(July 13) The cultural Left’s obsessive attempts to redefine the word “woman,” and, indeed, to destroy the concept of women entirely, aren’t merely sops to the apparently fragile feelings of “transgender” people. Instead, they are part of a deliberate mission to bastardize language in service of radical ideology.
My colleague Zachary Faria deftly excoriated a July 12 Washington Post ideological rant posing as a news story about a Capitol Hill exchange related to fringe transgender ideology. In a hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) drew ire from a radical California professor for asserting, reasonably enough, that only women can get pregnant, something every child knows.
Faria aptly described the Washington Post’s ludicrous account of these events as evidence that “gender ideology has utterly broken establishment media .”
What Faria criticizes is part of a larger trend. On May 11, I had occasion to write a piece with a headline asserting that the same ideology “ has corrupted daily journalistic ethics .” In today’s media, I wrote, “all the assumptions are made not neutrally but in favor of the lens preferred by trans activists.”
As objectionable as the stories by the Washington Post and others are, though, and as wrong as they are about how to define “woman,” the even more dangerous agenda at work is the Left’s larger attempt to misuse language as a bludgeon against empirical reality. This Leftist linguistic exercise is one part Orwellian doublespeak , one part absurdity. It’s a combination of totalitarianism and Humpty Dumpty’s insistence that a word “means just what I choose it to mean ” because “the question is, which is to be master — that’s all.”
Only through such deliberate distortions can someone possibly say that a person with a fertile uterus is a “man” rather than a woman….. The great novelist and essayist Walker Percy appropriately (if somewhat tongue-in-cheekily) wrote that “many of the philosophical puzzles about sentences have arisen from the failure to distinguish between actual sentence utterances and professors uttering pseudo sentences in classrooms.” Indeed, much of the damage does originate from the academic Left. … [The full column is at this link.]
