Mother Tongue Meets Her Nonbinary Child: Review of “Bad Language”

From a boutique British press, Bad Language is a third-wave feminist analysis by the London-based trans writer So Mayer. In this wobbly but exciting treatise, they note that words possess primary value according to how we embody them; thus, words do not stand for states of love and violence, they express degrees of those things. “I love you” has no meaning outside the multiple ways in which it is uttered. Take Mayer’s first sentence: “There is no such thing as a safe word.” Citing the metaphorical ambiguity of “queer BDSM,” Mayer shows that words may solicit pain and pleasure because when sounded they issue from our speaking and hearing orifices, things directly involved in creating pain and pleasure. There is no language that is inherently safe, they write, since some people will use them physically to invite and control danger.

Mayer’s book takes a nonbinary scalpel to how bad language is already bad; however, deracinating its offenses is circumlocutious. Why? Mayer’s key concept—dominance or, better, our inability to unseat dominance in language. The purveyors, the patriarchy, made sure abusive language and its abusers shaped our behaviors, more or less for good, to reflect God-the-father and Savior-the-son definitions. Moving from oratory to text, the language squashed the “misadventures” and the stretchy usages of those whose gender, sex, and identitarian choices are outside the mainstream.

Mayer’s thesis stresses that our lexical overlords are woeful at naming, defining, and addressing not the words themselves and their usages but the words’ consequences: who speaks, who’s heard, who oversees conformity to its rules, and why the sexism and racism of our language is so hard to reassign or defuse. Think about how the word woke, originally an internal Leftist pledge to stay alert to social injustice, was rejiggered into political retribution against its practitioners in just five years.

2 / This is not an easy book to love. There are as many conceptual obscurities as there are clear ideas in Bad Language, provocations shifting from brilliant to sketchy. Some of these deconstruct pithy uses of dominance (Mayer’s favorite word) while other parts are vague, insider-queer, and tiresome. Mayer has a fascinating and informed mind but wanders, at times, undisciplined, just when you need a point more fully explained. Preferring a free associational style, Mayer sleuths etymologies and substitutes neologisms of their own, to good and ill effect.

For instance, Mayer makes a portmanteau of the words listen and attend-to, substituting for “listen” the hybrid listend, which “can engage us in attending beyond standard ableist taxonomies of senses and their capacities.” A claim I find baffling. The words’ sounds are nearly the same; there’s no inherent semantical difference; and the mix misses how words should arise from a “multisensory” vocabulary, body-focused instead of usage-based, with which I imagine Mayer agrees.

In other constructions, we hear of the OED as a “frenemesis,” the author’s destinal “OEDipus complex,” and such silly re-castings as “dominance . . . shuts us down . . . it de-faces and ef-faces us to render us all sur-face.” (Weird, since, sur- means on top of, or to go beyond, as in surpass, not shallow or poor judgment.) In sum, Mayer’s gripe (and it’s obsessive) is that language’s violence against “the marginalized genders” is its worst trait. Like an Eton tutor, Mayer paddles the backsides of tropes that, shall I say, testosterone the King’s English. The author often remarks that people are not the abusers per se, but that semantics is. And yet don’t children everywhere who learn to speak their native language just as fast as learn to subvert it?

3 / When Mayer was a child, their father at bedtime read stories from the Brothers Grimm “with the familiarity of prayer, spoken in a sing-song in the almost-dark where story, memory and dream might melt into one another in a tired child body.” Finished, “my father would place his hand over my mouth and rape me.”

To be “lulled falsely,” Mayer writes, then “raped by the person who taught me to read and write, corrected my grammar, and stood for the authority of all the languages around me . . . is the opposite of language: the opposite of meaning, of communication. There is no listening. Rape is an erasure of shared existence, of the trust of being open.”

If there is no listening between father and child, that doesn’t mean he could have listened; such implies a common language. However, the child’s no or whimpering or rigidity or giving in or tears of rage, all uttered as resistance, may sound in the child but an ear attuned in the father doesn’t exist. There’s only his overpowering his daughter. What’s more, this overpowering continues into adulthood when Mayer comes out gender-free to speak about the crime, the voice they speak with has already been shaped by the oppressor. It does give substance, though, to another language that Mayer and their body need, writing, “desperate to find any language that could be heard and believed” that had been “speaking” throughout their ordeal. Those expressions include

vomiting after meals; “growing pains” so bad I couldn’t walk upstairs; sleep paralysis; deep bruising and frequent eczema on my inner thighs; repeated broken bones; second-degree burns; extremely early puberty; high fevers every school holiday. An “involuntary” suicide attempt when I was twelve, described as a swimming accident, left me with visibly damaged front teeth . . ..

No one heard a thing [in these injuries]. No one was listening. No one knew how to listen.

I can ask myself why I didn’t speak out about the abuse then, or I can listen to my self now, and to how I was not heard.

The major outcome of the rape is Mayer’s diagnosis of ODD—oppositional defiant disorder, frenzied with “bulimia and alcohol-related expurgation.” Mayer writes that the medical jargon their condition is treated with pathologizes people hostile to authoritarian categories, especially those like Mayer who’ve been violated by rape and their family’s Jewish conservatism.

Mayer decides on a name change (their first name, So, like a retributive knife-in-the-back) only to face a Kafkaesque tribunal that “does not want you to change your name, and works to associate it with criminality and degeneracy, with an underlying accusation that you are eluding both surveillance and patrilineality.” There’s no bloodletting rite for a father’s daughter to find renewal even in language. Despite their putative adaptability, the author tries to deconstruct language only to find how resistant it is to patriarchal law, one of the more incisive arguments in the book.

4 / On this point is their discussion of the overlap between blasphemy and blame in the chapter, “Crying.” Blasphemy’s “semantic trajectory” has a mongrel origin. First is its religious reference to God or the gods who, it’s implied, may have such thin skin that human taunts and sarcasm might weaken them. In ancient Greece, there were trials (mythic, real, parody, who knows) in which gods brought charges against disruptively clever humans. Hurt gods testified how harmed they’d been by a human hand (very unfair!), for instance, when King Sisyphus trapped Thanatos, the god of death, and, for a time, kept his fellow Greeks from dying.

The most well-known tale, the Oresteia, in which the gods participated at trial begins with Orestes facing death for murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, because she murdered her husband Agamemnon and his concubine, Cassandra, after the Trojan war. Athena, who is Orestes’s goddess-counsel, agrees with Apollo, who represents Zeus, and rules that there are clear gender distinctions about justice for humans. Mayer notes that Athena “shifts the meaning of kinship justice to honor the father and/as the state—and, behind them, the father god.” In short, the father’s right to murder his child is greater than the mother’s right for avenging that murder, putting kinship or blood sacrifice over Orestes’ sacred duty to Agamemnon. Mayer concludes, “Patriarchy and its violence are written into the foundations of state justice.” What, then, is the relationship to blasphemy or cursing the gods? Mayer says that from the religious principle that gods cannot be cursed or dishonored arises the “litigious systems [that] favor the already powerful,” those already in control: the father, the property owner, the slave holder, the husband, and the son.

We end up, post-Trojan War, with Cassandra whose divinely-sanctioned utterances are prophetic; she is doomed to speak the truth and go unheard. But worse, disbelieved, she’s “proclaimed to be lying,” “disparaged” as a female hysteric. Still true today, women and other nonmales who say “I told you so” are hectors while the judicial touchstone—“he said, she said”—is never fair because of patriarchy’s built-in so-called sacred advantages. Women and trans folk who prophesy are considered crazy; they must use their “wild energy sources,” often as enraged witnesses to crimes and their definitions via the language of legalese. That power, Mayer notes, is endemic to language’s oratorical sway in courtrooms every day where rhetoric theatricalizes trials into “performative utterances.” Stage and staged plays. Voilá, the facile Johnnie Cochran who frees O. J. Simpson.

5 / As I say, there is a good deal here that overextends “cisheteropatriarchy” as the reason why so much “languaging” trouble sticks to our socially unclassifiable brothers, sisters, and the queer, the nonbinary, and the trans. I don’t doubt that language is responsible, in part, for our traditional pink and blue specimen jars. And I agree that language exists as “border and border guard,” a geographical and tribal necessity. I also wonder whether language is more pliant than we think, ever-but-slowly-changing via self-correction, chipping away at its incarceration. We writers who work to clarify words and their usage aid that evolution—postmen become mail carriers and history gives way to herstory and queerstory, releasing some of its sexualization.

Take the word shibboleth: a practice “that differentiates us from them.” Among early Middle Eastern tribes, Jews articulated the syllable (sh-) with the h, while Palestinians said it as (s-), the h gone, the sound changed. That distortion was used to sort and murder some tens of thousands of Palestinians, which Mayer compares to the “Zionist genocide and occupation” of the Gaza War. This, Mayer scolds, is a clear case of using Semitic (mis)pronunciation as “genocidal gatekeeping.” The word genocide is a weasel word; it can never be precise, especially when applied after the modern en masse murders of the 1930s and 1940s. As an antidote, I’m not sure we can hold the annals of etymology even partly responsible for violence born of maniacal religious or race-based certainty. Giving abusive language this much heft as a co-driver of human oppression is far-fetched. The problem is, weaponizing news and blaming regimes creates a sideshow, taking the attention off the usefulness of moral inquiry into ending wars of revenge.

Andrea Long Chu’s New York Magazine article, “The Free Speech Debate Is a Trap,” which Mayer cites, got it right. Chu, responding in December, 2023, to the short-sightedness of congressional critics against university policies on what is and isn’t free to say in campus protests against Israel wrote: “There’s no sane comparison between a college protester who chants against Israel’s War on Gaza and “pointing a rocket at Tel Aviv.” “Anti-Zionism,” Chu went on to say, is not a Coke bottle thrown at a tank. Speech may incite violence but it’s not speech that goes to jail but rather those who wield “sticks and stones.” This, Mayer fails to see, is a necessary rational distinction. Mayer should know that their father’s abuse is first that and not an act of patriarchal bloodlust.

6 / Mayer’s firmest ground is “the personal,” namely, their “coming out.” Whatever shibboleths others attach to Mayer, whose previous book, A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, posits claims similar to Bad Language, the writer stands up as one misidentified: “What dominance culture insists is in my insistence—me being the problem—is actually me naming the way that dominance culture insists on not listening—me becoming the problem.” Hammering at that familiar trope, even inelegantly, feels apt.

It’s better phrased here: “Every time I come out—as queer, as nonbinary, as an abuse survivor, as an anti-Zionist—it is like eating the pencil that writes my story.” Language’s imagery and metaphor make itself and its target more exacting—such resistance lands. To self-name is to defy the patriarchy. But, more crucially, living with and in defiance is key, as Black people in America are used to—to be placed in the ring with “an external self-mandated authority that requires you to identify yourself at its policed borders.”

It’s true that nearly all “othered” people, from Jews to BIPOC to feminists to LGBTQ, have for decades faced what Mayer’s nonbinary status is facing. I admire this, for I’m reminded that one way to undermine consciousness about identity is to raise the maddening legacy of the oppressor’s language against outsiders. We should know by now how much truth there is in their arguments. It’s all part and parcel, Mayer writes, of a “state” whose “official language . . . obsesses over knowing what people’s genitals are.”

Indeed, Bad Language would be more readable if such simplicity were the author’s norm, not the exception. Still, this knuckled outpost of grievances against the Mother Tongue, befouled by fathers and gods and kings, reveals the history of Mayer’s injuries—rape in childhood, Judaism’s canonical law, the straight world’s tropes around he/she, and the branding of anti-Zionists. And it’s those wounds, on and in Mayer’s body, that deserve obeisance. Mayer is forcibly articulating a cause not of “their” rules about language but of “ours,” rules that most cisheteros fail to analyze and correct because, well, because we are blind to language’s sexism and ableism in ways Mayer is not.