The English language changes over time. Many of us remember reading Beowulf in Old English and understanding little without the notes, not getting the jokes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and understanding the music of Shakespeare but not always his meaning. Chunks of the King James Bible are incomprehensible to someone with an average education today. Sometimes, the meaning of words changes altogether. In Jane Austen ‘s time, the phrase “knocked up” simply meant exhausted, whereas today it means impregnated, not always on purpose. The word “sex” appears often in Austen’s novels, but exclusively to distinguish biological men from women, and the modern word “gender” is nowhere to be seen. Today, you can’t avoid “gender,” while “sex” is rarely used to describe the state of being rather than the activity. Thanks perhaps to the fact that most people now read many, very small samples of ever-changing text instead of books, the speed of change in the meaning of words seems greater, and more political, than in the past. Nowhere is this happening faster than with words connected with ‘social justice,’ race, and sex.
The word "equity" used to have two meanings; a lay one, meaning 'fairness,' and a legal one, which invokes a parallel legal system that ensures the rights of the vulnerable against too literal interpretation of the written law. It's most common form in American English is that we have 'equity' in our houses: technically, the bank is the legal owner until the last dime has been paid off the loan, but the law recognizes that it would be wrong to deny that the borrower has paid whatever part he has, and hence attributes that value through the concept of 'equity.' Now, in woke parlance, "equity" means that in any competitive venture, from admission to elite schools, to awards, to standardised tests, to employment, the proportion of the general population must determine the outcome, regardless of varied input.
“Racism” used to mean treating people differently based on their race, preferring one over the other. In 2020, the Anti-Defamation League changed their definition to: "the marginalisation and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges White people." This is in line with the Critical Race Theory-inspired teachings of Ibram X. Kendi, for whom any disparity between racial groups is racism. This new definition isn’t just for academics; according to a training pamphlet from Home Depot for its workers, racism is “racial prejudice plus power,” which comes straight from the CRT playbook. For Kendists, 'Anti-racism,' is not merely opposition to racism, but rather an ongoing program of discrimination in favour of the 'marginalized' or 'oppressed' groups in the Marxian taxonomy.
“Unsafe” is a word that we all used to understand. Driving the wrong way down a highway is unsafe. Running with scissors. A Ford Pinto. Now, the word is used by the woke to denote 'stuff that makes me uncomfortable.' Patrice Cullors, under fire for turning Black Lives Matter (BLM) donor money into luxury homes, claims that the journalists investigating BLM and her own alleged peculation make her feel “unsafe.” College campuses are, inevitably, at the center of the neo-Bowdlerist attempt to keep everyone “safe.” Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center has a list of “violent language” including “trigger warning,” “rule of thumb,” and “give it a shot/give it a stab,” the last two of which they call “expressions [that] needlessly use imagery of hurting someone or something.” The University of Virginia’s campus paper the Cavalier Daily wrote, in an editorial aiming to stop scary Mike Pence from speaking there recently, that “hateful rhetoric is violent — and this is impermissible.” For these fragile student journalists, words themselves, even if not promoting action, can be ‘violence.’
On matters of sex, meanwhile, what starts as fringe quickly becomes dogma, enforced by an army of online trolls capable of “cancelling” anyone on the wrong side of the ‘Rowling Line,’ the point at which your wealth and value to the corporate world exceeds the value of sacrificing you to the mob. Rowling, if you remember, became the most hated enemy of the trans army when she reacted to an article in June 2020 titled Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate. “People who menstruate,” Rowling wrote, “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people…” Ironically, the article she cited came from Devex.com, a news site dedicated to international development, and featured a program in Kenya, so far beyond the reach of American campus culture that women and men would be baffled by the concept of “people who menstruate.” A clip has been making the rounds of podcasts showing Dennis Prager on Bill Maher's Real Time show in 2019, where Prager cites "men menstruate" as one of many woke reality shifts people are prepared to accept as true. Maher, the panel, and the audience laugh, as they simply can't believe this would ever be credible. Three years later, Prager has been proven right, while Rowling has become the torch-bearer for sex-based rights and reality-based language.
The phrase "gender affirming care" would logically mean listening to vulnerable young people who feel unhappy in their male or female body (and are likely to be suffering from other mental health issues such as autism, eating disorders, depression, or trauma) and helping them, through friendship, counseling, or even therapy, to come to terms with reality. To the progressive Left, however, it means taking self-identifying ‘transgender’ children immediately at their word and offering puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irrevocable surgical changes to match their perceived ‘gender identity’ at all costs. Proponents avoid descriptive terms like sterilisation, castration, double mastectomy, and orchiectomy in favor of nicer-sounding euphemisms like “top surgery,” “bottom surgery,” or “life-saving medical treatment.”
The last stand for reality-based language, however, may be the most elemental words “man” and “woman.” Ever since language has existed, everyone has known what they mean. There was no argument over the idea that humans are a sexually dimorphous species, like all other mammals. Now, the desire to be “inclusive” of those self-identifying into another sex has made these basic terms contentious. The definition of “man” seems less of an issue; perhaps that is because there are so few transmen credibly ‘passing’ as men, and they are not perceived by most men as threatening.
The word “woman” is the real battle ground. Biological men identifying as women insist on their right to compete against women and access women’s sex-based rights and spaces. In obedience, academia, government, and the media studiously avoid the word “woman” when possible, using terms like “menstruaters” and “cervix-owners.” Healthline.com, like many such organizations, writes about the health issues of “people with vaginas.” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh is about to release a documentary, What is a Woman, in which he travels the world asking this rather essential question to which our newest Supreme Court justice, as well as politicians across the English-speaking world, cannot provide an intelligible answer.
Walsh has found the Achilles’ heel of the trans movement, the reductio ad absurdum: if you cannot actually define a woman, then progressive slogans like “trans women are women” have no meaning, either. On a recent episode of the Dr. Phil show, surrounded by a hostile panel and audience, Walsh calmly maintains the question and never gets anything resembling an answer. Englishwoman Kelly-Jay Keen uses the same technique; defend the ordinary meaning of words and concepts and force the ideologues to explain theirs. Her defense of biological reality on the James Max radio show is a great example. Keen and other women fighting to defend sex-based rights wear T-shirts and post stickers with "Woman: Adult Human Female," that are considered hate speech by trans activists and their "allies" and can get users removed from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
To say that men don’t menstruate, or that women don't have penises, or to call an obviously male sex offender a man, is anathema to woke America. So is the idea that men identifying as women have gained unfair advantage in sport. The idea that any men would pretend to identify as women to escape the consequences of their crimes against women or children undermines the ideological argument that ‘gender identity’ is innate and immutable. Newspapers and online media may have aligned their style guides with the progressive norm that self-ID trumps observable reality, but ordinary readers not steeped in gender studies and woke academia openly mock articles like this one from British news site MetroUK: ”Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public,” in speaking of an offender, born male, convicted over 17 times for various offences. Or this one from Britain’s Sun about a self-identifying transwoman: “A pedophile has been jailed after she had cocaine-fuelled sex with an Alsatian dog.”
In both cases, the headline is juxtaposed with photographs of the offenders that make a mockery of the terms used. Where it ends is unclear, but the backlash against hijacking of common words is being led by women, who having gained so much in the 20th century are at risk of losing it in the 21st. For now, politicians are terrified of the trans activist mob, but sooner or later, they may be more afraid of losing elections.