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A belated Happy Birthing-person Day

Rex Murphy National Post The big issues are far from settled. Sign up for the NP Comment newsletter, NP Platformed — the cure for cancel culture.

The International Olympic Committee’s decision to allow what we now term a “previously male” weightlifter to compete against women is puzzling many people. And so it should, as this simple statistic demonstrates better than all the nonsense articles to the contrary: the world record for men’s deadlift is 1,104 pounds; the women’s record is 694 pounds. Explain that difference without reference to biology if you can.

It really is strange how quickly, and with so little resistance, people yield to the strange new lingo of what we may call the “woke movement.” People who are fervently woke seem to have gifted themselves with the very curious right to change the names of things.

I added “fervently” there because I cannot believe that even in the climate of new wokeism, all are so presumptuous and vain as to think they have such a right. But there’s no doubt that it is from this dim and grim movement that cancel culture springs. (Grim, because if you stir a woke hive, you will get stung. Dim? Well, let me continue.)

In the newly fashioned and explosively present trans movement, you may find perfect illustrations of this. The basic names of things, such as “man” and “woman,” are being hauled from their very ancient roots. I am no linguist, but I’m willing to speculate that the very first words ever uttered — from that one instant, in the vast reaches of time when human beings discovered, were given or stumbled upon the faculty of speech — were mutterings to denote, and to name, mother and father.

The faculty of manipulating sounds to register and declare the objects around us and, over time, of applying sounds to denote emotions and thoughts, was the absolute central accomplishment of the human race. Thought emerges from speech. No speech, no thought. Without thought, we would have stayed in the caves forever.

Very close to those primal designations, I would also guess our ancestors had words (or sounds) for boy and girl, male and female. Language likely grew outward from such basic, infallible terms. Without seed words — such as mother, father; male, female; water, food — language could not have grown into the highly accurate tool to describe our reality to which we are all accustomed.

Sunday was Mother’s Day, probably the only secular holiday that has universal appeal and charm. For however little we know of the person standing next to us waiting in the queue, we do know that he or she, like you or I, had a mother. We know that, out of the darkness of the 13.8 billion years that preceded our brief burst into being, it was a woman, a female, a mother, who corralled us into life. It doesn’t matter who we are — butcher, baker, candlestick-maker — it was a mother that got us here.

Or perhaps you would prefer “parent-unit one.” Or the latest odd, tormenting and (to my mind insulting) mock euphemism to come out of the “making up words” faction of the woke establishment: “birthing parent.” This, it is the suggestion of the terminally woke, is the more “inclusive” term. Well, in the words of the immortal linguist Yogi Berra, “inclusive me out.”

I can see now in my mind’s eye the sweet smiling face of a six-year-old girl looking with immeasurable affection towards her mother yesterday and wishing that dear woman, “Happy birthing-person day, it. You are the best birthing-person in the whole wide world.”

Birthing-person will never replace mother, regardless of how much people here in the cocoon of the West’s prosperity claw away at every rule and truth of our nature. It is a precarious twilight in which “man” and “woman,” to use the academic vernacular, are contested, problematic — hold for a laugh — “cisgender-heteronormative” terms.

They are none of these things. Like mother and father, sister and brother, man and woman, these words are the heart of language itself. The attempt to usurp any of these life-defining words with the ugly and forced argot of academic ideologues is an insulting travesty. And the effort to brand anyone who uses words that have worked since our ancestors came down from the trees is the consummate marriage of arrogance with ignorance.

Combine birthing-person with chest-feeding (for breastfeeding) in this new vocabulary, and you see how hollow and ridiculous this business is. Sensible people should never accommodate the attempt to force people to use words that are forged in an ideological furnace. To control language is to control thought; to control thought is a sin — a sin against human nature and the idea of the individual.

Why we make it so easy is a perplexity I cannot resolve. In any event, a couple days late perhaps, but a delayed Happy Mother’s Day, all you birthing-persons. And a wave to all your little person-units.

IT WAS A WOMAN WHO CORRALLED US INTO LIFE.

ISSUES & IDEAS

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2021-05-11T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-11T07:00:00.0000000Z

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