Why It’s Worth Making A Fuss Over Language

Many publications and individuals have, in recent days, been suspended or locked out of their Twitter accounts and prohibited from using the platform unless certain posts are removed. Among those currently restricted on the site is the publication I work for, The Christian Post. 

When we posted an article titled, “USA Today names Rachel Levine among its ‘Women of the Year,’” and pointed out that Levine is, in fact, a “man,” the social media giant told us that, according to its terms of service, we had violated its “hateful conduct” policy, and that we have to delete the tweet if we want to continue sharing articles with our readers on the platform.

Christian Post has said, and I agree, that we are prepared to lose our Twitter account if we are not allowed to communicate truthfully. 

Some might ask: “Why is this such a big deal? Can’t you just call him a her if they want? Why all the fuss?”

The big deal and the fuss are that we are being asked to bow down to a lie. And it’s a huge lie. 

As I explained to The Washington Examiner when asked to comment on our Twitter restriction, the reason why The Christian Post is such a stubborn stickler for language is because we value the truth. When proponents of transgenderism twist and overhaul our very means of communication in keeping with their ideological goals, the truth is irretrievably compromised and people are gravely harmed. If we do not have a commonly shared understanding of what words mean, having conversations in good faith — not to mention our ability to function as a society — becomes all but impossible. 

When we are told by social media companies (or The Associated Press Stylebook) to report that a man is actually a woman, we are being indoctrinated to deceive. We cannot further the notion that our physiology can be overwritten with politically correct euphemisms and rainbow flags. Conveying such a thing as real through the use of this newspeak is, from our perspective, a dereliction of our journalistic duty to report as honestly as we can.

Human beings are sexually dimorphic mammals and sex is immutable. Using language to reflect that scientific fact matters. We fail to love our neighbors when we refuse to do this. And a world where everyone speaks out of an autobiographical dictionary filled with meaningless words is an untenable one where madness reigns. It is omphaloskepsis writ large, a new-fangled tower of Babel. 

But aside from anything distinctly theological, something greater is at stake here with the incessant word-bending that gender ideology requires: reality. When we are forced to lie about biology, we sever ourselves from all sense of what is actually real.

To paraphrase evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who is not a Christian and has written extensively on the gender pseudoscience that saturates the media and academic discourse, if we deny the nature of biological sex en masse, we will become hostages to chaos and lose our collective tether to reality. I submit that he’s not overstating it. 

That tether is already fraying and the most vulnerable people in our society are paying a heavy price. 

As Wall Street Journal columnist and Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier observed in a Substack essay about her opinion piece that detailed California’s policy that allows violent male offenders to be housed in women’s prisons on the basis of their self-identification as women, lying about sex will likely prevent the public from ever knowing about the scope of those (actual) female prisoners’ understandable terror. Keep in mind that many of these incarcerated women come from domestic violence backgrounds and often have histories of addiction and substance abuse. For some, the prison was the only relatively safe space they have ever known. 

In this Orwellian gender regime, the violence that male inmates perpetrate against female prisoners “will simply be recorded as ‘women on women’ violence,” Shrier writes. “Only those at the prison will be the wiser; the rest of us will live behind an epistemological blockade.”

The manipulation of language inherent in this ideology has extended to the medical arena. J.K. Rowling, the beloved author of the Harry Potter series, wrote last August that she has arrived at the dire conclusion that “an ethical and medical scandal is brewing” after conversing with both gender dysphoric individuals who were harmed and psychological professionals that have been raising concerns.  

Voicing criticism of the “affirmative” approach, which she rightly placed in air quotes, Rowling said she believed that “the time is coming when those organizations and individuals who have uncritically embraced fashionable dogma, and demonized those urging caution, will have to answer for the harm they’ve enabled.” 

May that day come swiftly. And may the megalomaniacal abuse of language that is part and parcel of that fashionable transgender dogma now trying to censor The Christian Post stop with it. 

Brandon Showalter is a senior investigative reporter on sexual ethics and the trans movement at The Christian Post.  He can be found on Twitter @BrandonMShow.

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