Gender dogma is predicated on the belief that words like "female" and "woman" and "girl" mean whatever anyone (usually a man) says it means (ergo, it means nothing at all unless a man has claimed the word to describe himself). We are told that female is not so much a "reality," but a feeling in a man's head, a hunch that a male might have.
We are told not to use terms that exclude male persons—like pregnancy, menstruation, vagina. We may, however, talk at length about female essence, female souls elusive, superstitious concepts impossible to verify, phantoms that no woman has ever actually seen of experienced, but in whose existence we must believe absolutely.
Terminology has been doled out to us, oh-so-charitably, by men who have taken up the mantle of woman.
Those of us, female, feminist, often lesbian, who take issue with this intellectual mandate, who critique firmly held beliefs in such Victorian concepts as "female souls," are accused of erasing transgendered people, of not wanting trans people to exist. And so it follows, if we embrace the zeitgeist, that language itself has the capacity to literally, actually eradicate people, and so dissent, of course, will be viewed as dangerous. And when we deem the language of dissent, of rational critique, to be "life-threatening," then we open the door for any intellectual discord to be met with actual violent opposition: we invite barbarism.
Language may indeed connote violence, may become an abstract rendering of violence, may even incite violence, but language itself cannot be literal violence. There is a concrete physicality inherent to actual violence (women and girls know this well) that language, despite its many powers, lacks. Would that language was violence, men would fight their wars in verse.
-Hypotaxis, "On Language and Erasure" in Female Erasure
