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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) used to be an organization which actually had some real intellectual heft to it, but not anymore.
The ACLU sent out a ridiculous tweet, changing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s statement to make it more 21st century politically correct. A screen capture of the tweet is to the right, just in case the ACLU decide to send it down the rabbit hole, but you can view the original at the previous link.
Well, now the ACLU has apologized for being so stupid, but The New York Times subheading said that yes, it was a mistake, “albeit a well-intentioned one.” Is there such a thing as a well-intentioned mistake?
The organization acknowledged that changing references from women to people was a mistake — albeit a well-intentioned one.
by Michael Powell | Monday, September 27, 2021
Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday that he regretted that a tweet sent out recently by his organization altered the words of a well-known quote by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The A.C.L.U. tweet, which was sent out Sept. 18, changed Justice Ginsburg’s words, replacing each of her references to women with “person,” “people” or a plural pronoun in brackets. Justice Ginsburg, who died last year, is a revered figure in liberal and feminist circles and directed the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project from its founding in 1972 until she became a federal judge in 1980.
The tweet by the A.C.L.U. occasioned mockery and some anger on social media from feminists and others.
“We won’t be altering people’s quotes,” Mr. Romero said in an interview on Monday evening. “It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”
Mr. Romero first noted his regrets in an interview with Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times columnist, who wrote a column that spoke to the danger of trying to “change the nature of reality through language alone.”
There’s more at the original, but it all stems from the cockamamie notion that ‘transgender men’ are actually men, something that both the ACLU and the Times have swallowed whole.
The A.C.L.U., he said, could have touched on this emerging reality, one that involves identity, gender and language, without tampering with Justice Ginsburg’s quote. “In today’s America,” he said, “language sometimes needs to be rethought.”
Does it? Mr Romero has just said, apparently with a completely straight face, that men can be pregnant. This divorces the word “man” from the biological description “male”, because reproductive biology is such that the male impregnates the female, and females are the ones who become pregnant. Biology is just so politically incorrect!
Of course, Mr Romero said the quiet part out loud. “In today’s America, language sometimes needs to be rethought” means what I have always said, that the control of language is the control of thought. The ‘party of science’ is actually the party of silliness.
In the year 2525, if man is still alive, some anthropologist might excavate the remains of Bradley Manning, the former soldier who now calls himself Chelsea. With so many records destroyed in the third World War, the anthropologist will be trying to figure out what went on in the 21st century. With the soft tissues gone, the anthropologist will examine the skeletal structure of the subject, and record in his notes, “The subject was male.” Then, finding a little bit of DNA has survived, he will classify it, and again write, “The subject was male.” Why? Because he will be using objective, scientific criteria, based on the slightly different skeletal structures of males and females — children have to be able to pass through a woman’s pelvis — and DNA, which differentiates males, with XY chromosomes, and females, who have XX chromosomes. Mr Manning’s subsequent claim to be a woman is not objective, but subjective.
Michelle Goldberg wrote, also in the Times:
What’s more difficult to discuss is how making Ginsburg’s words gender-neutral alters their meaning. That requires coming to terms with a contentious shift in how progressives think and talk about sex and reproduction. Changing Ginsburg’s words treats what was once a core feminist insight — that women are oppressed on the basis of their reproductive capacity — as an embarrassing anachronism. The question then becomes: Is it?
The case for making the language of reproduction gender-neutral is fairly straightforward. Beatie may have been the first pregnant man that the public was aware of, but he was obviously not the last. If access to birth control, abortion and obstetric care are fraught for women, they can be even more fraught for trans men and nonbinary people, who must contend with discrimination and challenges to their gender identity.
Plenty of activists, especially young ones, find gender-neutral language for reproduction, and the conceptual revolution it represents, liberating. The utopian goal of many feminists, after all, is a society that’s not built around the gender binary, a type of society that, as far as I know, exists nowhere on earth (though many cultures make room for a small number of people who exist outside the male/female dichotomy).
A gender-inclusive understanding of reproduction is in keeping with the goal of a society free of sex hierarchies. It is one thing to insist that women shouldn’t be relegated to second-class status because they can bear children. It’s perhaps more radical to define sex and gender so that childbearing is no longer women’s exclusive domain.
Actually, it’s perhaps more stupid to define sex and gender so that childbearing is no longer women’s exclusive domain.
Liberal thought and ideas of sexual equality have devolved to the point at which it must be denied that the two sexes exist and are different from each other. There is no society and no language on earth in which the words for “men” and “women” are decoupled from the words for “male” and “female”, but that is what the left are trying to accomplish these days, as though changes of language can make changes in reality.
Jared Jennings, a boy who claims to be a girl, calling himself “Jazz,” was the star of a television show documenting his family’s and his struggle to be seen as a girl. In a strange article in Teen Vogue, reality intrudes in a subtle way:
Among other things, she talks about what it’s like to date as a transgender teen, and proves that though strides have been made, there’s still more work to do in building understanding (and tolerance) for the LGBTQ community.
“For the most part boys aren’t really accepting of me because I am transgender and therefore not many guys have crushes on me at my school,” she tells Oprah. “They think if they like me they will be called gay by their friends because they like another ‘boy.'”
Or, perhaps, just perhaps, it is because the boys in his school didn’t see him as the girl he claimed to be, but saw him as another boy, one who just happens to be messed up in the head. At the time of the article, published on February 2, 2016, he still had a penis and testicles, though puberty blockers had kept them at pre-adolescent development. Let’s be brutally honest here: what heterosexual boy would want to ‘date’ someone who has a penis and testicles?
There are many, many layers here to dissect, but let’s just keep it simple: there’s obviously still a big misunderstanding of what makes someone a boy or a girl, and to be honest, at that age we often only know what we’re taught. Jazz is a girl, and that her classmates are trying to keep her boxed into her life before her transition is cruel and underscores the need for more education about sex, gender, and sexuality. At the same time, it’s equally unsettling is that Jazz’s classmates still fear being called gay. It’s not an insult!
Brianna Wiest, the article author, took two assumptions in that paragraph:
- That Jared Jennings is a girl, which is objectively untrue, and which his classmates did not see as being true; and
- That it isn’t an insult to be called homosexual, which many people do see as such.
This is a real problem for the left: they make these declarative statements, assume them to be completely true, and further assume that that is the end of the discussion. Yet reality, which Mr Jennings’ classmates saw all too clearly, intrudes, as only reality can.
But it is a real problem for conservatives as well, because the more we accept, without objection, the changes in language that the left are trying to emplace and enforce, the more the left are allowed to order our thoughts, and thus control our thoughts. This is why The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is so adamant on not referring to homosexuals and homosexuality as “gay,” and on referring to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names, if known, and actual sex; I will not consent to the use of incorrect terms.
It could be argued that I am being an [insert slang term for the rectum here] by refusing to refer to Jared Jennings, Bradley Manning and Bruce Jenner by the names and gendered pronouns they prefer; it certainly isn’t polite. But reality isn’t polite, and the truth isn’t polite; reality and truth simply are, and I would rather be seen as impolite than as a liar.
But there is one very unexpected quirk I saw, just before we left, that addresses a problem for today. Near a public cafeteria were the public restrooms. Entering the men’s room, I noticed the typical urinals along one wall, some in use, and a middle-aged female janitor cleaning, while the restroom was in use. Well, that’s pretty European, I thought.