Matt Walsh and the textualists are wrong about language; but they’re right about pronouns and pronoun preferences

It matters how you get there. And once there, it matters how you reject incoherent claims meant to pull you in to nihilistic relativism.

First, I hope everyone who celebrates it had a wonderful Christmas with those they love and cherish.

And yes, I did. Thanks for asking.

So happy am I, in fact, that I’ve endeavored to give back. Consequently — and secondly — here’s my Christmas gift to the world (warning: some big words ahead; retreat now if that’s not your thing):

Pronouns considered conventionally are parts of speech. Speech exists to express meaning. Conventions grow and exist in given interpretative communities to provide stable and repeatable clues to understanding the meaning of speech. These conventions help us to share a common set of rules and, properly, render definitions descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Convention, then, is a shortcut for all that goes into the process of interpretation — and because the rules are largely agreed upon, meaning can be conveyed with a rapidity that would be less consistently possible were we to interpret outside a conventional framework. This does not suggest, however (as many influential hermeneutic theorists have argued), that convention is where the locus of meaning lies; while we may in a multitude of instances demand speech be interpreted through convention — this is how we find agreement on the meaning of law, for instance — what we are actually doing is using convention as a stand-in for intention, which in the field of legal hermeneutics we demand align as a way to achieve a consensus on meaning.

(As a simple example, imagine legislators drafting a legal text intended wholly ironically — and the text is intended to signal its conventional opposite. That they do so and are then misunderstood by those interpreting the law using the conventions of legal hermeutics doesn’t change what the lawmakers actually meant. It only makes that intention difficult to discern.)

So while judges may reject legislative intent — even as that intent is obvious from an originalist viewpoint, let’s say — their justification for doing so is that good law, as legal convention has it, must signal its intent as clearly as possible to the greatest number of people. For law to exist as law, it must be understood by a preponderance of the people it circumscribes. Which is why legislation that doesn’t signal its intentions clearly should be returned to the legislature for a re-write by judges who can’t readily determine its legislative intent, or by judges who recognize its intent but feel that, read conventionally, most interpreters with minimal access to lawmakers would not.

Instead, too many judges simply take it upon themselves to “fix” the text — which is to give their own intentions privilege over those of the legislature, who, in the context of legal conventions, may have signaled their intent poorly. This maneuver transfers the legislative power to the judicial branch. And that should rankle all of us who believe separation of powers is essential to a thriving free republic and a representative democracy.

So. How does all this relate to pronouns? First, I’ll say this: every individual can select pronouns and mean by them exactly what they intend to mean; that is, an individual may choose the signifiers “they / them” to mean “I identify as a non-binary individual,” or maybe “I identify both as myself and as the other voices who live in my head and sometimes direct me to kill domestic animals, cut them up, then bury them in a shallow grave below my transphobic father’s window, their eyes upturned so that a death gaze will be forever directed at that bigoted cis-bastard who ruined my childhood.”

In both above instances, the signifiers “they” and “them” reference a desired signified — that is, the meaning that individual intentionally attaches to the signifier — to create a sign that in effect fixes the individual’s intent into language. There is nothing linguistically incoherent here; this is in fact how signification works: signs are created by the conjoining of an intent / referent to a signifier. The meaning imbued into the sign is real. For many textualists, though — and I’m thinking here of a recent monologue from Matt Walsh — words (which are best described as conventional signs) refer to things, and definitions describe the relationship between words and their referents. Yet that described relationship Walsh depends upon assumes a signifier is fixed in perpetuity by some prior cultural agreement. Words cannot be changed so easily, true, because they are often constrained by conventional and contextual frameworks. But this is not the case with respect to signs, as I’ll explain. To wit:

In my example, the problem with the non-binary’s usage of “their” sign is that the intention “they” is hoping to express may be unclear and, as it is in this sentence, unruly — after all, “they” and “them” have a history of carrying with them a conventional meaning as parts of speech representing either a plural or, more recently, an indefinite individual (a concession still bristled at by a lot of grammarians who recognized in it the slippery slope toward customized language) — making interpreting an unconventional usage difficult.

Alternately — and this seems to approximate the aim of post modernism as it’s been allied to academic Marxism — one can attempt to force language to accept an expansion of convention such that “they” and “them” can also be understood as indicators for non-binary-identifying people and others who share their dissociative disorders. They are additive — and they are additive by way of a will to power.

This is precisely what we’re now witnessing linguistically: yes, language can expand naturally — the beatniks, eg., could turn “cat” into “a hep person” by force of use and, eventually, with the aid of context and other indicators, into one of the socially accepted definitions of the signifier “cat.” If this kind of growth did not occur — and it’s here where the textualists get it wrong — language would stagnate, save for the occasional neologism designating the odd new field of dubious academic study, or the newest cryptid we posit has been living in the Pacific Northwest since time immemorial, and yet hadn’t until now been named outside of some fringe oral tradition almost lost to time. Similarly, we’d all be using the same vocabulary extant at the dawning of our new colonial culture, with the expansion of language occurring only by adding new signifiers attached to new things as they were revealed to us, or as they were taught us by cultures whose signs we subsumed (the non-linguistic term for this process? Assimmilation — another concept Marxists have worked hard to problematize).

LGBTQI+ activists are attempting something similar today — though in their case, there is nothing organic about how they’re going about it: they are presenting themselves as a new culture with a claim to inject its own cultural argot into our conventional speech. And they are treating that claim as if it has the authority of both law and nature. It is making demands upon convention that convention itself, in that it is a framework agreed upon by the general community of interpreters, will not yet abide.

That is, these new meanings they attribute to such signifiers are being forced into conventional usage against the wishes of the majority of the population. This is less assimilation than it is invasion, to extend the earlier metaphor. Compelled speech — speech that carries with it the force of law demanding it be uttered — is not free speech. It’s a religious affirmation. Similarly, language changed by fiat rather than expanded by usage that over time gains purchase in convention, is doomed always to meet with resistance. LGBTQI+ are not a new culture. They’ve simply achieved a louder voice of late and formed alliances to collect greater political power. Their own personal argot emerged inside an existing cultural framework. They may find their specialized vocabulary useful as they communicate with other members of their church; but that doesn’t mean the rest of us need adopt it.

Further complicating matters, the usage of pronouns as parts of speech are indicative: like convention itself, which provides a guide to meaning, pronouns exist to point to proper nouns in a shorthand fashion. Pronouns are a linguistic tool.

So while it is certainly possible from the level of agency and meaning to appropriate and personalize a pronoun, that is no different, linguistically-speaking, than appropriating and personalizing any signifier. To wit, you can genuinely insist that to you, the article “the” — as you signify it — refers specifically to your individual gender identity (or, should you manage to enlist a cult, each of their individual gender identities, forming a group identity); but most people won’t readily understand your usage, and even should you explain it to them, these same people may reject it as a category while simultaneously, and out of an act of politeness (not respect, which is something else entirely), humor you by attempting to use it as you intend it.

But unless and until we accept, on the level of broad scale social convention, that we’re comfortable surrendering a linguistic tool — a part of speech that helps us identify and express reality — to those who wish to use it as a customized identity marker, such hermeneutic friction will continue to exist. And one might argue that this friction is the entire point of the enterprise: an attempt by cultural marxists to mystify, destabilize, and upset the kind of conventional structures — read: tradition — that discreet cultures rely upon to undergird and perpetuate their shared ideals.

To sum up: an individual can mean whatever he wishes to mean, unconstrained by a dictionary, which is a simultaneously a history book and a record of communicative evolution; linguistically, this fact isn’t at all controversial (which is where I think certain textualists critics of the LGBTQ paradigm like Matt Walsh, while largely correct, over-commit and leave themselves vulnerable to an effective counter argument). But for that meaning the individual is asserting to prove useful to him as he attempts to communicate with others, those on the receiving end of the communication chain need both recognize cues that signal an unconventional usage and simultaneously become convinced that they should alter convention to envelop non-traditional usages as fruitful and legitimate.

To call such a refiguration of language a battle over preferred pronouns is to accept the implicit argument that signifiers like “they” or “them” signified in unconventional ways are acting as pronouns at all. They simply look like pronouns — in much the same way that trans people often mimic and identify as the thing they are not. Clouds can appear as copulating bunnies; but very few people believe that because they appear that way, we should grant that clouds are, in fact, also copulating bunnies.

The pronoun debate, it follows, is an attempt to embed in language the structures that legitimize claims that, eg., transmen are men, or transwomen are women. And they do this by insisting that just because you can mean what you wish, the rest of us are therefore required to accept your meaning as something that transcends your personal utterance and, perforce, reorients an entire linguistic category no individual controls simply to please your whims.

My answer is no. You can have an intent and signal it poorly. Or you can have an intent and insist I share it. Two things can exist at once: you can mean what you mean, and I can misinterpret what you meant because you’ve failed to signal your intent clearly, or you can signal your intent clearly, but I fail to accept that what you meant is deserving of my approval. When a trans-activist uses they / them, I know what he means. I simply reject that what he means requires me to share his delusions. In places like Canada, attempts are being made to legislate the expansion of convention to accomodate the use of pronouns as pet words legally adopted by individuals claiming ownership over them. So “they” must be approved as the singular “gender” identity of a user, despite the obvious pitfalls, not the least of which is “gender fluidity,” which allows those pronouns, in theory, to change by the second. Others less schooled in the linguistic turn may have no idea what an individual means when he uses conventionally plural pronouns to indicate his own singular gender identity — to such interpreters, he’d be doing the equivalent of pointing to a lone tree and referring to it as a forest, or a mountain range, or a fleet of golf carts — so, even were you to inform them, they’re under no obligation to “respect” your choice, nor to validate it. Their presumptions are not our determinants.

And that’s where all this nonsense ends.

Once you understand how language works — or rather, what we think we’re doing when we interpret — the postmodern edifice collapses under the weight of its own demonstrable incoherence.

So then. Merry Christmas, boys and girls. And a happy, happily binary New Year!