December 19, 2012
“Gender” was the name for this fraud that the left trotted out from the world of grammar and dressed up in fancy ideological clothes. So far, no one has come up with a word that means “race as a social construct.” I suggest “render.” It’s just ridiculous enough to appeal to lefties.
But the feminists were too successful with “gender.” It became so common it began to lose its ideological baggage and started to mean just, well, sex. Forms now ask for your “gender””and it’s not to thwart the jokers who used to write in “as often as possible.”
“Gender” is one of those words that has been slipped into the language for baldly political purposes. “Homeless” is another one. Sometime in the 1970s, all the world’s bums and winos got a promotion and became “the homeless,” as if their trim houses in the suburbs had all just been leveled by tornadoes.
The feminists have done even worse things, such as bullying us into breaking the laws of grammar. It is a peculiarity of English that we use the singular pronoun “he” and the possessive “his” when the subject’s sex is unspecified, as in “Each student has his own desk.” The students can be boys or girls, but each has a desk. Feminists can”t stand this. They claim that “his” excludes half the population, but this is absurd. Did anyone ever think that “He who hesitates is lost” doesn”t apply to women? Or that only men would be living in the workers” paradise of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?
Once again, however, Americans have been browbeaten into either the clumsy “his or her” or the ungrammatical “their,” as in “Each student has their own desk.” “Their” is pathetically, miserably wrong. It is the plural possessive, as in “The fourth-graders left their classroom.” However, when Twitter wants you to find out more about someone, you can click to “View their profile.” What craven surrender!
This kind of language subversion comes only from the left. Every change is a tiny attempt to poison someone’s mind”if not yours then your children’s. Today, plenty of young people would be astonished to be told that “Every student should do their homework” is as wrong as “They goes home.”
Every day, the left is beavering away at the language. Fight back. Proudly use such sentences as “Man is a mammal so he suckles his young.”
And in the meantime, Merry Christmas. Or should I say “Mary Christmas”? After all, she did all the work, didn”t she?
Image of gender symbols courtesy of Shutterstock
