If you want to know why conservatives are batting almost zero in the culture war, consider the recent story about a MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, or “trans”) activist who suggested rhetorically that all children should be put on puberty blockers. For while attempting to oppose the MUSS agenda, some conservative outlets reporting on the matter did, unwittingly and as usual, enable that agenda.
The story was sparked by one Zachary Antolak, a man claiming womanhood who goes by the name “Lauren McNamara” when he’s not going by the name “Zinnia Jones” and who tweeted the following:
I won’t address the tweet’s substance here, except to say the activist is making a rhetorical argument that was refuted wonderfully by commentator Drew Belsky. For what’s more troubling than Antolak’s sophistry is conservatives’ leftism-born terminology.
For example, TheBlaze’s Phil Shiver wrote, among other things, that the activist “argued in her [sic!] tweet thread that puberty became ‘optional’” due to technology, related Belsky.
That “TheBlaze would use female pronouns to describe this man is disgraceful,” Belsky then writes. “‘Zinnia Jones’ was not just ‘born male.’ He still is male and always will be,” he explains.
“He cannot be anything else,” Belsky continues. “To call a man ‘she’ and ‘her’ is to be complicit in transgender insanity. It’s twice as damaging when conservatives, who purport to hold the moral high ground, join liberal sexual deviants in pushing the linguistic envelope.”
Preach it, brother (except that there’s no such thing as “transgender,” either). I’ve been writing for almost 20 years now about how too many conservatives are “connedservatives” who, while fighting the culture destroyers, cede half the battle before it has even begun by embracing their Newspeak.
As to this, Stuart Chase pointed out in his book The Tyranny of Words that the side that defines the vocabulary of a debate wins the debate. Yet decade after decade conservatives have obediently parroted the Lexicon of the Left, which is generally originated by left-wing academics and then popularized by left-wing media.
Thus have I heard conservatives say not “illegal alien” but “undocumented worker” (akin to calling a rapist an undocumented husband). They also may call semi-automatic rifles “assault weapons,” black Americans “African-Americans,” “sex” “gender” (humans are of one sex or the other; words have gender) — and now a man by feminine pronouns.
Controlling the language is imperative (which is why our Left manipulates it, as evil forces will do — e.g., the Nazis). Just imagine, for example, that French and German cultures were vying for primacy in a certain region. If the Germans could convince the French to speak German, how severely handicapped would the French be in their culture war?
What conservatives do is a bit as if European Jews had said during WWII, using a pejorative the Nazis applied to them, “We untermenschen [sub-humans] must fight for our human rights.” Or it’s as if we’d proclaimed pep-talk style during the same period, using a pejorative the Imperial Japanese applied to Americans, “We hairy white apes will show ’em who really has the brains!”
In the MUSS agenda’s case, its activists’ central claim is that you can be an opposite-sex member (or another “gender,” as they put it) just by willing it. And referring to a man using feminine pronouns is tacit acknowledgement of this claim’s validity. We’re essentially saying, “We accept your ‘identity,’ but…” But what?
You’ve lost.
Thus proceeding is to buttress the MUSS agenda claim that certain people have a biologically induced brain-body sex mismatch requiring a biological remedy, as opposed to a psychological issue requiring a psychological remedy. It’s to say, “Your ‘cure’ is real — just don’t offer it to kids with the same problem.”
Aside from being a bit confused, the issue is also that too many conservatives are scared, afraid to truly transgress against political correctness’s tenets. We have to “respect” a person’s identity, right? (OK, then I identify as Oh Great and Superior Master).
So they’re left arguing against the extremes of political correctness — within the framework of political correctness. They’ll fight over the Left’s corollaries after accepting the Left’s propositions.
Now perhaps it’s obvious why G.K. Chesterton observed that the “business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
When conservatives accept the Left’s words when using words to battle the Left, well, it’s a bit like using the Left’s voting machines when trying to win an election.
