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.
It is one thing for the common uses of words to shift organically over time, such that “awesome” means just generally praiseworthy rather than awe-inspiring and, sadly, “gay” almost never anymore means happy or high-spirited. It is another thing, however, and an inherently malevolent thing, to manipulate and distort meanings deliberately and dishonestly so as to manipulate listeners or readers and alter reality.
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.
Percy, a noted scholar of linguistic semiotics , explained why the use or misuse of language is so important. “Your understanding of my sounds,” he wrote, “depends upon your having heard them before, upon a common language.” Giving a name to something, he added, is “an act the very essence of which is an ‘is-saying,’ an affirming of the thing to be what it is for both of us.” (Italics added.)
To change the meaning of something so basic as “woman” suddenly, against the understanding reflected in all of recorded human history, is an assault on that very purpose of language, which is to establish commonality.
Now, the Left asks us to accept pregnant “men.” We are to accept “whiteness” as a description of disfavored character traits, rather than the relative brightness of a hue. We are supposed to believe that “racism” can be redefined as a one-way power relationship, rather than an attitude against people of a certain race. Inherent rights are now being redefined as merely privileges “ doled out ” or withheld at the government’s discretion. And we are told to reconstrue ordinary speech as “violence” and arsonist mob violence as “mostly peaceful.”
These are not linguistic changes that develop in order to improve mutual understanding. These are contrived changes for left-wing ideological purposes.
As Percy wrote, “As one … comes face to face with the nature of language, one also finds himself face to face with the nature of man.”
As the Left tries to redefine and distort human nature itself, the rest of us should use a word with an unambiguous meaning: “No.”
* Article from: The Washingon Examiner
