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Man, oh, man — or, should we say, person, oh, person? “Soon, there will be no more manholes in the city of Berkeley, California,” CNN tells us. “There will also be no chairmen, no manpower, no policemen or policewomen.” For you fruits and nuts haters, no, this doesn’t mean the city will be wiped off the map. What it does mean is that it will wipe gendered language from its codes.
This is the outcome of a Tuesday night vote in which the city, uh, fathers passed an ordinance to replace such language with “gender neutral” terms. So not only is “manhole” verboten, but there won’t be a “nonbinaryhole in sight,” as SF Gate put it. For “they have all been transmuted into ‘maintenance holes,’ that highest, hardest glass manhole-cover finally shattered.”
Some of the politically correct changes are, regrettably, now common and mundane, such as replacing “craftsmen” with “craftspeople.” Others are nerdy, such as swapping “fraternity” or “sorority” for “Collegiate Greek system residence” (seriously? Don’t these people sound just about as much fun as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?). Yet others are just pathetic, such as replacing “fraternal” with “social” and “journeyman” with “journey.”
Some may now dismiss this, saying, “To each his own.” But it gets worse. Referencing the Made-up Sexual Status (MUSS) agenda, the ordinance also states that “broadening societal awareness of transgender and gendernonconforming identities has brought to light the importance of non-binary gender inclusivity.”
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Thus will the new ordinance, to cite just a couple of examples, replace “Male and female” with “People of different genders” and “‘Pregnant’ (woman, women)” with “Pregnant employees” (because if a woman further proves she’s a woman by getting pregnant but claims manhood, we all have to participate in the pretense).
Moreover, SF Gate tells us that the “ordinance eliminates all gendered pronouns from the city code, replacing ‘she’ and ‘he’ with ‘they.’” They? Hey, who needs good grammar, kids, when you can be PC?! Full list of the changes below.
The ordinance further recommends that the city manager develop “a procedural and financial plan to modify all appropriate City forms to include an optional field for personal gender pronouns.”
In other words, if you want to be referenced with zie, zim, zir, zis, zieself, eirself, terself, or emself, well, everyone today can just do his own thing — that is, unless you don’t want to be a pronoun poltroon. ‘Cause then the government will come a-knockin’. You will be absorbed, comrade.
(By the way, the above partial mutated-pronoun list is courtesy of the philosopher-king intellectuals at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. The school also invites you to join them “in commemorating International Pronoun Day on October 17th!” No, you can’t make this stuff up, not if you’re not sporting a straitjacket in rubber accommodations, anyway.)
Yet, really, Berkeley’s wise elders are still wallowing in a morass of exclusivity. They also want to replace “Manpower” with “Human effort” and present “Human-made” as an alternative to “Manmade.” But what, oh sensitive souls, if a person identifies as a ferret, a mongoose, or a pronghorn antelope?
Don’t laugh (okay, you can laugh, but still listen). Psychologists have identified “gender dysphoria” — the strong sense that you’re one sex stuck in the body of the other — and thus justify the MUSS agenda. Yet they also define “species dysphoria,” the strong sense that you’re an animal stuck in a human body. So why put people in a species straitjacket?
Note, too, that activists and many mental-health professionals (often one and the same) claim that gender dysphoria isn’t psychological but has a biological basis. Yet there’s just as much proof for this as there is that species dysphoria has such.
Namely, none.
Berkeley City Council member Rigel Robinson, the ordinance’s primary author, said that the changes weren’t controversial; this is no doubt true in wholly controversial Berkeley.
Then again, maybe Robinson has this impression because he’s practiced in putting his hands over his ears. Robinson, the council’s youngest member at 23 (which brings to mind why the ancient Spartans’ minimum age for governing-body membership was 60) and a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, just declined an offer to appear Thursday on the top-rated news show Tucker Carlson Tonight. He said he wouldn’t engage Carlson because the host is a “white supremacist goblin.” (I’d no idea Carlson thus identified. What pronouns do goblins prefer?)
This explains why presidential candidate Joe Biden was recently castigated for trumpeting how as a senator he was able to work even with people he profoundly disagreed with, such as segregationists: Today’s tolerant “Left” will indulge 87 new pronouns, but then won’t talk to political opponents. Robinson should ponder that when the time for talking has ended, the time for fighting has begun. When words can’t remedy, weapons can become recourse.
It’s ironic, too, because Robinson voiced something very true when justifying his ordinance. “There’s power in language,” he said.
Citing the theme of the book The Tyranny of Words, I’ve often pointed out that the side defining the vocabulary of a debate wins the debate. This is why we should resist politically correct language manipulation.
This includes nauseating “inclusive language” such as “he or she,” “his or her” (note: The masculine pronoun when speaking generically is inclusive). Why? This is a literary reflection of the feminist idea that the sexes should be treated the same because they are the same — except for the superficial physical differences. This notion paved the way for the MUSS agenda because it has a corollary:
Change the superficial physical differences, and you can be the opposite sex.
So we went from “he” to “he or she” to “zie” and from women and men to women acting like men to women claiming they are men. The moral of this story?
If you want to go righteously and right, don’t let your tongue tilt left.
Image: Mari Nelson via iStock / Getty Images Plus
