Compelling work was published yesterday by the country’s leading news outlet, CNN. In a piece titled, “The case for saying ‘pregnant people’ and other gender-inclusive phrases,” staff writer Kristen Rogers managed to make such a poor case for “gender-inclusive” language, that even Leftists on X are beginning to question the legitimacy of such Newspeak.
Rogers begins the article sharing some pertinent observations:
The use of phrases such as “pregnant people” or “penis owners” in cultural or political discourse is sometimes met with confusion, or even anger. Why use these terms when, as some people ask, “only women can get pregnant” or when “only men have penises?”
Fair questions, no? Rogers has an answer:
It’s the most inclusive, streamlined way to refer to everyone who, regardless of their gender identity, has certain anatomy or biological abilities.
“Streamlined”? Really? CNN’s defense of using terms such as “pregnant people” or “penis owners” is due to their “streamlined” nature, when contrasted with clunky terms like “women” or “men”?
Please, someone, make it make sense.
Rogers, an associate writer for CNN’s Features (Wellness, Space + Science, Travel and Style) section, offers a position that stems from uninformed and underbaked compassion. It is a call for kindness, for inclusivity, for making others comfortable. (No greater goods within the progressive paradigm.) Rogers forgets it is an unkindness to human persons to diminish their identity to mere parts — especially vulgar parts, as present in the denominations such as “penis owner.”
Rogers buttresses her claims with the support of an “expert,” a clinical professor of psychiatry at a top American institution, Columbia University (which recently canceled its in-person classes and graduation ceremony due to students promoting terrorism but that is totally neither here nor there):
Those people and institutions using gender-neutral language aim to be cognizant of the fact that sex doesn’t always align with gender identity, said psychiatrist Dr. Jack Drescher, past president of the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry and clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City.
Columbia can’t stop churning out great work these days. Columbia president Minouche Shafik — and member of the Pulitzer Prize board — should give CNN a Pulitzer!
My question for Rogers: If gender identity does not always align with sex, what if we used gender-neutral but sex-affirming language? If gender is changeable — and often changing — wouldn’t it be more streamlined to use terms that refer to the unchangeable sex of the person? (I digress.)
Perhaps Rogers would not see the validity in my proposition due to her eschewal of the reality of “unchangeable sex.” In lieu of a concrete definition of sex, she provides her own, with little success:
What is sex versus gender? A person’s sex is what they were assigned at birth based on biological characteristics of maleness or femaleness as indicated by chromosomes, gonads, hormones and genitals.
Her proposed definition of sex reeks of redundancy. Let’s try again. “A person’s sex is what they were assigned at birth based on biological characteristics of maleness or femaleness as indicated by chromosomes, gonads, hormones and genitals.”
There, that’s better. Somehow, for thousands of years, the human race has managed to accurately identify the sex of newborns by a mere glance. No Columbia doctorate required.
Her definition of gender is no better, seemingly lifted straight out of an introductory Women and Gender Studies course. (The fact that she cites the American Psychological Association only reveals how deeply this linguistic rot has spread in recent years.)
Gender, however, is a social construct and social identity marked by certain attitudes, feelings and behaviors a culture associates with someone’s biological sex, according to the American Psychological Association.
Rogers’s definition assumes that all cultural associations between sex and gender are arbitrary and shifting. A quick glance into the bounty of history will display that biological femaleness and cultural notions of motherhood and femininity are stubbornly and concretely intertwined.
This does not deter Rogers, for she argues that the world is finally entering an enlightened era, where gender identity is no longer bound to biological sex. She plants her flag with the growing number of youths who identify as transgender, and asserts that we must alter our shared language to accommodate them.
There are at least more than 1.6 million adults and youth — ages 13 to 17 — who identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of people ages 13 and older, according to the University of California, Los Angeles’ Williams Institute, a UCLA Law center for research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.
Despite 0.6 percent still being a substantially small number of the population, it is radically overinflated due to current trends of social-media platforms leading children to artificially question their gender. (A slew of articles have recorded this trend.)
Regardless of the inflated numbers of those who are “gender-nonconforming,” the exception does not disprove the rule.
Edge cases, such as persons born with intersex chromosomes or nondimorphic sexual organs, do not overturn the standard formulation, “XX is female, XY is male.” Rather, the very fact that there are edge cases confirm the rule. This point is a classic lesson of logic.
It is true to say that “humans have two legs” as a categorical quality. This does not negate the fact that a person can be both a human being and yet lack two legs. Whether someone is born without legs due to a birth defect — or a soldier has his legs amputated after a blast — these respective qualities do not make either person less human, even though homo sapiens are rightly considered bipeds.
Rather, such states would be considered a rare divergence from the human norm — the human norm being two-leggedness. This divergence is not a moral quality reflecting on the person, but a mere physical fact of their body.
To argue that we should cease using the terms “men” and “women” altogether because there are a few who identify as neither male nor female — or whose identification is not immediately clear to the onlooker — is like arguing that we should cease using the terms “run” or “walk” altogether because there are a few human persons without legs who can neither run nor walk.
Ultimately, Rogers’s preferred language elicits nostalgia for the days when feminists fought for women, rather than for “vagina owners” or “people who wished they owned a vagina.” Her proposed linguistic universe — like all instantiations of modern, Leftist feminism — negates womanhood.
Rogers has predicted this rebuttal in her article, and provided a response:
A common critique of gender-inclusive language is that it “erases women.” But there are parallel euphemisms for the genitalia or biological functions of those assigned male at birth, too — it’s just that phrases such as “pregnant people” or “people with uteruses” have been amplified in public discourse due to constant political discussions around reproductive rights, experts said.
Given the fact that there are “so many ciswomen and cismen and that they actually are a very large majority, language is not going to erase them,” Drescher said.
According to Rogers, because “ciswomen and cismen” are a majority in the population, we shouldn’t be worried about using language that erases them, because . . . they’re too big to fail? (With such a perverted sense of majoritarian rule, even John Rawls must be turning in his grave.)
The entire genre of “genre-inclusive language” minimizes mothers to “pregnant people” and implies that men are just as capable of being mothers. Terms such as “people with uteruses” communicate that women are merely a category of persons who happen to have different plumbing than men. With the introduction of this language, women are simply regarded as “men with vaginas,” rather than as creatures who posses unique virtues and capacities via their womanhood that set them apart from men.
Rogers, thanks for the proposal — but as for me and National Review, I think we’ll stick to “men” and “women.”