English is a remarkable language, and I consider myself lucky to have grown up speaking it. Today, it also serves as the world’s primary lingua franca — a shared language that enables communication across borders and cultures. It has become the dominant tongue of international business and diplomacy, the standard for scientific research and academic publishing, and the universal language of aviation, technology, and the Internet.

English’s global reach is due in large part to its clarity and standardization.  That’s why so many nations teach it as a second language in their schools, and why, when two people from different countries meet without a shared native tongue, English is often the bridge between them.

Yet today, a movement on the Left seeks to disrupt that clarity by promoting euphemisms such as “birthing person” in place of woman and discouraging traditional gender-specific pronouns. The underlying argument is that biological sex should no longer be the default framework for understanding people or society.  But try as I might, I struggle to understand the rationale behind this thinking.

There’s an old saying in politics: Who benefits?  And in this case, one thing is clear — it isn’t women.  Politically correct terminology doesn’t broaden communication; it narrows it. Euphemisms like “People who menstruate” reduce women to their biological functions, stripping away the inherent dignity and richness of womanhood along with its social, historical, and political significance.

When gender is treated as purely a matter of identity, the biological category of women becomes fragmented into a series of functions — menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth — instead of a cohesive sex-based class.  Meanwhile, our medical standards, workplace protections, and anti-discrimination laws were built to protect biological women, not as a set of euphemistic descriptors.

Healthcare depends on biological accuracy because biological sex is a crucial variable in diagnosis, treatment, pharmacology, and clinical outcomes.  When clinicians are urged to treat sex as interchangeable with identity, medical clarity gives way to subjective interpretation — and it’s the patient who ultimately bears the risk.

Public policy should focus on what best serves the citizenry.  Yet proponents of this woke linguistic shift have never explained how rewriting language to conform to an ideology benefits anyone — let alone the women whose identities it erodes.

When long-standing, biologically grounded words like woman are replaced with specialized terminology, institutional gatekeepers become the arbiters of acceptable speech.  Universities, corporations, and media organizations then emerge as the true beneficiaries—expanding their authority by policing vocabulary, issuing mandates, and enforcing compliance.

Shifting language from a descriptive system rooted in shared reality to a prescriptive tool designed to enforce an ideology undermines the very purpose of communication.  Meanwhile, advocates of this shift insist we adopt their framework for understanding gender — so let’s examine that demand.  Language exists to convey meaning clearly and efficiently, and throughout history it has evolved organically from the ground up, shaped by usage rather than being imposed from above.

But when language is repurposed to serve ideology, clarity and understanding become the first casualties.  Once words lose their commonly understood meanings, interpretation becomes politicized — the very phenomenon Orwell warned against with Newspeak.

Pronouns that once followed simple grammatical conventions — he, she, or a contextually appropriate they — now demand ideological awareness.  And the more language is forced to serve ideology, the less it functions as a tool for clear communication and the more it becomes an instrument of compliance.

The compulsory replacement of he or she with they, strips important information from language — and what reasonable person could object to straightforward information?  Pronouns serve a practical function: reducing repetition while preserving relevant distinctions.  Language should illuminate reality, not obscure it.  Medical and legal standards depend on linguistic clarity.  As the saying goes, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

Quote of the day: “Reducing women to functions — ‘birthing bodies,’ ‘people who menstruate’ — divorces language from the biological facts that law and medicine depend on.” – Dr. Abigail Shrier