It seems that I’m not the only one baffled by recent turns of language. The Atlantic has a piece on how the term “gaslighting” is shifting in meaning, and Zoe Strimpel had a piece in Common Sense with Bari Weiss about the feminist movement losing its sense of the definition of “women”.
“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”
“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”
“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”
The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)
“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.
What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”?
Strimpel continued, “But now these exemplars of female empowerment — educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence — seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.”
Consider the sad, telling case of Lia Thomas, the 22-year-old transgender woman who recently won the NCAA Division I 500-yard freestyle championship.
The NCAA’s decision to let Thomas compete on the women’s team was a clear signal: It was choosing transgender women over the biological women the team was created for. It was saying it agreed with all the trans activists and “feminists” that there was no real difference between trans women and biological women, especially after a year or two on testosterone blockers, a position scientists have shown to be false. It ignored the yowls of dismay from biological female athletes and their parents.
She concludes, “And so Post-Feminist Feminism has morphed into a dark, strange Anti-Feminism. Anti-Feminism borrows from the language of liberation, but it’s not about liberating women. It’s about pushing women out of college sports. It’s about telling girls they aren’t lesbians or tomboys, but in fact men struggling to find themselves.”
In the Atlantic article, Caleb Madison argues about the term “gaslighting” (psychological manipulation):
Although in most cases the word serves to expose implicit power dynamics and level the playing field, it can also be used to do the exact opposite. That’s thanks to a process called “semantic bleaching,” where a word’s true meaning gets diluted through imprecise and bad-faith usage. Conner gives the example of woke — a word that originally meant “socially and politically aware,” but now can be used to mean “sensitive” and “irrational about social and political issues” because of semantic bleaching by right-leaning media. Similarly, the word gaslight is at risk of getting reappropriated by the powers that be to undermine the very reality it seeks to expose and vindicate, as in this article, which accuses the Black Lives Matter movement of gaslighting the public. This dangerous process of semantic bleaching can lead to a vicious cycle in which the word loses its intended revolutionary power as it whirlpools into the vague oblivion of meaninglessness. The bleaching of gaslight has become so common that the word has been ironically appropriated in the “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss” meme, which satirizes the moral vagueness of the term to critique a certain strain of mainstream capitalist feminism.
It is difficult enough to sift through the news today and determine whether the “facts” are, indeed, facts, or simply propaganda. Now we also have look more closely at the words used, and how they are used, to understand what is being said.
I can imagine some readers interpreting the above examples as being anti-transgender, just as those opposing the teaching of sex and gender identity in kindergarten are being maligned for thinking it is not appropriate at that age. Instead, it is a recognition that “inclusion” — just as “freedom” — comes with conditions. Support and advocacy for a certain group or ideal comes with an obligation to see that it does not harm others. There is room for everyone, and while it may not always be easy to accommodate everyone, it need not harm anyone, either.
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