Not even the truth is sacred to language police
A PUSH to remove the word “mother” from maternity wards as the person in labour may identify as a man takes our PC obsession to a new level, writes James Morrow.
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MOTHERHOOD, it used to be said, is sacred. But perhaps in these supposedly more enlightened times we should change that to “carer status is sacred”.
As reported yesterday, Australia’s national Nursing and Midwifery Board just almost passed a new code of conduct which, among other things, would have made midwives refer to their patients as “persons”, not “women”.
As in, “the person in Delivery Suite A has been in labour for four hours”.
Welcome to mother… er, make that parenthood.
The shift was proposed, apparently, to make a universal change so that the profession would be more inclusive of those “individual instances” of women who identify as men giving birth.
Now of course everyone knows that transgender people are part of the community and surely no one of good will wants to make life more difficult for them.
But couldn’t it be left up to midwives and patients to work this out when these “individual instances” occur?
In any case, thanks to strong opposition from the profession, the Board relented, but not for lack of trying.
If anything, the progressive push to re-engineer the entire English language to suit whatever the rules are about what we can and cannot say this week is stronger than ever.
On Wednesday, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper reported that the country’s former mental health tsar (though “commissar” might be more accurate) told a conference of girls’ schools head teachers they should stop referring to their students as “girls or ladies” because it “reminds them of their gender”.
As one commentator said of the idea, “Britain is losing its mind”.
Well, perhaps. But the bigger question is, why does every week bring some new controversy over what we’re allowed to say?
Political correctness used to be defended on the grounds of politeness, but the current language wars go far beyond that, even if they follow a predictable pattern.
What starts out as attempts by progressives to burnish their own moral standing by finding something to be offended about on someone else’s behalf quickly morph into campaigns to so comprehensively divorce words from their meanings that the rest of us dare not open our mouths lest we say the wrong thing.
And this has real consequences. A few days ago an audio recording surfaced of a disciplinary hearing at Canada’s Wilfred Laurier University, where a teaching assistant named Lindsay Shepherd was put through the wringer by two academics for showing her students a clip of a public televised debate about the use of gender-neutral pronouns.
Her offence? She didn’t tell her students what to think about what they were shown before they saw it.
Kept off balance, bullied, made to doubt herself and her own left-wing credentials, Shepherd breaks down in tears on the recording as she is sinisterly told that her neutrality in presenting the material is “a problem”.
Re: those claiming I have a right-wing agenda: Unfortunately, you have missed the point. Freedom to circulate ideas and debate current affairs is everyone's issue. I am a leftist. But I do not represent the leftism of Rambukkana/Pimlott, who believe in shutting down opposition.
— Lindsay Shepherd (@NewWorldHominin) 16 November 2017
The mentality of the inquisitors is right out of Orwell’s 1984 or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon; happily for Shepherd an official censure was the most deadly weapon in her tormentors’ toolkit.
Those who follow academia know that this sort of thing happens all the time but that such officially sanctioned bullying over what amounts to thoughtcrime is rarely caught on tape.
The flow-on effects of all this are hugely toxic. The graduates produced by this system will soon be running the world, and that means there will be ever more attempts to police the language of the rest of us — all in the name of (dare we say it?) motherhood statements about “fighting inequality”.
It’s a totalitarian process of stripping the language of precision, and in the process, forcing people to say things they know are not true, or at least not as accurate as they could be.
Like referring to a mother not as a woman, but a person.
James Morrow is opinion editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Twitter: @pwafork