(LifeSiteNews) — Earlier this week, I noted in this space that the media’s promotion of gender ideology is eroding public trust in the press – and that this fact is almost entirely absent from discussions about the collapse of faith in the fourth estate. When stories about brawny, bearded, snaggle-toothed rapists are published with “she/her” pronouns and journalists calling the criminals “Janice,” they naturally cast doubt on the trustworthiness of other stories in the same publication. If the press is willing to lie about something so obvious, the thinking goes, what else are they lying about?
It is cliché to mention George Orwell these days – everyone does it. But when it comes to explaining how totalitarians of all stripes manipulate language for ideological ends, it is difficult to beat 1984. “’Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ Syme, of the Ministry of Truth, tells Winston Smith. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’”
It sounds very much like Syme is describing new updates to the Associated Press (AP) style guide, which sets the standard for how mainstream media uses various terminology and phraseology.
Their new guidelines on gender have again reduced the number of acceptable words and phrases with the intent of narrowing the range of acceptable thought. For example, the AP now tells journalists to avoid using phrases like “biological sex,” a concept trans activists object to, as well as the phrase “both sexes,” since the new social norm is that there is an indeterminate number of genders and biological sex does not exist.
To further muddy the waters, the AP advises that journalists should never indicate that someone now identifying as transgender was born a girl or boy, but instead use the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” Keen readers and listeners will have already noticed that this phrase has suddenly appeared in reporting across the mainstream media – it was jarring, a couple of weeks ago, to hear a reporter on the CBC use the phrase in a newscast. The orders come from the top; the journalists obediently change their language; the discourse is thus reshaped and defined by the demands of transgender activists.
As the AP style guide puts it: “Gender terminology is vast and constantly evolving; a style guide can’t cover everything. Let your sources guide you on how they want to be identified, and then use your judgement to be both sensitive and accurate.”
A glossary of terms is included to help journalists use the ever-multiplying identity markers including “nonbinary,” “genderqueer,” and “intersex.” The LGBT acronym has expanded exponentially in just the last several years, so this glossary will surely be expanding ever outwards.
Other terms, too, are being mainstreamed by the media – terms like “cisgender,” which refers to people who identify with the sex they were born as, and “gender-affirming care,” which refers to sex-change surgeries but builds the premises that these hormones and mutilations are “affirming” rather than “changing” right into the phrase.
And of course, the Associated Press also warns journalists to always use a subject’s “preferred pronouns,” regardless of how ludicrous they might be. I recently read articles referring to one trans activist as “zir,” and another using the plural pronoun “them” to a thoroughly confusing effect. But as I’ve noted before, pronouns are premises, and LGBT activists know how to use language to transform debate – which is why Megyn Kelly recently came out and announced that she would no longer be using “preferred pronouns”:
How can we stand up to any of this if we are complicit? How can we fight for facts if we participate in this fiction that a man can become a woman, that ‘transitioning’ is possible? How can we then try to say no, ‘she’ cannot come into our locker rooms or bathrooms or swimming lanes or sororities? Or try to say no, Target, ‘she’ can buy ‘her’ bathing suit with the extra fabric to hide ‘her penis’ somewhere else? It doesn’t make sense. Because it isn’t true. And we know it’s not true. And to pretend that it is true is to foster a lie that’s hurting too many people – almost all of them, girls. Women and girls.
They say pronouns are a gateway drug. They open the door to these lies that lead to real harm to real females. They’re a clever rhetorical trick that forces you to cede the argument about women’s spaces before you’ve even spoken one word of substance.
That’s precisely right. If we cede language, we cede everything – and if you want to know which media outlets are making unacceptable concessions, pay attention to how they use language.
