(LifeSiteNews) — Over the past couple of decades, social conservatives have been made painfully aware of what the term “wrongthink” means. The Oxford English dictionary defines “wrongthink” as a “belief or opinion that is perceived or condemned as socially, ideologically, or morally unacceptable, especially because it does not conform to a dominant, prevailing political or cultural orthodoxy.” That covers most beliefs held by orthodox Christians.
Traditionally, “wrongthink” has been largely ignored except when expressed aloud, with the scandalous recent exception of a Catholic woman arrested by police twice last year for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham, England. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who has since been vindicated in court and received an apology from police, had not been speaking aloud or even holding a Bible — but the police suspected that she might be praying in her head and asked her what she was thinking, after which they arrested her.
But a Daily Mail headline from January 12 reveals that some overzealous U.K. bureaucrats not only oppose wrongthink, but actually wish to demand righthink (which is a term I just made up — when I googled it, the first result was for George Orwell’s “Newspeak,” which about covers this headline): “Civil Service woke madness: Pronouns aren’t enough… you must THINK of trans colleagues as women now!”
According to the Mail, guidance released by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the non-departmental public body which reports directly to the U.K. Parliament, instructed employees that they should not only refer to their colleagues by preferred pronouns, but that they should think of their colleagues as belonging to the gender they identify as. One way that staff at the ICO can show allyship with their trans-identifying colleagues, the guidance states, is by “thinking of the person as being the gender that they want you to think of them as.”
Not incidentally, the ICO also states that men who identify as women go through menopause, which is both ridiculous and manifestly untrue, noting in their guidance about menopause that: “The menopause is a natural hormone transition that every woman and some trans men, trans women and non-binary people will experience.” Their “Trans Policy and Guidance,” in addition to instructing staff how to think, admonishes that employees must “be guided by your trans colleague and their preferences” and that they “must call a person by their chosen or preferred name.”
As Toby Young of the Free Speech Union told the Mail: “The ICO is supposed to be responsible for protecting people’s privacy. How can it be taken seriously in that role if it’s dictating to its employees what they can and can’t think? Talk about invasion of privacy! This is like something out of [George Orwell’s novel] 1984, telling people they must not commit thought crime.”
Tory MP Lia Nici concurred, asking: “Why do we need organisations like the ICO to produce guidance to tell people what they should be thinking? We already have protection for everyone in the workplace since the Equality Act was introduced in 2010.”
READ: President of Canadian LGBT ‘pride’ group charged with sex crimes against children
Protection in the workplace, of course, is not the point here. The ICO is already mandating compulsory speech by demanding that staff use the “preferred pronouns” of employees who identify as transgender and non-binary, essentially requiring staff to proactively participate in the ideological claims of their coworkers. But even further, the ICO has recognized that some employees might knuckle under reluctantly, deciding to “live by lies” to avoid unwelcome conflict or losing their job. Thus, they are encouraging their employees to go the full distance — and start thinking of men who identify as women as women.
Perhaps soon, government bureaucracies will start supplying hypnotic recordings for their staff, so that they can go to sleep to the sibilant tones of Ed Izzard chanting over and over again: “Trans women are women. Trans women are women. Trans women are women.”
