#language manipulation

By: Pamela Paresky

Published: Jan 28, 2026

When psychological jargon replaces descriptions of reality, it erodes our ability to draw legal distinctions, and the loss of legal rights soon follows. The recent Supreme Court cases Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. offer a clear illustration.

Stated in ordinary language, the question before the Court is simple: Should the law recognize biological sex when allocating sex-based protections? Stripped of psychological jargon, the question itself is nonsensical. Sex-based protections that do not recognize sex as a biological category are incoherent. But once the issue is reframed in “gender” jargon, the cases appear to the uninformed as matters of discrimination and exclusion.

Under longstanding constitutional doctrine, sex is a real, observable, and legally relevant distinction. Excluding male athletes from female-only sports is constitutionally permissible when the classification serves a remedial purpose. Women’s sports exist precisely to remedy categorical disparities that would otherwise bar females from meaningful participation.

Yet psychological language is increasingly used to bypass that reasoning altogether. If a male child is linguistically transformed into a “girl,” then excluding “her” no longer appears to be the lawful exclusion of a male from a female-only category. Instead, it now looks like the denial of participation to a different category of “girl,” rather than the enforcement of a sex-based rule.

During oral argument, advocates—and at times the Court itself—repeatedly referred to the male athletes in these cases as “transgender girls,” a term drawn not from biology but from psychology and identity discourse. The phrase does not describe sex. It obscures it.

A “transgender girl” is a male child whose psychological sense of identity conflicts with biological sex. The purpose of the term is not descriptive precision but perceptual transformation. It invites listeners—and judges—to look past maleness altogether. That is the point.

This substitution is often defended as compassionate and inclusive. But in law, its power depends on a reversal of linguistic direction of fit. Instead of aiming to describe the world as it is, the language demands that the world be reorganized to match the words. Once that reversal is accepted, the law becomes vulnerable to a subtle but highly consequential sleight of hand.

The philosopher John Searle distinguished between two directions of fit in language. In the first, “word-to-world,” language describes reality. In the second, “world-to-word,” reality is made to conform to language. The Declaration of Independence is a classic example of the latter: the United States was created by linguistic declaration.

Psychological jargon with respect to sex categories has quietly shifted from the first mode to the second. What was once a clinical description of psychological distress—an internal sense of self at odds with biological sex, formerly termed Gender Identity Disorder—has been transformed into a vocabulary whose purpose is no longer diagnosis or clarity, but affirmation. The result is a legal fiction that treats subjective identity as if it could override biological reality.

Whatever one thinks about the therapeutic value of such affirmation, treating a subjective sense of femaleness as sufficient to reclassify a male as female under the law is destabilizing to jurisprudence.

Even the routine use of pronouns that contradict biological sex reflects the same world-to-word reversal. Such language may ease psychological distress in individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But when identity terms that conflict with reality replace descriptive categories, the law loses its capacity to draw objective distinctions and instead becomes a vehicle for subjective self-identification. If “girl” comes to mean anyone who claims the label, sex disappears as a legal category. And so do sex-based rights.

The phrase “sex assigned at birth” illustrates the same linguistic maneuver. In its original clinical context, it referred to rare cases in which an infant’s sex was mistakenly recorded—most often in disorders of sex development where a male newborn’s genitalia appeared female. The phrase was later absorbed into a psychological framework that treats sex itself as provisional and subjective.

In reality, sex is almost always correctly observed and recorded at birth. It is not a matter of physician discretion or social assignment. Yet the widespread use of this language subtly recasts sex-based classifications as arbitrary administrative choices rather than the legal recognition of a biological reality.

Once the broader framing of sex as something merely “assigned” at birth is accepted, and a male child with gender dysphoria is reclassified as a “transgender girl,” protecting females begins to look arbitrary—or worse, discriminatory. The psychological language has already done the argumentative work before legal reasoning even begins.

This pattern is not confined to women’s sports. It reflects a broader trend in public discourse, in which linguistic constructs harden into what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”—phrases that signal moral virtue while shutting down debate. To question the language is to appear callous. To insist on distinctions is to invite moral condemnation.

Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated this danger long before the rise of modern psychology. He warned that democratic societies tend to cultivate habits of the heart—sympathy, identification, emotional responsiveness—more quickly than habits of the mind—judgment, restraint, and moral courage. When compassion outruns discernment, Tocqueville feared, citizens come to confuse kindness with justice.

That confusion is now embedded in our legal vocabulary. The law is increasingly pressured to affirm identities rather than uphold categorical boundaries. The result is not an expansion of justice, but a dissolution of rights—and a collapse of critical thinking.

George Orwell warned that when language ceases to describe reality, it becomes an instrument of power rather than truth. In law, that corruption has concrete consequences. Sex-based rights depend on the law’s ability to identify sex. Once psychological semantics makes that taboo, women lose hard-won protections in both law and society.

Semantics are not a distraction from justice. They are its foundation. And a free society fails when it loses the courage to tell the truth.

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About the Author

By: LGBT Courage Coalition

Published: Feb 13, 2025

Linguists have long understood that language is power. Words don’t just describe reality—they shape it. Style guides, dictionaries, and institutional norms have always played a crucial role in setting the boundaries of acceptable language. Yet when those boundaries are deliberately manipulated, language becomes a tool not for clarity, but for control.

The pronoun debate—starting with “preferred pronouns” and culminating in ze/zir, bunself, and tree/treeself—is not about kindness or inclusivity. It is about forcing compliance with an ideology by rewriting the rules of language.

This is where style guides come in.

Style Guides as Weapons of Authority

From The Associated Press Stylebook to The Chicago Manual of Style, professional style guides dictate how writers, journalists, and institutions use language. They provide the scaffolding of public communication: what to capitalize, how to use punctuation, and which words are acceptable for describing the world.

Historically, style guides have evolved slowly, reflecting cultural consensus rather than enforcing it. Yet in recent years, style guides have become weapons for activism—tools for linguistic revolution, often at the expense of clarity and truth.

The Associated Press Stylebook now mandates that writers respect “preferred pronouns” and use they/them as singular pronouns. A demand once relegated to niche activist circles is now a formalized rule in mainstream journalism. Reality is obfuscated by enforced language, as writers are instructed to prioritize identity claims over clear communication.

Consider the recent changes in academic publishing. The American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide now suggests writers avoid terms like mother or father in favor of “gender-neutral” alternatives like parental figure. Similarly, the AMA Manual of Style, used in medical writing, encourages the avoidance of biological sex by substituting terms such as gestational parent for “mother.” A search of medical articles on Google Scholar for the phrase “pregnant people” in the title since 2018 yielded over 500 results. These are not neutral decisions. They strip words of their clarity and obscure material reality under the guise of inclusivity.

Even dictionaries have joined the fray. In 2020, Merriam-Webster added a new definition of they to mean “a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.” While dictionaries once documented language as it evolved organically, they now play an active role in shaping cultural norms. Words are redefined not to clarify meaning, but to enforce ideological positions.

Neopronouns: From Style to Chaos

Once the linguistic dam broke, neopronouns flooded in. Ze/zir, fae/faer, bun/bunself—pronouns that bear no relation to sex, grammar, or reality—have now entered activist discourse. These words are not natural evolutions of language. They are ideological inventions.

Here’s the thing about style guides: by codifying language, they give it legitimacy. The mere act of inclusion transforms nonsense into something “official.” Once enough institutions normalize ze/zir as a pronoun set, refusing to use it will not just be unfashionable—it will be heresy.

This isn’t about linguistic diversity or creativity. It’s about control. Neopronouns serve no communicative purpose. They do not clarify who someone is. Instead, they demand that others participate in an individual’s self-concept—often at the expense of their own principles.

Linguistics and Reality: The Disruption of Shared Meaning

Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure taught us that language works through shared symbols. A tree is a tree because we agree that the word refers to a tall, woody plant. The system works because words have meaning—agreed-upon, stable meanings rooted in reality.

Pronouns historically functioned as linguistic shortcuts for biological sex. They help us navigate the world without constantly restating someone’s name or their sex. By insisting that pronouns no longer correlate to sex—or worse, by inventing entirely new sets of pronouns—we shatter that shared meaning.

The result is confusion. A pronoun like bun/bunself tells us nothing about the speaker except that they demand linguistic obedience. It is not descriptive, it is performative.

And when language ceases to describe reality, it becomes impossible to communicate it.

Who Decides? The Institutional Capture of Words

The style guide is not neutral. It carries authority because it tells writers what to do. But who gets to decide what the rules are?

Organizations like the AP, The New York Times, and GLAAD exert immense influence over language. Their decisions on pronouns, gender-neutral terms, and “inclusive” language are not reflections of organic linguistic change. They are ideological prescriptions, enforced from the top down.

Consider recent developments in The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals in the world. In a 2021 cover article, the journal referred to women as “bodies with vaginas,” reducing women to anatomical parts in the name of gender neutrality. Words that once communicated clear meaning—like “woman” or “mother”—are systematically erased.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health now uses terms like egg-producer or chestfeeding parent in its official publications. These shifts are not evolution of language—they are political choices to obfuscate sex and replace it with gender ideology.

Style guides, medical journals, and dictionaries are institutions of authority. When they rewrite language, they rewrite reality.

The Consequences: Reality on the Chopping Block

When words lose their connection to reality, truth becomes subjective, and meaning becomes meaningless.

Women cease to exist as a coherent category because “woman” becomes “anyone who identifies as such.”

Lesbians—women attracted to women—are pressured to accept males who claim she/her pronouns as part of their orientation.

Children, confused by language and ideology, are told they can be ze, fae, or even catself—whatever they feel.

This linguistic breakdown does not free anyone. It traps us in a world where language reflects ideology, not reality.

Reclaiming Language: Resisting the New Rules

What can we do in the face of this linguistic revolution? We can refuse to comply.

Speak plainly. Call men “he” and women “she.”

Resist style guides that mandate ideological language.

Challenge the institutional capture of words and insist on their connection to material reality.

Language matters because words matter. When institutions redefine words to obscure sex, erase women, and confuse children, they are not helping society—they are dismantling its foundation.

It’s time to reclaim language as a tool for truth, not tyranny. The style guides don’t own our words.

FYI, "gay" is also correctly defined as "own sex"-attracted, rather than referring to "gender" (opposite sex). Unclear if this was previously corrupted.

When language changes to reflect changes in society, that’s evolution. When language changes to engineer changes in society, that’s creationism.

By: Mark Goldblatt

Published: Feb 7, 2023

Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.

It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?

After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”

Her words hung in the air as I glanced around the room. Not a single faculty member, not even those in math or sciences, seemed fazed by her categorical statement. Since I was a tenured professor, I was reluctant to debate an untenured colleague during a school meeting. So, I let the matter drop. The course was approved without revision by the School of Liberal Arts, and went on to gain approval by the curriculum committee. And that is how my college got into the business of winning converts.

That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.

When Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest, in which they argued:

M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some marks of writings in that discipline. … In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor. … M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists. … Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

The claim that Queer Theory has “deconstructed objectivity” means only that a certain number of academic performance artists have doodled with a cluster of words related to the concept of objectivity in order to gain university employment, win friends, and influence a distressingly large number of gullible fans. But no epistemological breakthrough has come of their efforts: if it had, it would be self-refuting since it would consist of an objective truth about the impossibility of objectivity. (At a lecture I attended 40 years ago, a debonair British postmodernist stated that Derrida had shown us how it was possible to formulate a consistent argument with a contradiction in it. When I inquired how, in that case, we could recognize an inconsistent argument, the question was met with actual hisses from his acolytes. I’m still waiting for an answer.)

Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis. The statement “Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis” is itself objectively true. And Queer Theorists make objective truth claims all the time—as when they cite statistical evidence of harms visited upon the LGBT community or proving the reality of climate change. One of the silent faculty members at the meeting I mentioned, also near retirement, had devoted his entire distinguished career to combatting the effects of global warming. You’d think he’d be miffed at the suggestion that such effects were not objectively real. But no, he just sat in silence like everyone else.

Either he didn’t understand or didn’t take seriously the implications of what our new colleague was saying. The latter possibility seems the far likelier one. My sense, based on hundreds of informal conversations I’ve had with STEM faculty, is that people working in the hard sciences tend to roll their eyes at the alleged insights of postmodernism. They inhabit a world in which truth is still gauged by correspondence between belief and reality, and in which reality exists independently of our beliefs about it. Generally speaking, they don’t give a rat’s ass about discourse communities and meta-narratives. They want to know if the equations balance, if the instruments work, and if their hypotheses match empirical outcomes. In other words, they are interested in discovering if what they believe to be true is objectively true. They are certainly not interested in the ethnicity, sexuality, or gender identity of the people making truth claims.

Put all of that together, and you’ve got the makings of a schism. The humanities and social sciences are undergoing a mission reversion—they’re returning to a pre-Enlightenment view of the purpose of higher education. Prior to the Enlightenment, universities were sites of religious instruction that trained clergy. Harvard was founded in 1636, a mere six years after the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, to ensure that future generations of New England Puritans would be served by learned ministers. That goal is found among Harvard’s original “Rules and Precepts”:

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome [i.e., at the base of the boat, to keep it steady in the water], as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.

That’s a version of what we’re seeing with the rise of the subjectivist movement in the humanities and social sciences. It is a new secular faith, a version of The Way. Instruction in radical progressive curricula is baptism by accreditation. It’s witness and testing. You gather for three hours a week to dwell in the spirit, commit yourself to individual rituals and collective causes, despair the fallen state of humanity, call out and cast out demons, immerse yourself in sacred texts and memorize venerable chants, then venture forth to spread the gospel. The end is performative, sacramental. Let me tell you the many ways you’re oppressed so that you may be a river to the masses.

Increasingly, that is the state of the humanities and social sciences at public universities in the US. Whatever you think of that development, it signals an existential crisis for higher education because instruction in the STEM fields at American universities remains traditional, objectively focused, and globally competitive. The reversion of the humanities and social sciences to religious preparation cannot coexist indefinitely with the Enlightenment mission of STEM instruction. Something has to give.

What, for example, becomes of science textbooks that report that only female mammals give birth? (Pity the poor seahorse, hitherto famous as the only species in which the male gives birth. But for how long?) You cannot be told in your morning sociology seminar that the pursuit of objectivity is an instrument of white supremacist culture, which must therefore be deconstructed, and then be told in your afternoon biology class that identical twins are objectively always the same sex.

It’s natural to expect the demand for severing ties to come from the professoriate on the STEM side, from a desire not to be sidetracked in their pursuit of objective truth. More likely, though, as evidenced by that liberal arts meeting at FIT, the demand will come from the humanities and social science side, caused by the unbearable adjacency of reality-based standards and scholarship to the postmodern insistence that the demand for objectivity is oppressive.

Entrance into STEM fields requires rigorous standards of assessment, as does progression and graduation. Rigorous standards of assessment, however, don’t produce equity or (objectively!) diverse student populations. Asian students are currently overrepresented in STEM, black students underrepresented; male students are overrepresented, female students underrepresented. According to the tenets of progressive activism, demographic imbalances of that nature constitute de facto proof of racial and gender bias since in an unbiased system every demographic would be proportionally represented. How long will student activists, encouraged by humanities and social science faculty, tolerate this alleged injustice on their campuses?

The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.

[ Via: https://archive.is/vQvgg ]

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It's pivotal moments like this that inform what comes next. That realization something was really wrong here, with that hesitation, that second-guessing, that telling the truth might upset them, that it would just be easier to let this one slide, that instinct to just go along to get along, and the creeping recognition a group delusion was going on.

Who would have thought that the downfall of western academia could be powered by the worst, most pretentious and puerile French philosophy which can be encapulated as an academic formalization of the Equivocation Fallacy, and language games worthy of a 7 year old who just discovered a book of knock-knock jokes?

It was a mistake to think that nobody would take this seriously. It was a mistake to think that it wouldn't leak out of the bogus Fantasy Studies domains within Humanities which they'd invented and credentialed themselves in. And it was damn sure a mistake to give them a seat at the grown-ups table as far as knowledge claims and knowledge production.

To paraphrase Sam Harris, those who reject objective reality belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of knowledge.