Changing language, losing reality

The contortions that the transgender phenomenon has foisted on the medical profession’s language are myriad—and pernicious. Although 20th-century thinkers had described man as “the symbol-making animal,” we have demonstrated, in our day, that we are symbol-destroying animals as well. The way in which the medical profession has conspired to warp both language and bodies to conform to a series of self-defining fictions shows how far this sacred practice has drifted from the art of healing, and from any firm grounding in reality.

In a misguided effort to make language more “inclusive,” the bedrock principles of biology have been subjected to the kind of cosmetic surgery that turns celebrities into unrecognizable skin-stretched parodies of themselves. In place of the essential categories of “men” and “women,” strange substitutions have been imposed—substitutions which only create further confusion. These circumlocutions describe people “who have” or who “own” certain glands, organs, or bodily parts, as if our incarnate reality was reducible to an external inventory. Such terminological mutilation leaves us all alienated from our own corporeal being, and relegates our embodied selves to a collection of components. But we never asked to be denuded of our definitions and we should not consent to the imposition of such deep and unfair alienations. Even so, our culture is yielding, little by little, to the pressure of activists who wish to remake an ancient profession, biological facts, and the building blocks of language in ways which render them all completely unrecognizable.

The elemental realities of our bodily existence, which language ought to describe and reflect, are being sacrificed by the very practitioners of the arts on which our lives, quite literally, depend. Nurses, doctors, counselors, and researchers—indeed, everyone involved in the noble arts of healing—should see what is at stake in the linguistic contortions which the transgender phenomenon continues to create. As language devolves into a series of ideologically-approved euphemisms, we relinquish any ability to describe reality or understand ourselves. The only remedy to such confusion is words that reach the inviolable truths—and which require, with every passing day, more courage to utter clearly.

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