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the narcissist cookbook - gendering teddy lyrics

[spoken]
babylonians developed the first written numerical system back in 3400bc. their system was base 60 which we still use today for telling time, but for everything else we ditched that in favour of the base 10 system, which the egyptians came up with a few hundred years later; and this was rounded out by a notation for zero, courtesy of the mayans a couple of hundred years after that + giving us the numbers 0 through 9, upon which is built our entire mathematical architecture

now+

before this, it’s not like humans didn’t have a concept of numbers, any more than we didn’t have a concept of time before clocks were invented. we’ve understood natural numbers just fine since before recorded history. it’s easy to understand, after all, that if you have one chicken and your neighbour has two, then they have more chickens than you do. and it’s just as easy to show someone that 1 plus 2 equals 3 because we can see our chicken, we can see their two chickens, and then as if by magic + oh no! now we have three bloodstained chickens

this is simple and observable mathematics, we didn’t need language to make sense of this

beyond this though, things get abstract and theoretical really f+cking fast, and i’m not even talking astrophysics here. just getting into numbers larger than 60 and 100 poses serious problems in a world where you don’t often have 60 or 100 of anything
and, inevitably, somewhere adrift in the abyss of history is the first human who faced the challenge of trying to describe the concept of one million to a poor friend who was, understandably, less interested in a number with no practical application than they were in society’s state of the art advances in avoiding being eaten by f+cking lions

but in this one person’s brain was an idea, of a number bigger than anyone had ever counted. something that they knew was real, that they knew was out there, but which they couldn’t hold up and show anyone + which they couldn’t even clearly explain because the language had not been developed yet

and if, as has been theorised, our species’ intelligence is intimately tied to our capacity for language, then an abstract concept without a word attached to it well+ it might as well not even exist

when i was born, i was given a teddy bear that i called teddy, because some days you just phone it in, and i took teddy with me everywhere. and one day, when i was around 4, my mum and i were getting ready to go out, and mum asked “where’s teddy?”
and i said “upstairs,”
and mum said “well go and get him then, we’re leaving.”
and i remember being jarred by this. it was an unfamiliar, visceral feeling, powerful enough for me still to be processing it way, way in the background, 30 years later
i said, “teddy’s not a him,”
and mum said, “oh, her then.”
and i said, “no that’s still not right.”

“teddy’s not a her either,” i said, struggling to find a word for what i knew teddy was, a word that i felt must exist, because on a purely conceptual level i could imagine it, and because my experience thus far had been to point at something and ask what it is, and be told oh, that’s a table, that’s a chair, that’s a deactivated exploder for a mark 10 torpedo. and i just assumed, naturally, that in my 4 long years on the planet i had yet to come across the word for when something doesn’t quite fit in to the boy box or the girl box

but what did i know?

now, i know teddy was (is, actually, i still have them, they’re sitting in the next room as i record this), teddy is just clumps of fluff stuffed into a furry bag. there isn’t any objective truth to be found as to whether teddy is a girl or a boy or something else + but that’s not the point

the point is, that this is one of my earliest memories. this + not skinning my knee or losing my mum in the supermarket + is what has stuck with me. when i was 4 years old, before i had had any exposure to anyone beyond the gender binary, in real life or in books or on tv, before i even had a concept of what it might mean socially and politically+

gendering teddy felt like it went against something tangible that apparently only i could see

this is why i have so little patience for people who smirk and say we don’t need new words to decribe gender. the reason that these people constantly belittle and undermine the words trans and non+binary people use to describe themselves and the world around them is not because the words are meaningless + it’s because these people know fine well that words are powerful and dangerous, and they know that their last hope of stalling progress is preventing people from having access to language that validates and vindicates their experience. not to mention the frankly f+cking ludicrous idea that new words somehow erase their identity rather than give them a deeper sense of understanding of it, and the notion that it is somehow unnatural to invent new words for things, as if that hasn’t been one of the leading preoccupations of humanity for the past 6000 years at least

we are trying to do something that cannot be accompished without a new language. without it, the concepts that make up vital parts of our identities are formless and amorphous. without it, it becomes impossible to build support networks and communities, or to be taken seriously when your rights are being violated, or to tell the people you love who you actually are, or even to recognise yourself in the f+cking mirror

and that lonely, early human, who struggled to explain the concept of a million. if they could, maybe they would have said: “you know what, you’re right. we need a formal numerical system to know that 1 plus 2 equals 3, but we will need one to build a worldwide communication network, to point telescopes into the darkest parts of sp+ce, to plunge with no regard for our own safety into the deepest parts of the sea. maybe some of you think it is unnecessary, even dangerous to be coming up with new words like this, and in the process validating things that you don’t believe in, things that you can’t see.”

“but for me, i can’t see it as anything except progress. new words are new tools, which can be used to build a marginally better world right now, and maybe many, thousands of years in the future, these new tools that we drop and break and wield clumsily will be used in ways we can’t even conceive of today; to build miraculous, unimaginable structures, with our distant decendents standing atop them, being the people that we always wanted to be.”

- the narcissist cookbook lyrics

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