While spinning through the New English Review’s blog recently I came across an article by Theodore Dalrymple. In it he pointed out that the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) had, in discussion of covid vaccinations, spoken about ‘pregnant people’. The use of this term not only implies, wrongfully, that people who are not women can get pregnant, but also erases the term woman.
I don’t like seeing women erased from societies or from literature or technical publications. I don’t like it and call it out when women are erased in Islamic societies and I also don’t like it and call it out when the loud but tiny minority who belong to the cult of Trans do it.
There was no need at all for the CDC to refer to ‘pregnant people’ it should have, as a scientific organisation,stuck to reality and said ‘pregnant women’. Sadly the tyranny of political correctness and of speech codes has even permeated one of the pinnacles of medical information. We should not only be saddened by this but also extremely worried, for this sort of speech control is extremely sinister.
Theodore Dalrymple said:
It is not difficult to see the implicit lie that underlies and motivates the semantic evasion in the article, a lie which it appears that an important government agency (the CDC) now accepts and is willing to collude with, spread and no doubt soon to require adherence to as a condition of funding.
The lie is that there is no biological difference between men and women, a lie that has been adopted in the most cowardly possible fashion because of the activity of a very small but ruthless pressure group. In Britain, people (not only pregnant people) may change their sex on their birth certificates, a revision of history at which even Stalin might have balked.
Increasingly in learned journals and other publications for the intelligentsia, the locution “women and men” is used instead of “men and woman,” despite the fact that the latter trips off the tongue much more easily and is more grateful on the ear, just as “ladies and gentlemen” (soon to be an outlawed locution, no doubt) trips off the tongue and is much more grateful on the ear than “gentlemen and ladies.”
Science and scientific organisations should be about truth not ideology. But, the small but important surrender to ideology by the CDC on this issue diminishes this entity’s reputation. At a time when we most need to be able to trust in science and in scientists, such a capitulation to the screaming stormtroopers of the trans cult not only does not enhance the CDC’s reputation but may eventually damage it. Science should be free from ideology, including the ideology of the Trans cult.
