English speakers, from our first days of speaking, learn to identify the people around us with pronouns. Toddlers know well how to identify their mothers as “she” and their fathers as “he,” and to use other gender-specific pronouns that are part of everyday speech. For most of us, the use of gender pronouns is part of meaningful communication, not malicious slander. According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), however, those days are over.
The LGBT lobby has now opened another front in their war to remake American culture into their image: the English language itself. According to many LGBT activists, the English language is inherently discriminatory because it reinforces the male-female binary, which is, according to the far-left, bigoted. This view was fully expressed by the University of Wisconsin’s LGBT Resource Center in the following statement: “The dichotomy of ‘he and she” in English does not leave room for other gender identities, which is a source of frustration to the transgender and gender queer communities.”
Apparently, the far left LGBT lobby believes that the entire English language should bend to the will of the roughly 1% of Americans who are transgender or “transitioning.” They are calling on colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools to begin phasing out the use of gender-specific pronouns, in favor of gender-neutral pronouns such as “it,” which do not denote gender based on biology and / or anatomy. This is all being pushed in the name of tolerance and acceptance, but what is blatantly obvious about such a PC push is that it is blatantly intolerant and unaccepting to the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that gender is a fixed constant that does have a concrete connection to biology.
Such an over-the-line political correctness belongs in George Orwell’s 1984, not in English language textbooks in 2015. The notion that the English language is inherently bigoted because of its use of gender-specific pronouns is preposterous. There is virtually no language on the planet that does not distinguish between male and female, because there is virtually no culture on the planet that believes that there is no biological connection to being male or female. Gender specificity is not bigotry it is biology. For all the carping the left does about science in our political discourse, they do not seem to be that interested in anatomy and physiology or biological studies. Ideology trumps reason in liberal orthodoxy yet again.
