Naturally the news from America over the past few days has been dominated by the scenes in Washington, and the Last Days of Trump. This piece from Abigail Shrier, then, may have got lost in all the fury, but it's still worth reading. Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze, points out that the Dems seem to be in thrall to gender ideology. Their radical proposals on getting rid of non-gender-inclusive language may seem progressive, but in fact it's just one more step in the trans war on women.
On Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic majority proposed to eliminate “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister” and all other language deemed insufficiently “gender-inclusive” from House rules. They would be replaced with terms like “parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling” and so on.
“Mother” — among the most important concepts in human life — would be erased from the lexicon of the US House of Representatives. It’s important to recognize how radical this is. And no, it isn’t akin to updating federal law to replace “policeman” with “police officer,” a rational corrective sought by feminists for generations....
House Democrats don’t pretend to seek this change merely for the sake of “streamlining” congressional language. The explicit point is to advance “inclusion and diversity” and to “honor all gender identities.” Pelosi & Co. are desperate to accommodate an aggressive gender ideology that insists “man” and “woman” are fuzzy, subjective categories, rather than biological ones.
Lest you think this a harmless alteration, consider the ways California’s Democrats have run wild with Newspeak. As Quillette reported last week, California’s insurance commissioner has issued a directive to reclassify double mastectomies of healthy breasts from “cosmetic” procedures to “reconstructive,” necessary to “correct or repair the abnormal structures of the body caused by congenital defects.”
You read that right: The “congenital defect” is a young woman’s healthy breasts, provided that young woman subjectively identifies as “nonbinary” or anything other than “woman.”
It matters what we call things in the public space: Just ask the female prisoners now housed with violent biological men in California if our lawmakers’ words matter. This lie — that a girl’s breasts constitute “developmental abnormalities” depending on her subjective state of mind — carries the result that female patients of all ages would suddenly become eligible for insurance coverage for double mastectomies. A small change in language grants doctors the green light to remove the normal, developing breasts of an 11-year old girl. Still just words?
By all means, call people what they prefer. But language in the law, by definition, ushers words into action. Words grant rights or take them away. Words can enhance or diminish status, placing people and concepts beyond the bounds of legal protection.
No one knows this better than Democrats. By pressing for these changes across the country, they have allowed biological boys into sports competition with biological girls, peeling back Title IX protections for women’s sports. If “mother” is now a useless concept under House rules, why shouldn’t it pose an equally offensive presence in federal law?
That’s where we’re headed, isn’t it? Erasing “mothers,” and “women,” because the concepts are insufficiently inclusive to gender ideologues. The rights women struggled to win become undone, paradoxically, in the name of inclusion.