You can keep your ‘chest feeding’ and other ridiculous PC language

The latest push for politically correct and gender neutral language has at its roots a sinister attempt to control people’s thoughts and replace family with government, writes Louise Roberts.

As befits my new inoffensive role in society as a gestational parent, I asked my eldest decanted child what he wanted for his 17th hatching this week.

He said he would run it up the ladder with his non-birthing parent — sitting next to me — and circle back in order to get me across the ­decision.

So we’re now a textbook unit — I can’t say the f-word (family) because that is exclusive, discriminatory, bigoted and guilty of other firing squad-appropriate crimes in our jolly, cosy mission to ­obliterate commonsense and tradition.

Fortunately my son is as likely to use the social engineering speak outlined above as he is to stack the dishwasher and take out the bins without a reminder.

The word mum is out under new guidelines from a leading university. Picture: Nigel Hallett

There is no stronger bond than family.

It is our ground zero for identification so there is no better way to undermine it than making its key cherished concepts — mum, dad, son, daughter — a dirty, dirty language.

Alas, the march of ludicrous unnecessary interference only escalates here in the Lucky Country via the latest directive from the Australian ­National University.

A recent guidebook lays out a plan to pollute — sorry, change — the English language as a helpful How To on avoiding offence.

So Mother is out – gestational parent is in. They have also gone sour on Mother’s Milk, a phrase that signifies nurturing, comfort and a misty time where as babies we ate and snoozed and worried not a jot about the PC juggernaut heading our way.

Heterosexual and woman-focused lactation language can “harm ­transmasculine parents and non-­heteronormative families” because it can isolate and misgender.

Mother’s Milk has also been banned because it is apparently exclusionary. Picture: Tom Huntley

“Human/parent’s milk” is the phrase we should be using.

Somewhere amid our next instruction is a suggestion that chest feeding is a better description which technically is wrong because men have breasts too.

Lectures have helpfully been told that errors will be made but that’s OK if everyone has each other’s best interests at heart.

“Use inclusive language to describe parenthood. Do not worry if you make a mistake, simply acknowledge it and correct yourself. Language habits take practice to overcome, and students respect the efforts you make to be inclusive.” And on it goes.

So we are real time living through the chapters of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World where the family and its language are obsolete concepts. In the book, the World State destroys individual personality. It manipulates words and phrases to enforce stability and control citizens.

Not so sci-fi then — it only took us 89 years to get here.

The strange new rules of parenting language.

When you add in the Junior Anti-Sex League of George Orwell’s 1984 — eerily mirrored in much of the left’s radical policing of bedroom ­behaviour, and it becomes clear that those who are steering the ship of our culture have not realised that both books were not instruction manuals, but rather warnings.

The other issue we are now being told to tiptoe around is asking a student impromptu questions.

“How are you” becomes a kind of triggering statement because female students or “a student with feminine traits may perceive answering a question in public as a “threat”.

“Instructors thus need to encourage student participation in such a way that they are less likely to perceive contributing as a threatening experience in which they do not have control,” it said.

When so many kids leave high school with resilience issues, this is hardly likely to help.

Respectfully, uni lecturers are already switched on to dealing with younger generations and gender ­issues.

A stable, happy family life is not a bad thing. Picture: Toby Zerna

Likewise this is incredibly patronising to rest of us who are supportive of a stable, happy family life — whether that be homosexual, transgender or heterosexual.

This sort of guide book only serves to rewire our thinking so we think institutions have the right to be our caregiver, our nourisher.

The whole notion that mother and father are offensive terms and somehow invalidates other people in society proves we have jumped the shark on diversity.

Last week the dire, society-wrecking problem was being named Mother of the Year because it excluded other caregivers so a joyous 25-year award was binned. Now it is being a mother per se.

The ridiculous guidelines have come from the Australian National University.

Family is not the enemy. Family is the anchor, no matter what those who would willy-nilly replace the family with the loving ministrations of the government might say.

Which is probably why it is ­threatening to so many of the tiny ­totalitarians of academia and elsewhere, just as it has been to so many regimes that sought to get family members to tattle on one another for saying or thinking or laughing at the wrong thing.

And there is some choice, appropriate language I could use to describe a mission like ANU’s to cause division. But I won’t because this is a family newspaper.

@whatlouthinks