Equal to Nothing
A voice in the wilderness is crying out that perhaps no one should allow lunacy into his language.
Stella Morabito offers a rare bit of clarity about the impossibility of clear and honest speech while using unclear and deceptive vocabulary.
http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/31/why-you-should-stop-using-the-word-gender
Let’s stop polluting our language with the word “gender.” Corruption of the English language was Point A on the road to President Obama’s directive to de-privatize and de-sex all school restrooms nationwide. The ploy that got us all into the lazy habit of using the empty term “gender” in place of the accurate word “sex” has its roots in gender ideology, which cultural Marxists pushed for many decades. Since cultural Marxism is nothing but nihilism, it shouldn’t surprise us that “gender” can mean whatever you want or don’t want it to mean. In other words, there’s no there there.
George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” discusses how easily language can be a tool of political manipulation….
Orwell: “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.”
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.
A lot of us who do know better —— including yours truly —— have fallen into the silly habit of substituting the weaponized word “gender” for the precise word “sex.” Now there’s hell to pay, since it’s infecting all manner of legislation and legal documents—all in the name of “equality,” another term that’s become equal to nothing.
Let’s recall that the most accurate usage of the term “gender” is strictly grammatical, as when referring to noun and adjective declensions in foreign languages that assign gender to its words. Yes, yes, I know the dictionary has assigned new and “richer” meanings to the term “gender,” having to do with society, culture, and identity. This is totally political. Dictionaries have been turned into political minefields by activists in this war on mind and body. We should all be able to see through this by now.
How Money Replaced ‘Sex’ with ‘Gender’
Apparently, the substitution of the word “sex” with the vague word “gender” was thehobbyhorse of John Money back in the 1950s. Money was the corrupt sexologist who is most notorious for utterly ruining the life of David Reimer by talking his parents intoraising David as a girl after a botched circumcision left him without a penis. Money drooled at the chance to experiment on little David because David happened to have an identical twin brother who could serve as a control for Money’s little inquest. In the 1970s, feminists took off with Money’s new lexicon, and we’ve been sloppily repeating the word “gender” ever since.“Gender” doesn’t mean anything concrete when applied to human identity because “gender identity” is all about a state of mind that’s not rooted in any objective reality. Sex, on the other hand, is quite definitely rooted in physical reality. Yet when “sex” makes an appearance in “gender identity non-discrimination laws,” it is masked as something that doesn’t exist in reality. A standard definition of “gender” is that it means someone’s perception of self (as male, female, both, or neither) “whether or not it aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.” Part of the premise of transgender law is to get you to believe that your sex was erroneously—and even maliciously—“assigned” to you at birth.
Jurisdiction after jurisdiction has signed on to that canard. It forces onto us a fraudulent premise that denies the reality of our own physical bodies. Ten Republican U.S. senators even signed on to this ridiculously false premise back in 2013. Neat trick, no? We now have hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide with laws that de-sex us. They essentially tell us that biological sex is not something any of us are, but something we have. Or don’t have.
My comment:
I am galled that even a single conservative needs to be told not to use the enemy argle-bargle in his vocabulary. I am ashamed that even one literate person needs to be told that ‘gender’ is a part of speech, and is not to be used to refer to sex.
The word ‘gender’ is used to refer to the mental or social aspects of sex, that is, the non-sexual parts of sex. As if one were to invent a word that referred to the non-binary aspects of the number two, or the non-rubicund aspects of the color red.
That is to say, the word is utter rubbish, and refers to a nonsense concept that exists only as a rhetorical device to silence rational speech and thought.
Who needs to be told to stop using the word ‘gender’? Who is so gullible or foolish ever to have started?
I approve of the column and recommend it, albeit with reservations:
Miss Morabito is reasonable up until the point when she recommends calling any insane person who thinks he is of the opposite sex by calling him by his ‘preferred’ pronoun. Even in the middle of a column denouncing the use of the weaponized vocabulary of the enemy, she acts her readers to use that vocabulary. It is nuts.
She routinely uses the grammatically incorrect pronoun phrase “he or she” when she means “he”. In the same way that using the word “gender” cedes to the enemy, unargued, the false proposition that biological sex is unrelated to one’s proper sexual role, use of “he or she” cedes to the enemy, unargued, the false proposition that using the same pronoun for anyone of either sex as is used for males somehow denigrates or insults or ignores women. On the same grounds, the word “man” and “mankind” as been abolished. Meanwhile, no one insists on saying “fox and vixen” or “dog and bitch” or abolishing any other examples of when a word is ambiguous between the male case and the universal case.
Her unexplained concession on the point of language undermines the writer’s authority to presume to give advice on the point of how to speak without using the enemy’s vocabulary.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
