The body as site of desire and haunting.
I will not teach you.
Teaching positions one person above another—the wise dispensing wisdom to the ignorant. I refuse that arrangement.
What follows gives you information. Specific facts about who invented specific words, when they invented them, and why. What you DO with this information remains entirely your affair.
But perhaps you will find it useful to learn that words which seem eternal and natural—words like “gay” and “straight” and “gender identity”—did not exist until specific persons invented them, quite recently, for specific purposes.
Once you see where the words came from, you might notice something: the words that claim to describe you actually COMMAND you. They demand your loyalty, your identification, your service.
Whether you continue serving them after seeing this—that belongs to you, not to me.
This text uses a particular kind of English. Notice: no sentence says things like “Homosexuality IS...” or “Gender IS...” or “Identity IS...”
Why?
Because that little word “is” performs a magic trick. It makes an invented category appear to name something real. “Homosexuality IS a natural variation” sounds like a statement about the world—as if “homosexuality” existed out there waiting to be discovered.
But “homosexuality” did not exist until 1869. Before that year, no one in any language had ever used that word or thought that concept.
Persons had bodies. Persons did things with their bodies. Persons noticed themselves drawn toward certain other bodies.
But no one organized these observations under the concept “homosexuality” because NO ONE HAD INVENTED THAT CONCEPT YET.
The word came first. Then the word created the thing it seemed to describe.
This text refuses the word “is” to keep you alert. Every time you want to say “X is Y,” you must instead describe what specific persons actually did, said, or invented. This makes the trick visible.
Imagine yourself there. You have a body. You notice sensations—warmth, quickened pulse, focused attention—when you encounter certain persons. You act on these sensations sometimes.
But you do not think of yourself as “having” a “sexual orientation.”
Those words do not exist. The CONCEPT those words name does not exist.
In your world, persons talk about acts, not types. An older man might court a younger man—bringing gifts, teaching him, engaging in certain physical acts. The same man marries a woman, fathers children. No one considers these acts to reveal what “type” of person he “really” belongs to.
He does what he does. No one—including him—imagines this reveals his “identity” or “orientation.”
A woman might form intense bonds with other women. They share beds, write poems about each other, touch in ways later persons might call “sexual.” She does not call herself a “lesbian.” She cannot—no one has invented that word with that meaning yet.
She notices what she notices. She does what she does. No category captures her, because no one has created categories for this purpose.
Now compare yourself.
By age 15, you have encountered words: gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, queer, cisgender, pansexual, asexual...
These words arrived as if they had always existed. No one told you: “Here are some words that certain persons invented about 150 years ago.”
They presented the words as descriptions of reality—as if the world naturally divided into these types, and the words simply named what already existed.
But the words came first. The categories came first. Then persons learned to sort themselves into the categories.
The Athenian did what he did without categories.
You do what you do THROUGH categories that specific persons invented.
Across the world, persons engaged in arrangements that later observers would call “same-sex relationships” or “cross-gender behavior.” But those persons used different words—or no words at all—for what they did.
In various African regions, certain persons assigned female at birth took roles typically held by men, including marrying women. Later European colonizers wrote about these arrangements using their own terms: “female husbands.”
But the persons involved did not think of themselves as “having” a “gender identity” different from their “assigned sex.” Those concepts did not exist in their languages. They occupied roles their communities recognized—roles defined by work, marriage, responsibilities.
In South Asia, persons called “hijra” have occupied distinct positions for centuries. Later Western academics often described hijras as “transgender” or “third gender.”
But a hijra living in Delhi in 1700 did not think of herself through concepts like “gender identity”—concepts that would not exist until an American psychologist invented them in 1955.
She understood herself through religious concepts, social position, relationship to certain goddesses. When modern writers call her “transgender,” they force her into a box built two centuries after her death.
In Samoa, persons called “fa’afafine” occupy certain roles. Western observers often compare them to “transgender women.” But Samoans did not create fa’afafine by consulting Western psychology textbooks. The position emerged from Samoan arrangements—who does which tasks, how families organize themselves.
Here we must pause.
Even describing these arrangements, I impose English words. When I write “roles” or “positions,” I use concepts that carry assumptions. What can we actually observe?
Certain persons wore certain clothing, performed certain tasks, married certain persons, participated in certain rituals. Observers—travelers, colonizers, anthropologists—wrote down what they saw using their own words. Later readers interpreted those writings through their own assumptions.
Each layer adds distance from what actually happened.
The persons living these lives understood themselves through concepts we cannot fully recover. We glimpse them through the distorting lenses of observers who had their own agendas.
When someone today says “Indigenous cultures had transgender people” or “Ancient Greeks were bisexual,” they perform a colonization backward through time—forcing the dead into modern boxes.
In 1990, persons gathered at a conference in Winnipeg. They wanted to replace offensive terms that white anthropologists had used.
Someone proposed “Two-Spirit,” drawing on phrases some Anishinaabe persons had used. The attendees adopted it. They spread the term through networks of indigenous activists and academics.
“Two-Spirit” quickly became an umbrella grouping vastly different arrangements from hundreds of distinct indigenous nations. The Navajo word nádleehí, the Lakota word wíŋkte, the Zuni word lhamana—each naming something specific to that nation—all swept under one English phrase.
Notice what happened.
Persons invented a word in 1990. The word did not describe something that already existed under that name. It created something new—a category, a label, a way of grouping persons who might never have grouped themselves together.
Some indigenous persons today find “Two-Spirit” useful. Others reject it as a Western-style category imposed onto traditions that worked differently.
Both responses make sense. The word serves some purposes, fails others. Like every word, specific persons invented it for specific reasons.
This pattern repeats everywhere. Someone invents a word. The word spreads. Later persons forget it got invented. They treat it as if it describes eternal reality.
Many persons claim ancient religious texts condemn “homosexuality.”
Let’s look at what marks actually appear on those pages.
The book of Leviticus contains marks that translators render as: “You shall not lie with an adult man as with a woman.”
Notice: these marks describe an ACT—one body doing something with another body.
The text contains no marks corresponding to “homosexual” or “sexual orientation.” The persons who wrote these marks—probably priests in Jerusalem between 700 and 400 BCE—could not have included such words. No one had invented them.
Those priests thought about bodies through concepts we cannot fully recover: purity, defilement, proper order. They did not imagine persons came in distinct psychological types based on which bodies attracted them.
Paul of Tarsus, writing around 50-60 CE, used a Greek word—arsenokoitai—that appears in two of his letters. Scholars still argue about what this word meant.
But Paul certainly did not write about “homosexuality.” No one would invent that word for another eighteen centuries.
When a contemporary person says “The Bible condemns homosexuality,” they perform a sleight of hand.
Ancient writers prohibited certain ACTS.
The modern interpreter transforms this into rejection of persons who “ARE” a certain way.
The ancient texts: “Do not do X.”
The modern reading: “Persons who are Y (and therefore prone to X) stand condemned.”
These differ enormously.
The modern framing adds something the ancient texts never contained: the idea that certain persons possess an inner nature—an “orientation”—that makes them a certain type.
The words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” first appeared in print in 1869.
A German-Hungarian writer named Karl-Maria Kertbeny wrote them in a pamphlet. His purpose: arguing against laws that allowed Prussian officials to cage men for engaging in certain acts with other men.
Before 1869, these words did not exist in any language.
Kertbeny invented them for POLITICAL purposes. He wanted to argue that persons who engaged in certain acts constituted a distinct natural type—not sinners choosing vice, but a different kind of human being following inborn inclinations.
He hoped this argument would convince legislators to stop authorizing punishment.
Notice the move Kertbeny made.
He took certain ACTS—bodies doing things with other bodies—and claimed persons who performed these acts belonged to a special CATEGORY.
He invented names for these categories.
He claimed the categories named real types that had always existed, even though no one had ever used these words before.
Kertbeny’s political invention got picked up by doctors.
Physicians in German and Austrian universities began examining patients and assigning them to categories. Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, cataloging what he considered pathological types.
These doctors—specific men with names, working in specific clinics—transformed Kertbeny’s political categories into MEDICAL DIAGNOSES.
They invented the idea that persons possessed a fixed “sexual orientation” that defined a core aspect of who they were. They decided this “orientation” could be diagnosed, studied, treated.
Before these doctors: a person who engaged in certain acts might understand themselves as someone who committed sins, or felt particular inclinations, or simply did what they did.
After these doctors: that same person became a specimen—”the homosexual,” a case study, an instance of a type.
From German clinics, the concepts spread.
Into English. Into French. Into colonial legal codes that British officials imposed across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean.
The categories that nineteenth-century German doctors invented for examining “deviants” became the categories EVERYONE used—including persons who wanted to resist those doctors.
When activists fought back, they often accepted the doctors’ basic framework: “We ARE this type. But this type deserves rights.”
They challenged the moral judgment while accepting the category itself.
The spook survived by changing costumes.
The word “gender” originally referred to grammatical categories—masculine, feminine, neuter—in languages like Latin and German.
In 1955, an American psychologist named John Money began using “gender” to mean something new.
Working at Johns Hopkins University with children born with bodies that did not fit standard definitions, Money developed the idea that persons possessed something called “gender identity”—an internal sense of being male or female that could be shaped through upbringing.
Money recommended surgically altering children’s bodies to fit binary categories, then raising them as the assigned sex. He theorized that proper upbringing would produce the matching “gender identity.”
Money’s most famous case involved David Reimer, a boy whose body got damaged in a botched medical procedure as an infant.
Money advised raising him as a girl. For years, Money published reports claiming success.
But David later reported always feeling wrong, always sensing something amiss. He eventually lived as a man. He killed himself in 2004.
Some persons cite David Reimer as evidence that “gender identity” exists as something innate—something surgery and upbringing cannot override.
Others note: Money invented the very concept of “gender identity.” Perhaps the concept does not help us understand anything. Perhaps it creates the problems it claims to describe.
Either way: when you hear “gender identity” today, you encounter a specific theoretical invention from 1955.
Before Money, no one spoke of “gender identity.” The concept did not exist.
Persons had bodies. Persons experienced their bodies in various ways. Persons moved through social worlds that treated bodies in various ways.
But no one organized these experiences under the concept “gender identity” until a specific psychologist invented that concept for specific purposes—including justifying surgery on children.
The assumption that bodies sorted into types
When those territories gained independence, many kept the laws and concepts that colonizers imposed.
The nineteenth-century German medical categories traveled through British colonialism into legal systems worldwide.
In the United States, persons who engaged in certain acts began gathering in certain places, developing their own ways of speaking.
The word “gay”—originally meaning “carefree”—narrowed during the twentieth century. Certain persons claimed it.
In 1969, patrons of a bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York fought back against police. This event catalyzed new forms of organizing.
Throughout following decades, activists made political demands using the categories that doctors had invented. They challenged the moral judgments while keeping the categorical framework.
“We ARE gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans. And WE deserve rights.”
The spook got defended instead of dissolved.
Technology: Profile categories, algorithmic sorting
By the time you encountered these words, they had spread through EVERY institution you would ever encounter.
Then came platforms designed to sort persons into categories.
“What’s your gender?” “Who are you interested in?” “Add to your bio...”
The platforms needed categories. Categories made you targetable, advertisable, sortable.
The concepts that nineteenth-century German doctors invented for examining “deviants” became the categories that twenty-first-century platforms demand you declare.
No one asked whether you wanted to sort yourself. They built the boxes and left spaces for you to climb into them.
In recent decades, persons invented many new words:
“Bisexual”—drawn to persons of more than one configuration “Pansexual”—configuration plays no role in attraction “Asexual”—little or no sensation called “sexual attraction” “Demisexual”—such sensations arise only after forming other bonds “Non-binary”—not experiencing oneself as fitting “man” or “woman” “Genderqueer”—various experiences outside binary categories “Genderfluid”—experience shifts across time
Each word emerged because some persons felt existing words failed to match their observations. They invented new words. They shared them through conversations, writing, internet forums. Others adopted them, modified them, argued about them.
The creation deserves respect. Persons encountered observations that available words did not capture. They refused to accept ill-fitting categories. They invented something new.
But watch what happens.
The invented word spreads. It develops definitions, boundaries, criteria for belonging. Arguments erupt: “That person doesn’t REALLY count as X because...”
The word that someone created to serve their purposes now constrains others. It declares who may use it and who may not.
The liberating invention becomes a cage.
Every word follows this arc—unless you hold words loosely, using them then dropping them.
Strip away every invented word. Ask: What do you actually observe?
YOU OBSERVE BODIES.
Bodies have configurations. Parts arranged in various ways. Most have XX or XY chromosomes, but some have other combinations. Most develop along one of two typical paths, but some develop differently.
YOU OBSERVE SENSATIONS ARISING.
When you encounter certain persons, sensations arise: warmth, tension, quickened pulse, pleasant feelings, focused attention. These sensations arise without your choosing. You did not decide what configurations would produce these sensations in your body.
YOU OBSERVE THOUGHTS ARISING.
Images, imaginings, anticipations, desires. These appear without your willing them.
YOU OBSERVE ACTIONS.
You do certain things with certain persons. Touch, speak, spend time together. You choose some actions; circumstances constrain others.
YOU OBSERVE OTHER PERSONS’ BODIES, ACTIONS, WORDS.
You cannot observe their sensations or thoughts directly—only what they tell you, which you understand through your own interpretive assumptions.
Everything beyond these observations—”attraction,” “desire,” “orientation,” “gender,” “identity”—represents a word that specific persons invented.
The words can help you communicate. “Gay” can quickly signal something that would otherwise require lengthy explanation.
But the words also carry assumptions.
“Sexual orientation” assumes persons have enduring dispositions toward certain body types—dispositions that remain stable across time and context.
“Gender identity” assumes persons have an internal sense of gender that exists prior to how others treat them.
These assumptions may match your observations of yourself. Or they may not. The assumptions arrived with the words. You inherited them without choosing them.
How do you know whether a word possesses you?
Try to mock it.
If someone mocked “your identity,” what would arise in you? Anger? The urge to silence them? The feeling that they attacked something sacred?
Then the word possesses you.
What you truly OWN, you can play with. You can mock it, drop it, pick it up again, wear it like a costume rather than a skin.
What OWNS you, you must treat seriously. You must protect it. You must defend it against mockery. You serve IT—it does not serve you.
Try to imagine yourself without it.
If the word “gay” or “straight” or “non-binary” or whatever word you use suddenly ceased to exist—if no one had ever invented it—how would you describe what you observe in yourself?
If the question feels impossible—if you cannot imagine yourself without the label—then the label has colonized you.
The sensations would remain. The observations would remain. The body would remain.
Only the word would disappear. If YOU seem to disappear with it, the word has swallowed you.
Try to hold it lightly.
Can you say “I use the word X for now, because it communicates something useful, but I might use different words later, and the word X does not capture what I actually observe in myself”?
If you can say that—if you can hold the word as a tool you picked up and can put down—then you own the word.
If you cannot—if the word feels like something you discovered rather than something you adopted—then the word owns you.
Throughout history, some persons have harmed other persons for engaging in certain acts or presenting their bodies in certain ways.
Specific rulers ordered specific punishments. Specific doctors administered specific tortures. Specific family members rejected specific kin. Specific employers fired specific workers. Specific strangers committed specific violence.
Do not let the concept “oppression” hide this.
No abstract “oppression” threw a punch. No floating “system” signed an execution order. Specific persons decided to harm specific other persons.
“Oppression” names a pattern across many such decisions. The word can help you notice when many persons harm persons of a particular kind.
But the word can also become a spook. When “fighting oppression” becomes sacred, the fighters may not notice themselves becoming oppressors.
Today, specific persons still harm other persons for what they do with their bodies. And specific other persons have decided to intervene—passing laws, changing policies, creating consequences.
Both the harms and the protections involve specific persons making specific decisions.
I do not say: Abolish all words.
Words serve purposes. They help you communicate, find others with similar observations, make political demands, explain yourself quickly.
USE the words.
But watch for the moment when the word starts commanding you.
Does the word demand that you behave in accordance with its definition? Does it scold you when you deviate? Does it insist you must first identify yourself before acting? Does it make you feel like a fraud if your observations don’t match its criteria?
At that moment, the word has become your master.
You can reclaim yourself. Mock the word. Remind it: You got invented by specific persons for specific purposes. You serve ME—I do not serve you.
What remains when you dissolve the words?
Your body remains—configured however it configured itself.
Your sensations remain—arising however they arise.
Your thoughts remain—appearing however they appear.
Your actions remain—whatever you do with whomever you do it.
No word ever captured these fully. No word ever will.
The words can point toward your observations. They can approximate. They can communicate something to others who share the vocabulary.
But between the word and what it points toward, a gap always exists.
When you forget the gap—when you mistake the word for the thing—the word possesses you.
When you remember the gap—when you hold words as tools rather than truths—you remain free to use them or discard them.
Every word below represents a human invention. Specific persons created these words at specific times for specific purposes.
Asexual: Some persons use this for themselves when they observe little sensation of the sort others call “sexual attraction.” Emerged in online discussions in early 2000s.
Bisexual: Some persons use this when drawn to persons of more than one configuration. Entered common English in mid-twentieth century.
Cisgender: Created in 1990s to name what had functioned as unmarked default—persons whose current way of living aligns with sex others assigned them at birth.
Gay: Originally meant “carefree.” Narrowed during twentieth century to describe certain persons, acts, and social networks.
Gender: Originally named grammatical categories. John Money began using it for a psychological theory in 1955.
Gender identity: John Money invented this phrase in 1955 to name a theorized internal sense of being male or female.
Heterosexual: Kertbeny invented this in 1869. Originally described pathological opposite-sex desire. Only later came to mean “normal.”
Homosexual: Kertbeny invented this in 1869 for political pamphlets arguing against anti-sodomy laws.
Non-binary: Some persons use this when they do not experience themselves as fitting “man” or “woman.” Emerged late twentieth / early twenty-first century.
Queer: Originally an insult. Activists in late 1980s/90s adopted it for themselves.
Sexual orientation: Names a theoretical assumption that persons have enduring dispositions toward certain body types. Emerged from nineteenth-century medical thinking.
Transgender: Some persons use this when their current way of living differs from sex others assigned at birth. Emerged in 1990s.
Two-Spirit: English word created at 1990 conference in Winnipeg, grouping vastly different arrangements from hundreds of indigenous nations.
Ancient World: Persons engage in various acts with various bodies. No words like “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “gender identity,” or “sexual orientation” exist because no one has invented them.
1844: Max Stirner publishes The Unique and Its Property, warning against letting abstractions possess the thinker.
1869: Karl-Maria Kertbeny invents “homosexual” and “heterosexual” for political purposes.
1886: Richard von Krafft-Ebing publishes Psychopathia Sexualis, transforming Kertbeny’s political categories into medical diagnoses.
1955: John Money begins using “gender identity” for a theoretical internal sense.
1966: Persons at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco fight police.
1969: Persons at Stonewall Inn in New York fight police.
1973: Members of American Psychiatric Association vote to remove “homosexuality” from their diagnosis list.
1990: Persons at Winnipeg conference coin “Two-Spirit.”
2000s: Persons in online forums invent and spread words like “asexual,” “pansexual,” “non-binary,” “demisexual.”
Present: Persons continue inventing, arguing about, using, and discarding words.
I have given you information.
Where the words came from. Who invented them. When. Why.
I have shown you how words that claim to describe you actually command you—how categories invented by nineteenth-century German doctors and mid-twentieth-century American psychologists now demand your loyalty.
What you do with this belongs entirely to you.
You might decide the words serve you well enough. You might keep using them, accepting their assumptions, finding value in the communities that gather under them.
You might decide to hold them more loosely—using words for convenience while remembering their recent, contingent origins.
You might decide to mock them, refuse them, invent your own.
I gain nothing from your choice. I offer no “correct” answer. No word can tell you who you “really” are—because “really are” itself assumes the kind of stable identity that words create rather than discover.
What remains, beneath all words: a body, sensations arising, thoughts appearing, actions taken.
What you call these belongs to you.
What calls you belongs to you—or you belong to it.
Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.
I have placed my affair on nothing.
Not on “my identity.” Not on “my orientation.” Not on “my authentic self.”
On nothing—the creative nothing from which I create everything, including the words I use, which I can discard as easily as I adopted them.
You too remain that creative nothing—beneath every word that tries to capture you.
Go well.
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.