The politics of inversion
Human rights campaigners are claiming that keeping men out of women’s sports is an attack on women’s rights.
Most successful politicians are adept at linguistic sleight-of-hand. I am not talking here about outright lies, but rather the twisting of the truth through wordplay. One of the most striking examples was the US military spokesman during the Vietnam War who described a bombing raid as having ‘obtained a 100 per cent mortality response’. This verbal formulation certainly sounds much more palatable than the reality it describes.
While we might call this rhetorical prestidigitation, there is also another technique – one that is becoming increasingly common in today’s culture wars – that is best described as rhetorical inversion, or the practice of simply asserting the precise opposite of the truth. We saw an example only this week, when more than eighty human rights and sports advocacy groups responded to the International Olympic Committee’s plans to ban male athletes from competing in women’s sports. Andrea Florence, executive director of the Sport & Rights Alliance, argued that such a ban would be a ‘catastrophic erosion of women’s rights and safety’.
Florence’s statement is a clear example of inversion: a policy which preserves the integrity of women’s sport is recast as a threat to it. Testing an athlete’s sex through a non-invasive cheek swab is hardly a civil rights violation, and keeping men out of women’s sports should be the bare minimum required for the preservation of ‘women’s rights and safety’.
One is reminded of when Humza Yousaf, at the time Justice Secretary of the SNP, introduced his authoritarian Hate Crime and Public Order Bill. Although the bill made it possible for citizens to be prosecuted for speech uttered in the privacy of their own homes, Yousaf claimed that the new legislation ‘does not undermine free speech’ but ‘protects it’. Rather than making a serious case for the bill, he simply pretended that its outcomes would be the opposite of those intended.
All of this makes it look as though these people simply do not care if the public know that they are lying. Yet there are good reasons why identitarian ideologues such as Florence and Yousaf prefer outright inversions of the truth than subtle misrepresentations. Their worldview is rooted in the postmodernist conviction that reality is subordinate to language, rather than the other way around. To make something true, therefore, one need only assert it.
This explains why the likes of Yousaf see censorship as ‘progressive’, and that the basic human emotion of hatred can be eliminated if its verbal expression is stymied. It also explains why genderists who have been unable to persuade the public that sex is mutable have resorted to fact-free assertions in lieu of actual arguments.
Consider the robotic responses of this UNISON representative when asked a series of perfectly reasonable questions by Connie Shaw for GB News:
‘Trans women are women’ is not a coherent argument; it is a statement of unequivocal untruth. ‘Trans women’, by definition, cannot be women, otherwise they would not be ‘trans’. George Orwell might have been describing the individual in this clip when he wrote this passage from his 1945 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’:
A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.
The mantra of ‘trans women are women’ is no different from Andrea Florence’s claim that protecting women’s rights and safety represents a ‘catastrophic erosion of women’s rights and safety’. There is no clever trickery here, just a flagrant reversal of the facts. Orwell encapsulated this technique in the ruling party’s motto in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.’
Tyrants do not persuade, they make demands. It is evidence of their power that they can force or coerce their subjects into asserting untruths as though they were incontestable. The terror that the trans lobby has inspired in the general public has meant that few are willing to state openly the biological facts that we have all known since childhood.
But although many human rights organisations and sporting bodies remain in thrall to this science-defying ideology, it is a sign of progress that the International Olympic Committee is poised to overrule them. With any luck, it will hold its nerve against the will of these activists who can only make sense of the world through mindless slogans.
The bearded doughnut in that clip is a comical illustration of the Orwell quote, brain visibly offline, slogans on autopilot. Almost certainly has a postgraduate degree in something ending in 'studies'. He'd be right at home in any totalitarian regime of the last century – at the persecuting end of it, obviously.
"Trans women are women" is the sort of argument that i think has helped bring the word retard into popular usage again. It's the only response to ridiculous statements.