Parallels Between Gender and Language
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on gender recently, including Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s Gender Without Identity, and I’ve found several interesting parallels between gender and language.
Gender and language arise independently within every human culture, which indicates that the blueprints for these two social constructs are built into our brain structure.
Gender and language are both enacted by mimicking established conventions and occasionally making an original subversion, which can sometimes propagate memetically and fundamentally change that language’s linguistic structures, or that culture’s gender structures.
Gender and language are both acquired (or at least, an acquisition model of gender has been proposed by Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, and I find it very compelling). It’s this third point I’d like to explore a bit more in depth.
I’ve written at length about Krashen’s theory of language acquisition, but one important aspect of it I’d like to draw attention to is the Monitor Hypothesis, which states that conscious learning plays only a limited role in the ability to produce and understand language.
Learning has only one function, and that is as a Monitor, or editor. Learning comes into play only to make changes in the form of our utterance, after is has been “produced” by the acquired system.
Krashen (1982, p. 15-16)
The acquired system, then, is a system that does not understand how the language works, but knows how to produce and interpret it without understanding. You might think this sounds very similar to large language models such as ChatGPT, and I do, in fact, think that we all essentially have an organic LLM in our brain, powering our language acquisition (such a metaphor elegantly explains Krashen’s Input Hypothesis as well - you need to train the model on large data sets!)
Imagine (you may not have to imagine very hard) that you have acquired a language, but there are certain quirks of the language that you (or rather, your Monitor) are taught are incorrect. To use an English example, you may be taught in classrooms that “its” is the possessive, with no apostrophe, and “it’s” can only mean “it is”. Every time your acquired system writes “its” or “it’s”, you then have to rely on your conscious monitor system to correct it if it is incorrect. This is an extremely mild example, but consider also children in rural or oppressed communities, such as Black communities. These children acquire one dialect (such as rural Australian English or AAVE), and yet learn in classrooms that it is incorrect, not proper. Enforcing linguistic purity is an inherently oppressive act that aims to subjugate. Not only that, it is futile. In order to produce the normative, “proper” version of one’s language, one needs to subconsciously acquire it (which would mean being exposed to a great deal of input — possibly requiring distancing from their community — not just being consciously taught how it works), lest they be cursed to consciously monitoring their language production whenever it is required (such as in their professional life). And that is no way to live. A far better world would be one where there is never a requirement to produce a normative version of language, one where language is not used as a tool of oppression.
I would argue that this is similar to gender conversion practices. Models of gender are acquired subconsciously, which we then form attachments to, subconsciously (these attachments may be normative or non-normative, strong or weak, but everyone must contextualise themselves within their models of gender). When psychologists and other academics discuss finding a “cause” for these non-normative attachments to gender (i.e. transness), they often do so with the goal of preventing or reversing this cause. I won’t speak on prevention for now (though I do believe it to be impossible and unethical), but I would like to draw a parallel between attempts at “reversing” transness, and attempts at enforcing linguistic purity.
Attempts at trans conversion such as gender exploratory therapy (GET) are attempts at changing the subject’s conscious conceptualisation of their gender. I would also consider self-repression an attempt at changing one's conscious conceptualisation of gender as well, speaking from experience. I remember consciously suppressing non-normative gendered desires and expressions prior to coming out. These attempts are futile, because they will never alter the acquired system lying underneath. If such attempts “work”, they only work in the sense that the subject is consciously monitoring and correcting their intuitive gender productions. And that is no way to live. A far better world would be one where there is never a requirement to produce a normative version of gender, one where gender is not used as a tool of oppression.
