okay, so here’s what’s coming up for this episode. I’m really glad to have both of you on the show, because we have had some fucking bullshit going down in Melbourne over the weekend as so-called gender critical feminists and actual Nazis joined hands in the cause against gender stuff. I think I need your help to sort things out around here. This is a language show. So, this all ties into language in ways that I have recently realised I’m not entirely on top of. So, I’m going to need your help. Okay? All right.
I’m going to try to remember that as a white, straight cis guy, I am very much a traveler here in this terrain. So, I am going to try to travel cautiously and respectfully with my listening ears on. Sound good?
HEDVIG: That sounds good.
CAITLIN: Love that.
DANIEL: Okay. Our last episode was a bonus episode, a mailbag with Dr Kelly Wright. So much fun. We noticed that really, really different morphemes, suffixes in English have converged to look only a couple of different ways. So, that was weird. And what else did we do, Hedvig? Do you remember?
HEDVIG: What else did we do?
DANIEL: My memory doesn’t go back. We figured out why billion and trillion have different numbers of zeros in different places.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god, that was mind blowing.
DANIEL: You remember that?
HEDVIG: I just need people to say like number of zeros and not use these words. Or, do like 10 to the power of or something like.
DANIEL: Is that okay? Should I do that? I’ll do that. Okay.
HEDVIG: Sorry, this is alarming.
CAITLIN: Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay. Well, we have fun with our bonus episodes. If you want to support the show, hear bonus episodes, join our Discord community, get extra perks, then come and join up. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
All right, it’s time for the news. So, the first one, congratulations, Hedvig on… Well, I’m congratulating you, but maybe that’s presumptuous. Glottolog 5, it’s out.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] So, Glottolog is a catalogue of the world’s languages that is partially produced in my department. I am not a part of the editor and team at all. I’m just a very enthusiastic fan, and I file a lot of issues where I’m like, “This language should be a bit further to the East,” or, “Here’s another name,” or, “I found a new grammar.” I file those, and then Harald Hammarström, Robert Forkel and the rest of the team take care of that.
They recently published the five version. And regularly, there are new versions published. It’s pretty practical, if you are familiar with other catalogs, such as the Ethnologue produced by the Summer Institutes of Linguistics. It links up to that. You can use codes, and it has information on language families and language locations. What I really like, something called descriptive level, where it says if a grammar exists for that language or not, and you can see all the areas in the world where there aren’t descriptions of languages.
In this most recent version 5, there’s also been some updates to how sign languages are treated, because…
DANIEL: [EXCITEDLY] Yes.
HEDVIG: So, Robert said that they’ve been gone over and edited a bit, how they work into families, etcetera, depending on how you classify them. So, that’s good. I’m happy with that. That’s great.
DANIEL: That’s very cool. And by the way, happy end of Sign Language Week in the UK. Hurray.
HEDVIG: Oh, yes. And this reminds me to say to all of our listeners that we’ve started a Google Calendar that you can subscribe to, if you want, with linguistic-relevant holidays or events.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: It’s mainly like when someone has like Sign Language Week in the UK or Te Reo Māori week in New Zealand or something, we haven’t put in conference calls and those kind of things, because Linguist List said they might be doing that anyway. So, let’s not reinvent wheels.
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s right. But we did have OK Day on the 23rd of March, and that was the very first appearance of the word “OK” in a Boston newspaper in 1839. March 23rd there. Anyway, enough about that. But I think that’s really cool that we’ve gotten a big update for Glottolog, that’s going to help lot of people.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Practical and free, which is nice. [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: That’s big. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that is nice. I actually really admire and appreciate a lot of the work that SIL International does and have done for our fields. But Ethnologue is a paid product and has some lack of transparency sometimes with some decision making or references. So, I’m a big Glottolog fangirl for that reason.
DANIEL: Well, you can head over and check that out at Glottolog… That’s two Ts. glottolog.log. L-O-G dot. How do you spell it? G-L-O-T-T-O-L-O-G dot org. Now, our next news item is about deplatforming. When people are banned from a platform because they’ve broken the rules, does it have any effect? Did we have a stand on kicking people off of platforms when they’ve been doing bad behavior? What’s your own personal policy, y’all?
CAITLIN: I’ve been on the deplatforming works train ever since I saw Milo Yiannopoulos trying to sell little figurines on a catholic home shopping network. I was like, “That’s your level, buddy. That’s where you go.”
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: That was really interesting, wasn’t it? I mean, under the bus was where he went.
MAUREEN: I’m also pro-deplatforming. I don’t agree with the idea that everybody just has a right to… the “Twitter is a public sphere” kind of argument. I think that’s sometimes the only way to take some of that reach away. Yeah, I just think you’re cutting it off… This is so gross. I don’t know why I thought about this, but like a skin tag, you just got to [DANIEL LAUGHS] cut it off.
CAITLIN: Oh, you have to tie thread around it and then leave it.
MAUREEN: Yeah.
CAITLIN: You have to starve the blood source.
MAUREEN: That’s what I did to Jordan Peterson.
CAITLIN: Yeah, you’ve got to do it. Well, there’s this idea that the best antidote to a bad argument is a good argument, right? The best disinfectant is sunlight, you got to get these bad ideas out into the open and then debunk them. But we have so many cognitive biases that cause us to forget the quality of the information when we hear it. And it sort of just goes into the box and jumbles around. And then later on, we’ll be like, “You know, I heard one time that relative skull sizes are actually different between the races.” And then, it’s like, “Well, shoot.” [CHUCKLES] You also heard that wasn’t true, but apparently, only one of those things made it in. That happens all the time. So, just letting everybody hear all the information all the time, even if it’s wrong, it’s not as effective as we think.
DANIEL: I do believe Lindy West once said that, “Sunlight is not the best disinfectant. Sometimes sunlight helps things to grow.”
CAITLIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah. What if it’s a weed?
DANIEL: I guess it does place a lot of faith in humans to say, “Well, will we be able to tell the difference between the good arguments and the bad arguments? I know sometimes I fail at this. I would like to be given the opportunity.”
HEDVIG: But that’s also putting not only a lot of faith, but also… Like, I have a full-time job, a husband and two cats. Like, I am not employed by snopes.com to debunk and criticise everything I see. I outsource that to certain news desks, and I try and keep social media low stakes and out of some of that stuff.
CAITLIN: Right. You have to vet your sources. You can’t vet every single parcel of information, right?
HEDVIG: Right. Exactly. So, my media diet is, I start with the Finnish news broadcast in Swedish, because that’s really fun because they report on Sweden from an outside perspective. So, that’s fun. And then, I go through the Swedish news, the Australian and the British, and they often cover the same event, but from different angles, and it’s really fun. But on that point of like Twitter or Facebook or something being a public space, there’s a part of me that kind of understands that. But then, I was also there when internet was young… You can have a blog. You don’t have to be… Facebook and Twitter, there are other spaces on the internet.
CAITLIN: Right. Well, it’s only come to this point where we think of it that way because of this kind of oligopoly of social media sites.
HEDVIG: Yes, exactly.
CAITLIN: That’s a symptom, the fact that Twitter or Facebook is where people go to get information and not other places…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: …that’s not an awesome state of affairs.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Yeah. And you can’t stop people from saying things that are incorrect. If we did that, then half the things I say would be at least partially redacted. But what we’re really talking about is when people are banned from a platform because they’ve broken the rules about hate speech or encouraging violence, because we sometimes think, “Oh, this is some kind of Socratic dialogue, where we listen to each other and we form ideas.” But in reality, violent speech or violent expression doesn’t stay on the internet. It spills over into real life. Then we have a problem.
So, this is some work from Shagun Jhaver from Rutgers University and a team published in the proceedings of the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, which is such a steampunk title. They looked at three right wing figures, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and Owen Benjamin, after their Twitter accounts got pulled. And then, they looked and saw, well, what happened to their reach? Were they just as popular as before, or did they see some lessening of influence?
They found that deplatforming reduced the amount of conversations that people were having about them on Twitter. And they report that the overall activity and toxicity, as measured by the words in their online content, declined after deplatforming. So, if we’re talking about removing the influence of toxic actors or hateful actors, booting them off had that effect even among their supporters.
CAITLIN: Right. Because then they go to some other smaller place, and not all of their followers are dedicated enough fans to follow them there. So, it all kind of goes down in numbers. They still have their really excitable fans. They’re like, you know, really dedicated people.
MAUREEN: They’re turning into the Catholic Home Shopping Network.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah. They’re not gonna…
CAITLIN: Yeah, I don’t know that they followed Milo anywhere. But Alex Jones, he still has his own network that he’s trying to do. And so, you can go to his own website, the URL of which I will not say, because I don’t want traffic there. But I like this podcast, Knowledge Fight, which is about Infowars, and they talk about what he’s doing at any given time. They go back in time… like, they went through the whole Sandy Hook situation and…
DANIEL: Pfooooo
CAITLIN: Yeah. They talk about how it does impact him when he gets taken off of a platform.
DANIEL: This is interesting. I’m having an interesting experience because I’m enjoying talking to you three. But every once in a while, there’ll be a little sadness bomb that makes me go, “Oh, oh, Sandy Hook.”
HEDVIG: What?
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’m sad now.
HEDVIG: Oh.
CAITLIN: Sorry. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m having a good time. I think it’s just going to go like that. So, listener, be aware.
CAITLIN: But that’s the kind of thing that you want to cut off, is the Sandy Hook disinformation, the harassment that those families faced and still face.
DANIEL: Yup.
CAITLIN: That’s the kind of stakes that we’re talking about.
DANIEL: It is. There was another report from EPFL Switzerland and Rutgers University. Shogun Javert was on that team as well. They looked at 165 deplatforming events targeted at 101 influencers. So, the last study was just three. This was 101 people. And again, they found that deplatforming, booting them off reduces online attention toward influencers. And it worked, whether it was a permanent ban or a temporary ban. But they noticed that it depended a lot on how popular that user was. They looked at the top third and they looked at the bottom two thirds, and they found that the more famous a personality was or the more notorious, the less effect that booting them off had on overall attention.
HEDVIG: That makes perfect sense, right? That’s how loyalty works.
CAITLIN: Right. They have more pull to get their people to follow them to wherever it is that they went.
DANIEL: I guess so. So, it’s partly the popularity of the network, but partly the popularity of the person. I guess that makes sense.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: It probably has a lot to do with how much energy they’re putting into any given platform. Like, if they’re very famous, but they don’t have a presence other than on Twitter, it might be harder. But if they also have a really populated Facebook fan group or they have a Substack with a lot of subscribers or they go on TV a lot also, they’re going to have an easier time reaching their fans without the one platform.
DANIEL: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I guess one piece of evidence that deplatforming has an effect is that they hate it so much that they complain incessantly about it. That should be a guide that, “Oh, okay. I guess we’re doing that.”
MAUREEN: I was watching Some More News. It’s a podcast and a YouTube series that covers political topics. But they were covering the Daily Wire’s Lady Ballers, which is a transphobic… Just garbage. But they marketed it as a comedy.
DANIEL: Gross.
MAUREEN: But in the film…
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Sadness bomb!
MAUREEN: Yeah. There’s like this evil s…
HEDVIG: I thought it was like another word for GIRLBOSS.
CAITLIN: I think they were trying to play off of that, but this is about men trying to enter a basketball competition that’s for women.
HEDVIG: Oh. okay.
MAUREEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s fine.
MAUREEN: Oh, thank you for clarifying. [CHUCKLES]
CAITLIN: Sorry. Yeah. I was just like, “Girlboss TV show? Sounds great.” [CHUCKLES]
MAUREEN: Like, I love it! But the main character is, like, this cool conservative guy, and he’s, like, sleeping with this evil liberal journalist, whatever. But she’s like, [EVIL VOICE] “If you cross me, I’ll cancel you.” And you could just tell this occupies so much real estate.
CAITLIN: The kind of thing that we say all the time, right? I’m going to cancel you.
DANIEL: I say that.
CAITLIN: Sometimes I do joke. Like, I’ll say that I canceled Steven Pinker. I’ll joke with my friends that I’m about to cancel them. And sometimes people on the right will see that on Twitter and be like, “Look, she admitted it!”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That is so funny.
DANIEL: Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could actually cancel people and they would stay canceled? Instead, they just choose when they’re going to come back! They don’t stay… [GNARLY VOICE] “When I cancel somebody, they stay cancelled.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It doesn’t work. All right. Well, that’s a strategy note. Let’s go on to our last news story about hand gestures. Hedvig, you pointed this one out, but I did some research. Do you want to drive on this one, or do you want me to drive?
HEDVIG: I want you to drive.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, cool, cool. This is work from Marlijn ter Bekke from Radboud University and a team. “We sometimes think of hand gestures as contentless, but they’re really not.” And I keep going back to an episode I did with my friend, Mark Ellison. We talked about our brains being prediction engines.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: When we are having a conversation with someone, our brains are furiously cranking through data, looking for patterns, trying to predict what’s going to come next, looking for cues to interpretation.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This team wanted to look at gestures as a way of maybe helping us to predict what the meaning was going to be. But of course, in order for gesture to be helpful in prediction, the gesture would have to come before the words that they signify. So, this team took a look at, when somebody makes a gesture, does it come before the word that that gesture corresponds to?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: For anyone who didn’t read, any guesses? Does it? Does it?
MAUREEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: I think some of them might.
CAITLIN: I’m going to guess yes. I’ll be fully honest. I was just watching your little square in the Zoom to see if your hands were going to tell me anything ahead of time. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Stoppit! That’s when I throw in misleading gestures or dramatic gestures. So, let’s see, this team looked at specifically representational gestures, which they defined as “gestures that depict semantic information by virtue of handshape placement or motion.” So, for example, pointing would be one of those. Or, if you’re miming, holding a glass and drinking, do you say “drink” after you do the thing, or with it or slightly before? When do you do it?
HEDVIG: I think I do a lot of the… When you talk about a person or a place and you’re like, “Oh, I went into town,” and you point at town. Or, you say, “Oh, Edvin this last name, not that last name,” and you point where he used to live or where his office is or where he usually sits at the table or something. I was thinking to myself, “Do I do that before I say the name?” I’m not sure. I like to think I do it simultaneously, but I don’t know. What did they find in their experiments?
DANIEL: They find that, in fact, gestures do precede the words. The overwhelming majority, about 96%, started before the word that the gesture pertained to.
HEDVIG: Wow. Okay.
DANIEL: And then, they checked on whether it had an effect. And they found that when people got questions with the gestures, they actually gave faster responses than when they didn’t get gestures. So, that seems to suggest yeah, there’s some predictive capacity there. I thought that was super interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: Yeah. It’s almost like language is embodied, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Like, we use all the resources we got, right?
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Like, we use multiple channels.
HEDVIG: We use shared knowledge, we use guessing, we use… We need a lot of information to guess. That’s also why text information can feel so robbed of informational content, because you’re like…
CAITLIN: And misunderstandings are easier.
DANIEL: I don’t know what the intonation is. I don’t know what’s… And that’s why people need things like emojis or something, or develop different mimetic templates or something to get more information in there.
DANIEL: You’d be amazed at how critical some people are of emoji and how judgmental they are. Even today, some of the people in different audiences that I speak to.
HEDVIG: But Daniel…
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: …I know what audiences you speak to.
DANIEL: Yes.
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: They are middle-aged Australian people who are… They are not…
DANIEL: They didn’t grow up with emoji.
HEDVIG: No, but also, they’re not like a random Australian. You know that, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. The audiences that I speak to are fairly well educated, a little bit older. But like everybody does, they have some unexamined language attitudes back there. When I say, “Hey, maybe there’s some counterintuitive stuff going on in language,” I find that they’re really pretty good about taking it on, in general. Not everyone, but a lot of them. So, it makes me feel good.
There was one thing about the study that I wanted to point out, and that was alignment. How do you know when to say it’s begun? Like, the gesture, they measured that when they got the first frame. You can see when that starts. But then they decided to tie it to the nouns. So, you’re tied timing the start of the gesture with the nouns. But you got to remember that sometimes you got a noun phrase with a few words before the actual noun, before the noun lands. Like, you’ve got the bridge.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, I’m not going to count the “the.” I’m just going to count when bridge hits. So, I thought, “Hmm, maybe that’s throwing the timing out a little bit, making the words later than the gestures, but not for a very good reason.” Do you have any feeling about that?
HEDVIG: And also, people start planning before they start vocalising. What is it, like 200 milliseconds or something that you start planning in your head?
CAITLIN: So, you’re thinking “bridge” before you’re going to say it. Once you say “the,” it’s not like it’s a given that bridge is coming next. A lot of things could come after that. So, it’s still helpful.
DANIEL: That’s true. That’s a good point. And also, maybe because it was about 672 milliseconds on average where the gesture preceded the word, that’s a lot of space. So, yeah, you could squeeze a few adjectives in there.
It is time for our favorite game, Related or Not. As you know, we put out the call for jingles for the Related or Not segment if anybody wanted to contribute a jingle. And people have been stepping up. So, Adam, our listener Adam, has been sending some that he generated from Suno AI. So, let’s hear this one.
SUNO AI: [UKULELE PLAYING] Is it connected? Is it connected. Related or not. Is it connected to the word or the other word? Related or not. Related or not.
DANIEL: Isn’t that lovely? I’ll just let that fade out. Thank you, Adam, for sending that to us. We’ll have more. And of course, you are welcome to send a jingle if you would like to. All right, let’s start with one from Bandito Juan on Twitter. Are the following words connected? MURKY, as in dark and murky. MERK, to kill, as in getting merked. And then MERKIN, a pubic wig. Once again, MURKY, as in dark and murky. MERK to kill, as in getting merked or even just like getting killed in a video game or something. And then, the MERKIN, a fashionable accessory.
CAITLIN: It’s so fashionable.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] And functional, occasionally.
MAUREEN: That was going to be my Word of the Week, actually. Like, in all sincerity, I was like, “Merkin.” And then, someone beat me to it, which is the grossest form of what? Serendipity?
CAITLIN: Yeah, right. Upsetting.
DANIEL: Mmm. Yes, indeed.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: All right, it’s time to start guessing. Are any two of these related? All three? Or none related at all? I made a guess, and then I looked it up.
CAITLIN: So MERKING, to… like, killing somebody, MERK. That’s from the word for a paid fighter, right? What is that?
HEDVIG: Mercenary?
CAITLIN: Yeah. Isn’t that from MERCENARY?
HEDVIG: Oh… I didn’t know that.
DANIEL: I guess.
CAITLIN: Isn’t it like a clipping? Maybe I’m totally wrong. I know I sound like a mom, but that’s what I think it is. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. That was my thought as well. I thought I’m pretty sure that MERK comes from mercenary, to kill someone. Okay. So, I thought, “Yeah, that one’s not related.” Any other, but I may be wrong.
MAUREEN: Do you think MERKIN is like an eponym? Did somebody invent it and be like, “This will bear my name for generations to come”?
DANIEL: From a person’s name. Fascinating. Okay.
CAITLIN: I, Stephanie Merkin, I’m going to be famous.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Or, someone was like, “I hate Stephanie Merkin.”
CAITLIN: Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Like, what, people did with Santorum [DANIEL LAUGHS] and bodily fluids.
CAITLIN: But MERKIN isn’t necessarily as horrible as SANTORUM. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: You see that. I see that.
CAITLIN: True. Somebody could… Some real prude out there could feel like…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Depends on what you’re into. Okay. And then, MURKY. Do we have any feeling of whether MURKY is related to any of those? It sounds like we’re saying, I don’t think any of these are related.
CAITLIN: That’s got to be old as hell, right?
DANIEL: Sounds old, huh?
MAUREEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, here’s where I get to be the cheater. So, in Scandinavian languages, the word for dark is MYRKT.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay, very good.
HEDVIG: So, that sounds…
CAITLIN: Like I said.
DANIEL: So, my guess was I don’t think any of these are related.
HEDVIG: Yes, mine too.
CAITLIN: I’m going to say the same. Even that’s boring, but yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. Well, it’s not exactly clear. Let’s start with MURK as in murky or dark. It does come from old Norse, myrkt, meaning darkness. Okay, then we get to MERKIN. It appears to come from a woman’s name, which was Maud. [LAUGHS] Touch in the air.
CAITLIN: Come on.
DANIEL: It got a diminutive and changed to MALKIN, which was apparently “a little maud””. And then from MALKIN, it moved to MERKIN. In the late 1200s, it was used to describe a woman’s servant. And then because meaning jumps, it described the mop that she used. And then by the 1600s, a wig, specifically a pubic wig. Have you ever noticed that if a man’s name becomes a general term, it just always means a regular guy, like Average Joe or Tom, Dick and Harry. But if it’s a woman’s name, it’s always a generic term for a sex worker?
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Is that…?
CAITLIN: That’s not… Hang on, I got to put in JOHN for toilet.
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: And I got to put in all…
HEDVIG: Johnny.
CAITLIN: …the different words for penis like…
HEDVIG: Yes, me too.
DANIEL: Dick.
CAITLIN: …Jonathan. Isn’t there like a John Thomas?
HEDVIG: Or, just Johnny, right?
DANIEL: John Thomas.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Or is Johnny a condom?
CAITLIN: Willie.
DANIEL: Jack.
CAITLIN: Oh, Johnny is a common condom. Yeah, but Willie.
HEDVIG: Willie.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Generic male names do have a tendency to revert to penis.
CAITLIN: Sometimes, they can become genitals. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: There we go. Okay, you know what? I’m going to take that on board. Now, things get a little bit murky. Heh. Because with MERK, Wiktionary has it as a variant of MERC, as in dark. Turning out someone’s lights, perhaps. But it doesn’t say how it knows. It does come from African American English, where it’s been spelled MURK and MIRK. So, maybe not from MERCENARY.
CAITLIN: What’s the final consonant? Is it a K or a C at the end?
DANIEL: It is a K, which counts for something, but maybe not too much.
CAITLIN: No.
DANIEL: So, it’s been spelled variously. I’m leaning away from MERCENARY, although one poster on Urban Dictionary thought that was so but that was someone’s opinion. At this stage, I’m going to have to say this one’s origin uncert, which means that we all get to pretend that we were right. Hooray.
HEDVIG: Yay.
CAITLIN: Good for us.
DANIEL: Thanks to Bandito Juan. Let’s go to one from Yitzi, who says, “Hello, my apologies if this was already done. But I wanted to submit HARASS and HARANGUE for Related or Not?” HARASS and HARANGUE. Any feels?
HEDVIG: HARASS and HARANGUE.
DANIEL: They both start with har.
HEDVIG: Har, har, har. What else starts with har? HARNESS.
CAITLIN: HARRIED.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. Yes, harried.
CAITLIN: Harmonious.
HEDVIG: Harried. Yeah.
CAITLIN: Harcoon. Harbinger.
HEDVIG: Harbinger.
DANIEL: What is the HAR- in HARBINGER?
HEDVIG: God only knows. I don’t know.
CAITLIN: Does that have to do with HERE? Like, location?
DANIEL: These things get out of hand pretty fast, so I’m going to ramp it back. My guess was… I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that these are doublets, like ASTONISH and ASTOUND. There are these pairs of words that are related, they just go different ways. So, I said, let’s go related. That was my guess.
CAITLIN: I’m going to say it’s a false… like, it’s going to be surprisingly not related.
DANIEL: Okay. Surprisingly not. Okay, very good.
MAUREEN: I’m going to say related.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
MAUREEN: Because I do not know.
CAITLIN: Come on, Hedvig. Come on, Hedvig. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I’m also going to say related.
MAUREEN: Okay. That means my odds are so good right now. My returns.
MAUREEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Yeah, exactly. Like, you’ve the contrarian viewpoint, right?
CAITLIN: I am on three to one.
HEDVIG: Yeah, she’s probably right.
DANIEL: And you’re right. They are not related. [LAUGHS] Get some!
HEDVIG: I always do so badly at this game.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Amazing.
DANIEL: So, let’s talk about HARASS. And this one comes from the domain of hunting. There was an interjection that they used when you were driving the hounds forward, you would say, “Hare. Hare. Hare. [haɹeɪ]” I don’t think it means HARE. But from that word HARER comes a French verb, harer, to stir up or to provoke or to sic a dog upon. And that’s where we get harass.
CAITLIN: Is that also related to HARRIED then?
DANIEL: It is not. I just looked that one up, and that one seems to come from a different word, meaning, to lay waste, to destroy, to devastate with an army. So, not related at all. And then, we’ve got HARANGUE, which comes from a completely different word. There was a word for the public square, ARINGA, which meant the arena. It was old Italian. And it is probably related to RING, because everyone sits in a circle. The notion of a circular gathering. And of course, what do you do when everyone’s gathered around? Well, you lecture to them. You occasionally harass, annoy and harangue them. So…
CAITLIN: Amazing.
DANIEL: …not related. Thanks, Yitzi. Finally, from MVP Chris via email, who says, “Discussion with my family…” Actually, this is so old. He says, “Christmas discussion with my family.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Sorry, Chris, it’s taking so long. We had a lot.
CAITLIN: It took so long, Jesus is coming back from the dead…
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: …before you got it. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Related or not. WHEEL versus REEL. MVP Chris says, “They both have similar sounds. Both are circular and have some rotation involved in function. My dad, layperson, was like, ‘I can’t think of any /w/ to /r/ consonant changes.’ So, an unexpected stumper. What do you reckon?” I’m not going first this time.
HEDVIG: Sometimes I go through funny… I have a bunch of friends who are like Indo-European historical linguists who are going to drag me for whatever I say. But [DANIEL LAUGHS] I also don’t know any /w/ to /r/, but there might have been steps in between there that I don’t know about that make more sense. I do know that the Indo-Europeanists argue about whether the Proto-Indo-European word for WHEEL means wheel or turn, like the action of something turning around, or an actual noun, wheel.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Because they’re like, “Well, if it meant turn, then you could have that word before you had the wheel, because other things turn.” But then, some people say, “No, no. I mean specifically wheel. And if we reconstruct it to this time point, it would suggest that they had a wheel then.”
MAUREEN: Oh.
HEDVIG: So, this becomes like an archaeological paleontology conundrum.
DANIEL: You know many things about this word.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I’ve just been hanging out with a lot of Indo-Europeanists lately. They’re actually… by the way, fun news. Like, there are a lot of young, fun, nice Indo-Europeanist, similarly to what I experienced with generative functionalism debate, where people were quite… had a lot of aggression, I get the sense that Indo-European linguistics maybe is moving into a less aggressive phase, maybe. We’ll see.
DANIEL: Oh. Domestication. That’s lovely. Anyway, your answer!
HEDVIG: They’re related. They’re related…
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: …is my answer.
DANIEL: Okay.
MAUREEN: My answer is going to be that they’re unrelated.
DANIEL: Okay.
MAUREEN: Partly because I do not think there’s an R/W kind of thing. Fun fact about me, I went into grad school actually wanting to be an Old English scholar.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah?
MAUREEN: I don’t know how relevant this is, but those words both probably used to have an H sound in front of them. And so, I imagine that HRIL or HREL or something like that, and then HWIL, HWAEL will be different. So, that’s my reasoning.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: So, not related.
MAUREEN: Yeah. My guess is that they are unrelated.
DANIEL: Okay. Caitlin, it’s down to you.
CAITLIN: I’m also going to say unrelated. I’m guessing that they… Yeah, that it’s just an accident that they sound similar.
DANIEL: My goodness, you’re correct. It’s not related.
HEDVIG: Fudge.
DANIEL: And the cool thing is, Maureen, you got the thing right about the H in front of the W and the H in front of the R. The REEL does come from hreel.
HEDVIG: Amazing.
DANIEL: A reel for winding thread. Goes back to Proto-Germanic, hrehulaz. And then, wheel did also have… It was hrēol in old English, old Frisian. And probably goes back to a different word, hwehwlaz. Meaning, wheel or circle. Interestingly, reduplication, *kʷékʷlos. *kʷékʷ, you can hear the reduplication there over and over again, like a wheel, round and round. And so, yup, different words, not related. This is one of those rare shows where nothing was related. [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Huh.
DANIEL: Thanks, Chris.
CAITLIN: I am going to make myself a plaque and put it on that wall…
HEDVIG: Oh, hit.
CAITLIN: …that I got all three today. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Nice.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Good job. There is one more quick one. Ice is ice. But what’s the icle in ICICLE?
HEDVIG: Is it just diminutive?
DANIEL: Nope.
CAITLIN: Feels like a trick question.
HEDVIG: Is it the same icles in popsicle?
CAITLIN: Is it reduplication?
DANIEL: It is reduplication, kind of, in a special way.
MAUREEN: Oh, a little icy guy.
DANIEL: And it is the same as POPSICLE and CREAMSICLE. And CORPSICLE. Do you remember, Hedvig, our recent live episode with Ellen Jovin?
HEDVIG: Yes, of Grammar Table.
DANIEL: Yes, of Grammar Table.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: We had some words for ice, like Spanish HIELO and Icelandic JÖKULL, which meant a piece of ice or a glacier. Well, get ready, because our friend Corvin is going to blow our minds. He sent me an email, hello@becauseanguage.com, explaining that the -ICLE of ICICLE is actually Icelandic JÖKULL, a glacier or a piece of ice.
HEDVIG: Oh. So, not reduplication of the word, ice.
DANIEL: Well, Corvin says this.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Jökull is related to an English word, icicle from ice-icle, where icle — jokull — means icicle.
HEDVIG: Peace. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, yes, an icicle is an ice icicle. It’s a redundant word. And then, Corvin mentions this cool thing. “This was formerly folk etymologised as ICE SICKLE.” You would think it would be SICKLE, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: “As in the opening ballad of Robin Hood and the Ranger: ‘when Phoebus has melted the sickles of ice.'” So, this is an example of rebracketing.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Wow. There’s so much here. So, thanks, Corvin.
CAITLIN: The next time somebody gets mad about ATM MACHINE or like CHAI TEA, I’m bringing up ICICLE.
DANIEL: Yes, exactly. You do these things all the time and don’t notice.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Or salsa sauce or CD disc. I love them. I want to use all of them all the time.
CAITLIN: Yeah, they’re great.
HEDVIG: They’re great. Yeah.
DANIEL: Words jumping in to help each other out. I think we should make more.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MAUREEN: [CHUCKLES]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: So, this is going to include some fairly scratchy, maybe unpleasant subject matter. So, we’re going to put a bit of a content warning here. There’s going to be maybe some discussion of antisemitism and transphobia. The reason we’re going there is because if we want to understand what’s happening and how to help, we have to talk about it. So, I’m really grateful to you, Caitlin and Maureen, for helping us both understand this. You’ve been both really active in the online discussion. You’ve seen a lot of the argumentation. You seem really aware of where things are going. Where are things right now? I guess I’m not just talking about the Melbourne protests, but I kind of… Maybe we should start there.
Trans-exclusionary feminists were protesting the idea that transpeople have rights. Nazis showed up. And not only did they bring the sound equipment, but they actually gave speeches. It looks like these two groups, which seemingly are pretty disparate, are joining forces in this fight. What was your sense when you were watching this happen?
HEDVIG: Wait, before you… Just explain to… what were they actually protesting?
CAITLIN: Okay. So, in Melbourne, it was a rally called Let Women Speak, which is run by Kellie-Jay Keen, who also goes by Parker Posie. Not Posey Parker, the actress. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay.
CAITLIN: She is one of the main proponents of this adult human female like phrase that’s supposed to define what a woman is. And it’s supposed to exclude transwomen on purpose, because they view womanhood as a property that they can possess. And if we allow other people to identify into it, then we lose our personal property rights over womanhood, and we lose safety and we lose our grip on reality even. They go really far on it.
HEDVIG: Traditional TERF…
CAITLIN: Traditional TERF stuff, right?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
CAITLIN: And so, she does these tours called Let Women Speak. And as somebody pointed out, if you have a Let Women Speak rally and you give the microphone to a Nazi, you are holding a Let Nazis Speak rally. And that is precisely what happened.
They were using the local neo nazi clubs as protection, like security, but they also had brought the PA system as well, for whatever reason. They happened to have it, I guess, and then were given the microphone and given a chance to speak when some trans-inclusive feminists, including transwomen, were not allowed to speak.
HEDVIG: Right. They didn’t let trans positive ciswomen speak either, presumably?
CAITLIN: Right. There was a counterprotest. There were people there who would have spoken if allowed, but they were not.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And just so I get a clear picture of this, because I’ve been in Sweden and thinking about other things and haven’t been following this, and maybe some other listeners haven’t either. The Nazis who were speaking were ciswomen?
CAITLIN: No, they were men. They were cisgender men.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Yeah. Because they were there as muscle. So, they were…
HEDVIG: Right. You can have ciswomen muscle. I don’t know.
CAITLIN: No. Not if you’re a TERF, I don’t think.
MAUREEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Not if you’re a gender essentialist.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: At least for the optics, why didn’t they send forward their one female member?
CAITLIN: The optics look different to us than to them, I guess.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right.
MAUREEN: She was in the kitchen.
HEDVIG: Okay.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right.
CAITLIN: But the Nazi woman… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m just trying to understand the picture that we’re talking about.
CAITLIN: She was tradwifing.
HEDVIG: Okay. And they were protesting against… They were against using they/them pronouns, they were against transwomen using women’s bathrooms, they were against schools saying that trans identities exist. All the usual…
CAITLIN: Yeah, there was a strong keep prison single-sex contingent there. They don’t want transwomen going into prisons with ciswomen.
HEDVIG: Okay.
CAITLIN: Yeah. It’s all the biological sex binary sorting that they want.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. Now, I understand. Thank you very much for that.
DANIEL: So, I guess I want to ask, where is the gender-critical movement now as you’re seeing it, and where is it going? What are you experiencing these days?
CAITLIN: Maureen, do you want to say something, or do you want me to just barrel through?
[LAUGHTER]
MAUREEN: I can start. It sounds like you have thoughts. It bothers me, not that you did it, Daniel, but that people are like, “Oh, it’s so surprising. So surprising.” But what makes it so surprising is that people believe anything about the F in TERF, that feminism is really about anything other than preserving a patriarchal status quo around gender. But yeah, I think that, unfortunately, I only see them continuing to pick up steam for the time being. Only because I’m also seeing in mainstream places like TikTok, just a massive increase in overtly transphobic discourse. Like, people seem very willing to engage on this topic.
And so, even though I don’t think those people are directly influenced by gender-critical movements, it’s clearly having an effect. And this kind of unholy alliance between TERFs, Nazis and the Christian, although, come on, there’s significant overlap between those groups anyway. But I worry. I don’t want to say anything definitively, but it seems to be, at least on the internet, at least in the brain-poisoned internet space, it seems to only be intensifying.
HEDVIG: The scary thing about trans issues that I’ve noticed on TikTok is that the algorithm seems to cluster transphobic and pro-trans things as related to each other. So, you get a lot of transphobes being recommended videos of a transwoman being like, “Here’s my outfit of the day,” or something.
CAITLIN: Just doing innocuous stuff. Yeah.
HEDVIG: And they’re like, “Oh, my god, I see this in my feed.” The algorithm sees the interaction between these accounts, not knowing what they are, I guess, and just pulls them together, which is, yeah, not fun for anyone.
CAITLIN: I will say with TERFs, it’s a question of their attitude towards coalition building. So, they have this idea that their genealogy comes from the radical feminist tradition, and they will still quote rad fems in their writings. They are concerned about some feminist issues, like the gender pay gap or sexual harassment or that kind of thing.
But when it comes time to organize events, when it comes time to go and speak on somebody’s podcast or TV show, their allies, because they’re so focused on gender ideology or gender identity ideology and being against the idea of trans and nonbinary and other kinds of gender identities, the people who want to hang out with them and do events with them and talk to them are right wingers.
This is a historical pattern that has happened forever and ever and ever, which is that people will tend to ally rightward, and they become convenient, useful tools for the people on the right. And you ask a TERF, “Why are you sharing Matt Walsh content? Why are you sharing Libs of TikTok? Why did you go on Tucker Carlson’s show?”, and they will say, “Oh, don’t worry, they’re not using us. We’re using them. We’re getting feminist issues into the right,” not understanding that what always happens is that as soon as you have cleared out all of the degenerates and all of the gross people, they’re coming for you.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Mm, that makes sense.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
MAUREEN: It reminds me of our Milo discussion from earlier too. Because when I was doing my early alt-right research, it was so fascinating because Milo was starting to gain momentum in the mainstream, was doing campus tours and all this stuff. But in those 8chan, Stormfront spaces, they just hated him, thought he was just a filthy degenerate, but he’s doing some of the work. And then, as soon as he’s no longer useful, first one to get pushed off the platform, because they don’t care.
CAITLIN: That’s right.
MAUREEN: They’ll work with whoever, because they don’t care until… I don’t know, it’s the whole leopards eating faces thing.
CAITLIN: Right. And there are transwomen and men who are being useful to TERFs. Some of them are currently experiencing that whiplash. So, Debbie Hayton, for example, admitted that she uses the women’s bathroom, and now TERFs are angry with her. But she’s been one of their greatest campaigners for a long time. They don’t care. They don’t care how much excellent work she has done for their cause. They care that she’s a “male person” using a bathroom. I’m using air quotes a lot, which in the Zoom you can see. But in the podcast audio, you won’t know that I’m doing that. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: I think it’s quite clear. All of this stuff has made me think about the label feminism overall, like you guys are bringing up. Because intersectional feminism has been a term around for a while where you combine… You see people’s identities as more also racialised or your class or your gender identity, etc., as all contributing to the system that you’re in and what you’re experiencing. I was reminded recently of this old Soviet politician, Alexandra Kollontai, one of the people who probably originated the fact that we have Women’s Day on 8th of March, because they had working Women’s Day in Soviet Union on 8th of March. And she hated the term “feminism” because she was like, “This is bourgeois nonsense. They don’t care about working class women. They only care about state wives getting to vote in Britain. And I don’t want to call myself a feminist because of that.”
CAITLIN: Right.
HEDVIG: That seems like partially the same critique that people have had of white feminism in the last 20 years, 30 years. And TERFs calling themselves feminists as well, I’m like, “Oh, what is this TERF? What is it doing?”
CAITLIN: Yeah. Well, the philosophical underpinnings of TERFism and gender-critical ideology are pretty complicated, because they consider themselves to be materialists, but they’re also against intersectionality. They reject that. They’re against queer theory. Even if it comes from Marxist theorizing, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the kind of materialism they’re interested in. The way that they are treating materialism is more like positivism. It’s that there’s some kind of unfiltered reality, and sex is about that reality, and gender is just feelings and imagination and nonsense.
HEDVIG: Right. Because I always get so confused when people say something like, “Oh, that’s a social construct. Therefore, it’s not real.” And it’s like, “We are humans. We are cultural beings. We live mainly in a social landscape.” I haven’t left my apartment in quite a while.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I am quite detached, actually, from the landscape. But I think even humans like 200 years ago, what matters is, family structure, societal structure, job identities. Like, we’re deeply, deeply social beings and social constructs exist.
CAITLIN: Right.
HEDVIG: They’re real.
CAITLIN: Well, like, I have the chromosomes that I have, and I’m not going to have different chromosomes at any point in my life. But my body has been interacting with the social concept of gender ever since the ultrasound where the doctor told my parents, “That’s a girl,” right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: So, society has been acting on me since that point in a gendered way. And that is a material reality. And materialist feminism normally does grapple with that and does consider that to be real. But the kind of materialist “feminism” that TERFs are doing doesn’t, it rejects that. It considers that all to be irrelevant. And the question is either, what chromosomes do you have or what size gametes does your body produce? Or, if it doesn’t produce any gametes, what size gametes was it? Was your body designed around the production of?
DANIEL: That’s just a very abstruse way of defining gender.
MAUREEN: Yes.
CAITLIN: It sure is.
DANIEL: That’s very strange.
CAITLIN: It has very little to do with your day-to-day experience of your life, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, truly.
CAITLIN: Sure. Two of my large, immotile gametes did develop into small people, and now they are a part of my everyday life. But I could have procured those small people through other means.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Let’s bring in… Oh, sorry. Hedvig, you want to go?
HEDVIG: Well, I was just going to ask like, “So, what do they think patriarchy is?”
CAITLIN: Well, they do think that gender, and sometimes they call it gender woo, which is very silly,…
HEDVIG: Okay.
CAITLIN: …or gender ideology, is patriarchal. So, they consider the oppression of women…
HEDVIG: Oh.
CAITLIN: …to be sex-based, and that all of this other stuff that’s put on top of sex, gender is actually patriarchy.
HEDVIG: So, patriarchical people are like bad, rational, positivist scientists who have created a false religion or a false construct.
DANIEL: Narrative.
HEDVIG: That’s bad.
CAITLIN: It’s the queer theorists that are the patriarchy, apparently.
MAUREEN: Yeah. It’s the post-structuralism.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
CAITLIN: The pomos.
MAUREEN: Because the positivism, I think, is something I want to return to.
CAITLIN: That’s what they like.
MAUREEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Sorry. Could you tell me what positivism is? Because I’m a little lost in the sauce on some of the terms.
HEDVIG: It’s roughly a term that has to do with what is knowledge and what is information and how you procure knowledge. So, classical positivist science is where you do experiments, and you use your senses and you believe that there is a world outside of you. Physicists are like penultimate positivists, usually.
DANIEL: Positivists. Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s like, when people talk about the scientific method that is usually deeply ingrained in positivism. Am I roughly on the right track?
CAITLIN: Yeah. It’s the idea that there is a reality out there that’s universal and objective. And that if you apply the right methods and the right rational, logical thinking to it, you will then have access to that objective truth.
HEDVIG: Sorry. Maureen’s cat is glorious.
CAITLIN: I know. So cute. Oh, my gosh. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: I heard someone once say, “You can’t science gender. You can kind of statistics gender.” Would you agree with that?
HEDVIG: What would it mean?
CAITLIN: I think that depends on how you feel about science as a thing you can do, right?
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: I think you can science gender in the same way you can science a lot of things that maybe other people wouldn’t agree with me that you could science.
DANIEL: Okay. With all that as background, I want to bring in the linguistics of it all, because that’s what we do. This whole discussion was started by our friend and listener, Sim E, who says, “Maybe interesting linguistic news about prescriptivism and far right politics. In Germany, we had a big investigative report come out about a secret meeting last November with members of the far-right party AfD. The center right party, CDU, neo-Nazis and entrepreneurs, where they discussed plans to ethnically cleanse Germany.” And then there’s a link to an article.
sim/e continues, “The linguistic news about it. Between the neo-Nazis and entrepreneurs, there was one person doesn’t really fit the rest of the group, Silke Schröder, a member of the Board of Directors of the Verein Deutsche Sprache.” Sorry about my German. “The association of the…”
HEDVIG: That’s good, though.
DANIEL: Thank you. I am a linguist. “Association of the German Language, which is the biggest prescriptivist association of Germany with 36,000 members. It’s quite well known in Germany with some famous members. In recent years, its main activity was putting out big press statements against gender neutral language, which all the big media cites and publishes. Members are sitting in talk shows as perceived experts on the topic, the campaigns against gender neutral language in Germany, of which the Verein Deutsche Sprache is a big part, already were successful in some states of Germany, where laws prohibiting gender neutral language in public institutions are discussed, or already in the process of being passed, like Bavaria.”
HEDVIG: Always Bavaria.
DANIEL: “Now, I do notice that Schröder has since been removed from the board of the VDS, because her connections came to light and then she attacked the press about it.” Now, we’ve covered articles and stories like this for a long time, but this German example really brought it home to me. It’s not just your grumpy coworker who doesn’t like using gender inclusive language. Its language bodies, its political groups working really hard to prohibit egalitarian language. And I am not really sure I understand why do they care? What additional thing does demagoguing language give them? What’s the point of this?
HEDVIG: I think language here is a metonymy term that actually is, they’re using it to talk about something else, but they find it more practical to talk about language. But that’s not actually what they want to talk about. I know that in some European languages, people say that it’s good to have language with obvious gender like societal gender markers in it. It is actually a good thing for women, because then it becomes more obvious when a group is entirely dominated by men or when the doctor is a man or something like that. And that’s why you should continue to have, for example, gender terms for professions. They do here in Germany, like Arzt/Ärztin. I don’t know about that.
It’s fun to me that this was brought up by a listener, because I live in Germany and I don’t hear anything about this, because it’s not in the news I consume. It doesn’t reach the top news. It’s very interesting to get this from here.
DANIEL and CAITLIN: Yeah.
CAITLIN: So, I have some big brain thoughts, like some…
HEDVIG: Love it.
CAITLIN: …galaxy brain take. So, this is a way of thinking that is common to fascists and also colonizers and colonial thinking, which is to think of the mind as an organism, like a cell or something that is vulnerable to illness and degradation by outside forces. They think of the mind that way. They also think of the human body that way, the person that way.
HEDVIG: The society.
CAITLIN: They think of society that way. They think of the nuclear family that way as like it’s got a membrane around it and you should not allow impurities into it, because it will corrupt the organism. And so, what happens to their idea of language is if we allow people to speak about gender in a way that does not reinforce the gender binary and the nuclear family, the male-female biological children unit, that it will begin to degrade their concept of their responsibility to form those units and their responsibility to fulfill those roles.
They also like to bring up Orwell a lot because they’re like: Oh, yeah, well, language… If you control the language, you control the society, whatever. So, it is this idea that you can actually damage… This is a TERF talking point as well. If you allow for, let’s say, a transperson to be a teacher in a school, they’re committing a deception by wearing opposite sex clothing, and they’re interfering with the child’s neurological ability to discern sex when they see it, and you’re actually causing them developmental damage by tricking them in that way. And so, it becomes about the health and the integrity of the psyche and the mind and the person.
DANIEL: And you mentioned that’s where the Lovejoy defense comes in, right?
CAITLIN: Right. Think of the children. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Because who’s thinking of the children, right? Okay.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But it’s so strange. I find that these things are supposed to be natural and inherent and something we’re born with. And at the same time, incredibly fragile and easy to be confused about. I’m like, whenever people bring up that there’s some sort of difference between men and women biologically, which is really hard to test anyway, but it’s like, “Oh, men are slightly better at imagining 3D objects or something like that.” It’s a common one. But the effect sizes in those studies, they’re usually tiny. And if you look at like… there were trans women 200 years ago. If it’s true that you have an inborn gender identity that’s really strong and you had all society telling you how gender works and you still chose to not conform to them?
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Then that has got to be the weakest shit we’ve ever measured, right?
CAITLIN: Yeah. So, it does have to be policed really, really hard. That ideology does persist, like, back to that film, Lady Ballers, it’s about a bunch of men who aren’t doing well at basketball, so they pretend to be trans women and they join a women’s league. It’s based on this assumption that is totally wrong, which is that your average dude off the street could beat a WNBA player at basketball.
HEDVIG: I want that confidence.
CAITLIN: I know, right? Yeah, there’s a bunch of dudes out there who think they could beat Serena Williams at tennis, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That was a thing. We talked about that a while ago. Yeah, I can get a point off Serena Williams at tennis. What was the other one? Oh, I could probably land a plane.
CAITLIN: Fight an ostrich was another one. That’s my gender.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Have they met ostriches? They’re fucking terrifying. All the cassowaries, ostriches, emus, they’re all terrifying birds.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: They are murder dinosaurs.
HEDVIG: Truly. Yes.
CAITLIN: Yeah. If you’ve ever wondered if dinosaurs are real, go look at a cassowary.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Maureen, did you have a viewpoint on this? I wanted to hear your take as well.
MAUREEN: Yeah. I’m actually writing a paper for the Journal of Far-Right Studies on this exact topic, the language ideology, overlap between the far-right and these TERF groups.
DANIEL: Oh, here we go.
MAUREEN: But Caitlin already got to a lot of it.
CAITLIN: Sorry.
MAUREEN: Oh, no, it’s great.
[LAUGHTER]
MAUREEN: No, it’s great. One thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that way before, it really hit a heyday in the US, globally there have been anti-gender movements. For example, Judith Butler visited Brazil a few years ago, and there were people burning their effigy. There was a lot of people talking about gender ideology. It’s in a lot of catholic countries, because the Catholic Church has actually been calling queerness and transness generally as gender ideology and talking about the need to fight it.
But anyway, back to Caitlin’s point about positivism. I think there’s a big element of this idea that there’s this objective reality that also can be indexed by language. So, the paper that I’m writing about is that, I’m calling it like referentialist language ideologies, so the idea that words pick out real entities in the world. And it’s really cyclical. If something has a definition, that means it’s real. We know it’s real because it has a definition. And so, trying to guard these boundaries around, like, who’s allowed to be called a woman or who’s allowed to be called a man and things like that.
I argue that it has to do with epistemic control. So, for people who are not as familiar, epistemology is the study of knowledge and how we come to know things and how knowledge is structured. So, my feeling about this is by trying to control what people are allowed to describe themselves as, in that Orwellian sense, they’re trying to control the options that people have to describe themselves, trying to cut that off at the source. But also, it’s comforting.
There’s a lot of psych research indicating that conservatives prefer things like nouns over verbs, for example, because they provide a higher degree of epistemic closure, because nouns refer to things in the world, whereas verbs refer to processes. So, when you are constantly nounifying everything, conceptually, you’re doing something different than when you’re processing a verb.
HEDVIG: Okay.
MAUREEN: And so, by… Yeah.
HEDVIG: When people talk about a person living with a certain medical condition rather than a… I don’t know, a person living with leprosy instead of a leper.
[LAUGHTER]
MAUREEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: That’s [LAUGHS] the only word I can think of. Sorry.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s interesting.
MAUREEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, you got it.
HEDVIG: So, they describe the same reference in the world, but in two different ways. I’m by no means saying that the other things we have discussed are medical conditions. It was just an…
DANIEL: Oh, my god,…
HEDVIG: …example.
DANIEL: …a homeless person versus someone experiencing homelessness. That would be quite a stark contrast.
CAITLIN: Because that puts temporality into the equation, that’s very upsetting. There’s a thing that TERFs do a lot and gender criticals do a lot, which is to reassure themselves that reality is on their side. It takes up a lot of their self-talk and their talk to each other is that like, “Reality is on our side. We have access to the truth.” Like, these people are trying to muddy the water. They’re deluded. They’re crazy. I’ll quote Judith Butler, since we’re at it from who’s afraid of gender. The gender critical people are trying to deny that trans women are women or that trans men are men or any of that, because “they believe they possess the only language that yields reality, and anyone who disagrees is deluded.” And that’s a major stand in a stake in their ideology is that it’s a delusion. It’s no accident that Colin Wright’s organization is called Reality’s Last Stand. Collin Wright, who gets funded by Moms for Liberty, by the way.
The other one is the pronouns are Rohypnol thing. There was an article that went out in gender critical circles, again, appealing to this idea of neurological damage, that when you as a cisgender person meet somebody, and you think you’ve clocked them as, for example, male, and then they say, “My name is Theresa. My pronouns are she/her,” being informed of that is such a shock to your brain…
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
CAITLIN: …that you experience a disembodiment and a lack of ability to defend yourself against danger, because you’re just so neurologically interrupted by that incongruity. They literally were like, “It is the same effect on your brain as being spiked with Rohypnol.”
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: People say confusing shit all the time! I do double takes all the time. Ste said something really confusing to me this morning and it took him like two minutes to explain it to me.
CAITLIN: Yeah. I’ve been spiked, okay? It’s not the same. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Yeah, good point.
HEDVIG: I’m so sorry. Oh, fuck.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: I seem to remember that quote. A lot of conservative outrage is just them finding out how things work for the first time.
CAITLIN: Yeah. And Maureen brings up the point of this… this is a connection to race science as well, that they call themselves race realists. Some gender critical people call themselves gender realists or sex realists. They talk about the materiality of sex and about it being just reality. And it does go back to this positivist, colonialist mindset that gender is a property that you own and should protect and that it connects to real world physical object.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: So, when I say trans women are women, I am trying to use language to describe what I perceive as a reality. But they would say, “No, no, we’ve got the reality. And by introducing this language, you’re trying to muddy the waters, and our reality is the one that counts.”
CAITLIN: Yeah. And they consider it as, it’s like a neurological attack. Like, you’ve done a chemical attack on me by telling me that you think trans women are women.
DANIEL: Amazing.
HEDVIG: What about the people that they sometimes claim to defend? I understand that children are very smart and sweet, but they’re not very smart and they don’t…
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I’m sorry, at least two pe…
CAITLIN: And sometimes they are mean.
DANIEL: No, no, please continue.
HEDVIG: Sometimes they are mean. But for example, women that have suffered domestic abuse, sometimes TERFs claim that they are protecting those women. They say things like, “Oh, if a trans woman came into a bathroom and someone there had been a subject of domestic abuse by a cis man, they would feel bad somehow.” Do we know of any organisation that works with protecting victims of domestic abuse that ever enters this debate in any way?
CAITLIN: Sometimes not by their own choice. So, there is a domestic abuse shelter. I think it’s in England. And the head of it was a trans woman. And the TERFs were furious. They launched a harassment campaign that didn’t stop until… I believe that that woman stepped down, because it was their belief that cis women who had experienced battery by a man would… upon encountering a trans woman, become retraumatized, because that’s the same thing.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I think we’ve uncovered a lot of things about why language is the vector for this. Because first of all, they believe they’ve got reality, and they feel like it’s important to describe that reality very accurately. But I can also see how that would work for linguistic conservatives, because change is hard. Language change can be difficult for people to get used to. And so, by seemingly taking a stand against language change, that would have a lot of appeal to conservative people, in general.
CAITLIN: Yeah, that’s right. It’s about the defense of the status quo, in general. The gender order of today is the natural gender order, or more accurately, the gender order of “when I was a kid” is the correct gender order for any given person. So, “I grew up with a mommy and a daddy in the suburbs, and therefore, everyone should be a mommy and a daddy in the suburbs.”
DANIEL: And then erasure of trans people allows people to say, “We didn’t used to have all this stuff back then. So, it makes it seem like a new thing.”
CAITLIN: That’s right. And so, they always share a graph that shows, what looks like sudden increase in people answering surveys to say that I am transgender or I am nonbinary… Also, they’re upset about bisexuality going up. I don’t know why. That sounds great to me. But the idea that it’s only sudden… There’s some TERF books that say transgender ideology started in the 1990s, [CHUCKLES] where we know we have evidence of trans people going back hundreds of years, actually, like, definitive proof. And then we have suggestions that there are lots of different ways to be your gender going back thousands of years.
MAUREEN: Not even knowing their own history too, which is classic, because Sheila Jeffreys wrote The Transsexual Empire in the 1970s.
CAITLIN: It’s truly a google search away.
MAUREEN: Yeah, it’s right there.
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES]
MAUREEN: But not that I care good. Don’t read Jeffreys.
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: We’re just going to have to listen to you misinterpret her too so.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I worry sometimes when people who think that trans lives matter seek to convince people by saying that there’s a history or that it’s widespread in many different independent communities. I wonder if that’s buying into the argument that that makes it therefore more real, because I think that even if trans identities were invented and never existed before the 1980s, that still makes them fine.
CAITLIN: Yeah. It only matters in as much as it’s not true. But even if it weren’t true, if people just started being trans 20 years ago or 30 years ago, good for them.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I feel conflicted about that, because I do think it is potentially convincing of some people to say like, “Look, we know about trans identities and lots of different that don’t look the same, by the way as American trans identities aren’t the only universal, non-binary identity in the world.” But it also buys into the argument that that is what needs to have happened.
CAITLIN: I would say one thing about the false belief that trans identities are new and that being trans is new is that it has prompted gender critical people to launch these investigations into how it suddenly started happening. And it’s how we get these false notions, like rapid onset gender dysphoria and social contagion. If transness is new, what’s causing it is like a big part of gender critical intellectual activity.
MAUREEN: The angle I like to take partly to avoid that historical trap like you were talking about is to frame things in terms of bodily autonomy and the right to bodily autonomy. I see a lot, like, people talking about other types of plastic surgery or elective surgeries. But it’s like you don’t need to believe somebody is who they say they are for them to be allowed to do to their body what they want.
CAITLIN: To change their body, yeah.
MAUREEN: I feel like it’s a lot harder to argue against… Well, it’s not with TERFs, because they don’t care. Like, they didn’t care about Roe v. Wade, for example, in the US.
CAITLIN: They cared in as much as they could blame gender ideology for it.
MAUREEN: Yes, exactly, so they can blame talking about birthing people or something.
CAITLIN: Yeah. We can’t even define what a woman is, how are we supposed to protect their rights?
MAUREEN: Yeah. They do frame it as this kind of cosmic punishment. Like, “Ha-ha, this is what you get.” They’re just so uninvested in justice for anyone.
DANIEL: Let’s take it to recommendations. You both are very active in the online discussion. Not all of us have the time or the inclination or the ability to handle ourselves in that sphere. How do we help in this discussion? How do we play a part? What kind of things would you recommend our listeners do to make a stand?
CAITLIN: Well, the fun thing about gender ideologies is that they are not just online. They are everywhere. And so, it’s good to hone your ability to spot toxic ones and try to counteract them where possible. I’ve got a four-year-old and a two-year-old child. One of the things that I am always doing is indicating to my child that there are lots of ways for families to be, that there are lots of ways for people to be. We watch a children’s music entertainer who’s non-binary. We have a very close friend who’s non-binary. We have friends who have different configurations of parents. I always try to explain very carefully that those are all very legitimate ways for people to be, and that there are other ways that we haven’t even thought of that are also legitimate. And obviously, not everybody has a four-year-old to indoctrinate.
So, [CHUCKLES] otherwise, just when you hear it in conversation, you can take a moment to go, “Oh, that’s an interesting way to see gender. I thought it was more like this,” that kind of thing. Also, legislation is important there’s a lot of anti-trans legislation being floated and being passed. And so, if you have a chance to distinguish between a candidate who is active on the issue versus inactive or active on the wrong side, make that choice to the best of your ability. If you have somebody that you feel like you can pressure, who’s a politician, that is great, do that.
DANIEL: Okay. Maureen, what would you recommend?
MAUREEN: I love everything. I endorse everything Caitlin said. I think it would be very funny if we did a counter. Musk is pushing The Great Replacement conspiracy theory and stuff. It’d be very funny if leftists just pushed this thing of like, “Let’s have as many babies as possible and indoctrinate them all.”
CAITLIN: Hell yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: That would be very funny.
CAITLIN: I have used my large, immotile gametes for wokeness.
DANIEL: Me too!
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: Wonderful.
DANIEL: Slightly smaller gametes.
[LAUGHTER]
MAUREEN: But in terms of my advice, I think that one way that people on the left struggle is framing. I think that we often, and this is an issue I find in my alt right research in general, is that we tend to follow the frames that the right wing is putting forward and responding to the way that they frame things. I do have to give a shoutout to George Lakoff, because he wrote the book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! I think it’s really, really useful for anyone who is trying to talk back. Knowing how you want to conceptualize things, what presuppositions are we playing into. My overall advice would be, “Don’t argue with people online.” I don’t follow my own advice, and I’m a huge hypocrite. I get really upset, [DANIEL LAUGHS] and I want to say things to people who don’t give a shit.
CAITLIN: You’ll see me do it in waves, and you can make some pretty strong inferences about my state of mind when it…
MAUREEN: Yes, exactly.
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: You can tell that I’m like…
CAITLIN: You’d be like, “Caitlin, how are things at home?”
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: “Are you stressed out about something?” [LAUGHS]
MAUREEN: Yeah, I’m fighting with somebody who has a dinosaur emoji and is from New Zealand or whatever. But, yeah, I think that refusing to engage on their terms, it sounds contradictory, but also not paying attention to people knowing of them, but not interacting with them. I think that a lot of these people, if you just don’t engage, their wheels will spin.
HEDVIG: It’ll be a bad faith argument, anyway.
MAUREEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: It’s not going to go anywhere and you deserve…
CAITLIN: And you do run out of energy screaming into the void. Like, they will peter out.
MAUREEN: You can’t prove anything.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You deserve peace of mind.
DANIEL: What if I’m somebody you know, and I say, “I’ve been hearing some stuff. I don’t know, I’m concerned about this gender stuff. I don’t really know about it, but it’s got me worried.” Well, what would you say?
HEDVIG: On a personal level, I don’t know if this makes sense, but I try and practice patience and kindness where I can. But if someone is clearly not interested in being kind to their fellow humans, I don’t know if I have time to teach them how empathy works. Sometimes when those things come up when people are really clearly not interested in hearing, then I’m just like, “Okay, you feel that way. I’m going to go. I don’t need to…”
CAITLIN: And you won’t be the only person who finds themselves losing patience with that unempathetic person. They will start to find that they don’t have a lot of deep connections. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Unfortunately, what happens then is they find their friends on the internet and then…
CAITLIN: Right. And they talk about how victimized they are. Yeah.
DANIEL: Maureen?
MAUREEN: Oh, I was just going to add two little bits, which is like, on Mumsnet, you see a lot of people posting like, “Oh, no one in my family talks to me anymore.” It’s very culty. There’s a lot of things… there’s a lot of work out there establishing the culty nature.
CAITLIN: And they do love bomb each other. They do reassure each other, but you can see periodically, there’s a lot of wavering in there that there’s people posting and saying like, “Could we be the baddies?” Because people that I love and care about and people that I raised and people who raised me are telling me that I am saying hateful things when I feel that I am just stating reality. Could it be that I have it wrong and that we have it wrong? And they try to bring them back, but it doesn’t always work.
DANIEL: Yeah. So be there when they surface, I guess.
CAITLIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I have family members who are very close to me and who don’t necessarily do all the research that I do, because that doesn’t make sense. Why would they…? I do it. They’ll have gotten some horrible gender idea from somewhere and bring it to me, and I do think that I’ve done a pretty okay job at being friendly and accepting and empathetic when I explain my perspective on it and bring in as much support as I can, evidentiary support, to help convey that, “This is a belief that is out there. It’s nothing against you that you thought it might be legitimate. Here’s what I know and what do you think now?” And the conversation, even if it doesn’t go amazing right there in the moment, it usually does go well. But even if it doesn’t, it’s something for them to think about after I’m out of their immediate vicinity, and it has worked. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you for doing what you do for taking up the fight. Thank you for educating me on today’s show, because I feel like I do understand this a little bit better.
CAITLIN: Yes.
HEDVIG: I also think we talked a lot about how to engage with people who say hateful things. I like to also spend time and energy on the people who… like, I have friends who are trans, and sometimes I use the wrong pronoun and I feel bad. And then I go up to them afterwards one on one, and I say, “I’m sorry. I realise I did that.” Caring about them even when you fuck up… That’s also takes, I don’t know… I have limited patience for people who don’t want to be kind. And I can try and spend my energy…
CAITLIN: Right. Well, doing that kind of thing is, it’s like normal friendship work. Like, you do when you slight a friend or you mess up with a friend, you do the friendship repair work, and that’s very normal. This isn’t just because they were trans. It’s because they’re your friend, right?
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
CAITLIN: Yeah. People just have a lot of extra anxiety around the gender stuff, and it’s okay. It’s going to be okay. You’re not going to have somebody just scream at you, because you slipped up once.
HEDVIG: No, exactly. I don’t know… Yeah, I have fucked up. I have not been screamed at.
DANIEL: Thank you both for this education.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE MUSIC]
DANIEL: Let’s take it to Words of the Week. And this one was suggested by Heather, who says, “Hi, I have a suggestion for Word of the Week. Fundie Baby Voice.” We know what this one’s about. Now, this one is about women’s voices, and especially one woman’s vocal performance. And I’m aware that we live in a world where women’s voices are criticised and scrutinised and discounted. So, I don’t want to be one more person who’s dishing out criticism about the way a woman talks. However, I am incredibly interested in how people use language to construct and perform identity and get across their goals. And this falls squarely in that realm.” So, Heather has given us a link to the Huffington Post, Fundie baby voice seems to be everywhere now. Here’s what you should know.” What do you know about this?
HEDVIG: I’ve heard people talk about this on TikTok, because it occurs also in Christian evangelical cults, right?
CAITLIN: That’s right. Yeah.
MAUREEN: That’s the Fundie part.
HEDVIG: Yeah. it’s also known as the Keep Sweet…
DANIEL: That’s the Fundie part.
HEDVIG: Keep Sweet voice, I’ve heard.
CAITLIN: Keep Sweet. That’s right.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You’ve watched a lot more about this than I have.
HEDVIG: I am fascinated by American religious fringe. Like, evangelicals and Mormons are so interesting to me, because…
CAITLIN: Well, yeah, the Fundie baby voice is a direct result of the repression of women in fundamentalist spaces. They’re not allowed to be too assertive or harsh or anything, even when they’re assuming authority roles. And so, it is this careful management of keeping in the forefront your identity as an evangelical female person who has very few options for agency and who cannot afford to be seen to be stepping out of your role while also trying to be emphatic and convincing and even be a leader. Maureen, you probably have a lot more to say about this. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: What does it sound like?
CAITLIN: It sounds a little bit breathy, a little bit high and very characterized by emotionality. It sounds like they’re almost going to cry. There’s a shakiness in there.
DANIEL: Shall we listen?
CAITLIN: Let’s do it.
DANIEL: The background for this is US President Joe Biden, delivered the Annual State of the Union address, and it’s customary for the opposition party to give a response, usually pre-recorded. So, Alabama Republican Senator, Katie Britt delivered the response, and here’s how it sounded.
KATIE: The American family needs to have a tough conversation, because the truth is we’re all worried about the future of our nation. The country we know and love seems to be slipping away, and it feels like the next generation will have fewer opportunities and less freedoms than we did.
DANIEL: So, like you say, the breath equality, the slight tremble in the voice.
CAITLIN: Yeah, it’s a feminine frailty. You can also see in the video, she’s smiling the whole time even though she’s talking about some really dark ideas. And some people who grew up in fundamentalist or evangelical families have likened it to a fawn response that…
DANIEL: A fawn response?
CAITLIN: The fawn response. Yeah. So, if you’re in an abusive situation, you are trying to fawn, literally make yourself seem really unscary and you’re never going to fight back ever in your life, “Please don’t… I’m not a threat. Please don’t worry about me. You are so strong. You are so amazing.”
DANIEL: It’s not just fundamentalist Christians. This is also a Mormon thing. I recognise this as Relief Society Voice. I have a clip, but I won’t play right now because of time. But this is a lot of Latter-day Saints were saying, “Why is she talking like a Latter-day Saint?” But this is an example of convergence, where you don’t have access to power, but if you take power, then it’ll seem like you’re too strong. So, avoid being threatening to men over domineering. What I like to call, topping from the bottom.
CAITLIN: Nice.
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: So, there we go. FUNDIE BABY VOICE, a way of getting your goals across. Let’s go on to the next one. I’ve often thought about why so many notable people in journalism and business and academia have flung themselves into weird, authoritarian ideology. Matt Taibbi, Greenwald, Sternwin Plonker, of course. You know who I’m talking about. So, there’s a bit from Media Matters, and there’ll be a link on the show notes page for this episode. It’s about Russell Brand. Media Matters has done a thing on Russell Brand’s evolution.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: And the Word of the Week is GRIFT DRIFT.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I think it’s important to realise that some kinds of ideologies can make people money.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: We talked about before, which is, there was some analysis, I think it was by Media Matters and the QAA team about like, how Russell Brand was changing his video content based on views and comments. And he noticed that when he wrote, he said certain things or did certain things. So, he’s, in a way, partially radicalised by his audience, because…
CAITLIN: Yeah. Is GRIFT DRIFT different from audience capture?
DANIEL: Ooh, I don’t know. What is that? How would you describe that?
CAITLIN: So, that’s what Hedvig is also describing there is like, when you have a certain audience, and you hint towards something like a little bit conspiratorial or a little bit like right wingy, certain members of your audience get really excited and become really supportive of you.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: And other ones wander away, because they’re not interested in that.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
CAITLIN: And over time, it’s a vicious cycle. And so, you end up going from Jordan Peterson saying, “You should take personal responsibility. You should clean your room. You should take a shower and you’ll have a better time in life,” to being like, “Women are chaos dragons, and the devil is behind gay people,” or whatever it is that he says. I don’t know. “Eat raw meat, nothing else.”
HEDVIG: It’s like the YouTube rabbit hole, but for creators. And with platforms like YouTube, you get such detailed feedback. So, content creators get reports on, like, what words that people search in order to find your videos.
CAITLIN: Right.
HEDVIG: And then they see those…
CAITLIN: So, you’re getting a lot of information about your market share, and who you appeal to, and then you modify to increase that and you find yourself grift drifting.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hmm. Amazing.
HEDVIG: Money is important.
CAITLIN: Sure is.
DANIEL: Why don’t lefties give lots of money to grifters?
HEDVIG: People do.
DANIEL: Or, do we?
HEDVIG: People do.
CAITLIN: I think it depends what lefties you’re talking about.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it does. There are people who just mindlessly buy Che Guevara T-shirts at all times.
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I suppose.
HEDVIG: I mean, there are, right?
CAITLIN: Yeah. But that’s not the same as paying into an influencer’s Patreon, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: But I would say that, like, probably the crunchy lefties, the antivax lefties, the conspiratorial lefties, they probably, I think they are paying grifters.
HEDVIG: They are definitely… I put them in the sort of, they’re not fascists yet, but they are very interested in purity.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: And they don’t mind making common cause with fascists, as we’ve already seen.
CAITLIN: That’s right. They’re doing the same stuff with disability and illness that fascists are doing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Last one. GREAT GENDER DIVERGENCE. We heard a report last month from John Burn-Murdoch publishing an article in the Financial Times. Looked at 18- to 29-year-olds in the US, UK, Germany and South Korea, and claimed that men were suddenly becoming much, much more conservative than women to a level not seen in other generations. And of course, a lot of commentators jumped on and decided: The lefties were to blame — as always — for not being welcoming, for being divisive. We were driving young men into the clutches of the alt-right warlocks. Any truth to this?
HEDVIG: I was listening to a podcast today. [CAITLIN LAUGHS] And it was the Chapo Trap House guys on the QAA podcast.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: They were talking about that sometimes governments, and especially the American government, do form conspiracy sometimes. And it is worth thinking about the society in structural terms and think that there is a structure. It’s not lizard people eating children. But the basic premise of millionaires are probably not interested in your wellbeing is…
CAITLIN: Yeah. And sometimes they have meetings about it. That’s not crazy.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s not crazy, right. So, I think it’s hard when you face a very precarious working situation where you can’t really hold down a job. You don’t have the same economic opportunity just the parent generation did, and you feel like it’s out of your control. Then I can see it’s quite easy to slip into wilder conspiracy theories, because some conspiracies… I don’t know if I’m expressing myself well, but if there’s a grain of truth in millionaires are probably not interested in the betterment of society.
CAITLIN: Yeah. This is a case of, it was capitalism all along, right?
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: Like, we’re more isolated, we don’t have any third spaces, we don’t have… Everything’s a business now. Like, you have to go to a store just to get out of your house.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES] Sometimes I’m like, “I don’t know if that’s true. There’s playgrounds. But I can go to a playground because I own some small people.” I don’t think your random person who does not have small children…
HEDVIG: No.
CAITLIN: …can go sit on the bench at the playground and not be bothered. So, it is really hard to gather in places without it being commodified.
DANIEL: Lately, I’ve seen some pushback on the great gender divergence. One article…
CAITLIN: Yeah. I think that’s it.
DANIEL: …on LinkedIn from Doctor Antarika Sen points out two things. Number one, “It’s not men who are moving, it’s women who are moving to more liberal, which is causing the divide. Men are relatively unchanged.” And then if you look at studies, it appears that majority Generation Z men are not themselves conservative. They’re not changing. It’s that women do. Okay. So, FUNDIE BABY VOICE, GRIFT DRIFT, and GREAT GENDER DIVERGENCE, our Words of the Week.
HEDVIG: Daniel, I have one really short, and it’s not a bummer.
DANIEL: You got one? All right. Sock it to me.
HEDVIG: Okay. DINKWAP.
CAITLIN: [GASPS]
DANIEL: Did you say DINKWAP?
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: What did you just call me?
HEDVIG: I am a DINKWAP.
DANIEL: You are.
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: Okay. Double income, no kids?
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: Is that right? Okay.
DANIEL: Good start.
HEDVIG: Good job.
CAITLIN: What’s DINKWAP?
DANIEL: Oh, I know the other part. No, that’s not… That couldn’t be what that is.
CAITLIN: Working on phonetics.
DANIEL: Not that W.A.P.
HEDVIG: It’s not a… a thing you need a bucket for.
DANIEL: Thank you. Well said.
CAITLIN: “With one pet.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. “With a pet.”
DANIEL: With a pet.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Was it “with a pet” or “with one pet”? Was it W-O-P?
CAITLIN: A-P, not O-P.
HEDVIG: It’s WAP.
DANIEL: A-P?
HEDVIG: So, it’s “with a pet”. So, you could also have…
CAITLIN: WAP as… Oh.
DANIEL: Very good.
HEDVIG: I happen to have two. But it’s just a word for like when you can spoil your cats. We recently bought them little lawns again.
DANIEL: Ah, the furkids.
CAITLIN: I love the little lawns.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Anyway.
DANIEL: Big thanks to you, Dr Caitlin Green and Maureen Kosse. Do you want to tell people where to find you?
CAITLIN: Yeah. You can find me on X-Twitter. On Twitter. Come on, guys. It’s @caitlinmoriah. And also, on Bluesky, same handle.
MAUREEN: Yes. And on Twitter, I am @maureenkosse. No spaces. And on Bluesky, @mkosse. M-K-O-S-S-E.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE MUSIC]
DANIEL: Thanks, everybody for supporting Because Language, if you do. If you don’t, you could do. There are lots of ways you could do it. And they don’t all involve money. You can tell a friend about us or leave us a review. If you leave us a review, we’ll find it. And if it’s pretty good, we’ll read it. You can follow us. We’re @becauselangpad in just about all the places. Remember how everyone dumped Spotify because of Joe Rogan? But then four months later, everybody was back on Spotify. We’re still not on Spotify, but we’re everywhere else.
You can send us ideas or comments by email. That’s hello@becauselanguage.com. You can also send us your voice. We have SpeakPipe on our website, becauselanguage.com. Send us something that way. Thank you.
HEDVIG: Yes. And if you do become a supporter on Patreon, you get certain perks. You get the nice, fuzzy feeling in your tummy of knowing that a little bit of money goes to transcribe, buy me new microphones, give a little bit of money to our guests and nice things like that, and mail outs and make sure that we have time to do this show, which does take some time. And you also get the regular episodes, of course, and you support those, but you also get special episodes that are only for Patreons supporters. And you get transcript from SpeechDocs. I found out today that we have a channel on the Discord where you can search it. So, that’s very fun. I actually didn’t know about that functionality. I enjoy that very much.
DANIEL: It’s in beta.
HEDVIG: And I’m going to give a special shoutout to our top Patreon supporters. They’re Termy, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt.
DANIEL DNA HEDVIG: LordMortis.
HEDVIG: Elías, gramaryen, Larry, Rene, Kristofer, AndyB, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Diego, Ariaflame, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach /ɹaʃ/, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, aengryballs, Tadhg, Luis, Raina, Tony and WolfDog. Molly Dee, sæ̃m and J0HNTR0Y. This list, Daniel, is getting long.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] It’s getting seriously long.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Can I ask that Maureen does the last bit?
DANIEL: Yes, please. Maureen, would you please…
MAUREEN: Oh, yes.
DANIEL: …read us this lovely text?
MAUREEN: Yes. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
[APPLAUSE]
DANIEL: Well read.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
MAUREEN: Thank you.
DANIEL: Thank you all.
[BOOP]
CAITLIN: I was here like 15 minutes early, just plugging things in and selecting. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You were.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You were. But then we had a good chat. You got to hear me improvise songs as well.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Improvise songs?
CAITLIN: I think that’s a parent thing that I also have and I will sing like, [SINGS] Changing your diaper, getting you clean.
DANIEL: Yeah.
CAITLIN: [SINGS] Going to get a fresh outfit on you. Yeah.
DANIEL: [SINGS] Poop went up the back, and we’ve got to get it off.
CAITLIN: Oh, that one, we always say “Big Summer Blowout!” from Frozen.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I’ve actually noticed that that’s a performance thing for my parenting, because when I’m singing, [SINGS] I’m the dad who’s not impatient. We’re getting your shoes on.
CAITLIN: That, it’s really good. It puts you…
DANIEL: You know what I mean? It’s like…
CAITLIN: …in the moment and yeah, keeping things going but not being like, “Can you just…?”
DANIEL: [FRUSTRATED NOISE] It communicates that Dad is happy.
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: The most terrifying creature in Enid Blyton was Mr Turnabout, who suddenly flips from normal to angry. I don’t want to be Mr Turnabout. I just realised, “Oh, shoot, that’s bad.”
HEDVIG: I just watched The Witches of Eastwick for the first time last night.
CAITLIN: Oh.
DANIEL: Yeah?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve never seen it before.
CAITLIN: I’ve never seen it.
HEDVIG: There’s this moment where Jack Nicholson shifts from being like this very generous, gratuitous, cool guy to being very, very angry.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s very scary, because there are other characters that are angry all the time.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
CAITLIN: But you don’t know to be careful around the one who’s acting cool until it flips.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s an abusive tactic to keep people off balance.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s really scary.
DANIEL: Holy fuck.
CAITLIN: Insecure attachment. What is that?
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]