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Words matter immensely in law and where important topics are being considered. Definitions are usefully agreed upon at the start of a debates on contentious issues. Therefore, it's key to our personal and social health that we forge agreement on how to describe people whom we have to relate to or who have crucial roles in our life.
Pronoun use has been getting a lot of attention recently, with activists within the micro-minority that is the trans community forcing the issue. Therefore, it was strange that the Catholic Church in the US was mocked for declaring that thousands of people were not baptised because a priest had adopted the practictice of saying "We baptise you..." instead of the prescribed formula "I baptise you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit". The AP reports:
The difference is theologically crucial, the Vatican ruled in 2020, because it’s not the “we” of the congregation doing the baptizing but the “I” of Jesus Christ, working through the priest.
Words matter when there is religious belief involved, and in many areas relating to the performance of important responsibilities. This is emphasised by one Australian commentator:
Institutions entrusted with the care and welfare of individuals and society appreciate that conceptual precision requires lexemic precision, because words hold power.
The power contained in legal formulae or oaths of office results in a change in legal status or level of public authority for those to whom the words pertain in civil proceedings. The Australian Constitution instructs that a person elected to Parliament “must make and subscribe an oath or affirmation of allegiance before the Governor-General or some person authorised by the Governor-General”.
Any departure from the approved formula places into question the liceity of the oath/affirmation and means that the elected person may not take part in any proceedings of the House. The federal government guidelines include no provision for altering the official wording of the oath/affirmation. The words we use matter.
On 24 February 2022, Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville announced that more than 1,000 police officers were incorrectly sworn in due to an administrative oversight. For the past eight years, acting assistant commissioners have been swearing in police officers and protective services officers invalidly, which means they have been undertaking their duties without having the legal powers to do so.
These officers must now be sworn-in again and emergency legislation must be enacted to ensure the legality of arrests they made and legal proceedings involving them. Validity of administrative authority and validity of wording results in the valid performance of duties. The words we use — and the valid authority to execute the power contained in those words — matter.
Before going on to argue that the efforts within the transgender world to claim ownership of socially important words are deeply detrimental to the health of society, I want to dwell on the mistake by the American priest, using it as a case study of the significance of the language we use.
The Australian commentator, a professor at the Australian Catholic University, writes:
Catholic liturgy is regulated from the highest authorities in the Church — namely, the Pope and, as laws may determine, the local episcopal conference or local bishop — and “no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority”. The Second Vatican Council taught that liturgical rites are not private functions, but celebrations which pertain to the whole church because they “manifest it and have effects upon it”.
Why does the Catholic Church insist on getting liturgical words right? Because the faith of the faithful is at stake when we celebrate liturgy. An ancient axiom expressing the rationale of the church’s liturgy is, lex orandi, lex credendi (attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine, circa 370 – circa 465) which is generally translated as: “let the law of prayer establish the law of belief”. What we do and say in liturgy both effects and affects our faith. The Church’s rites are privileged expressions of what we believe, distilled and polished over time, and performed by the faithful in the presence of God.
The Church’s ritual texts are linguistic facts — they do what they say they will do and have the power to change lives: from unbaptised to baptised, from lay person to ordained leader, from unforgiven to forgiven. The ritual words that effect such changes in people are considered sacred because God’s power is enacted when they are spoken. Changing these sacred words also changes the theological tenets they contain and convey.
Father Arango’s error was a small but significant one: in an attempt at inclusivity he said “We baptise you …” instead of “I baptise you …” which, according to Church law, invalidated the baptisms he performed. When the “I” of Christ who has the power to sanctify someone through baptism is replaced with “We”, the end result is that the assembly is led to worship itself rather than to worship God who is the only source of sacramental grace.
“We” as an assembly — with all our human flaws and tendency to sin — have no power to baptise anyone; the priest as a man has no power to baptise anyone. As an ordained representative of Christ standing in persona Christi when enacting a sacrament, the priest speaks Christ’s words over the candidate as Christ’s power effects the sacrament in that individual.
In a similar way, the complexities of human life shine through when we look at the terms "woman", "mother" and "father", and the pronouns that have now become a thing of play. Instead of simplifying life, as a coherent culture does, the efforts pushed by trans activists are leading to semantic confusion.
Look at this headline: Transgender man who gave birth slams nurses who called him ‘Mom’. Instead of reading and understanding, we have to sit and think what is being said, and we are compelled to assess the implications of the word play. Language is meant to aid social discourse, not stymie it.
In the case that the headline relates to, the complainant, who identifies as a man — beard and all — had this to say:
“The only thing that made me dysphoric about my pregnancy was the misgendering that happened to me when I was getting medical care for my pregnancy,” he said. “The business of pregnancy — and yes, I say business, because the entire institution of pregnancy care in America is centered around selling this concept of ‘motherhood’ — is so intertwined with gender that it was hard to escape being misgendered.”
The confusion occurred this way:
In 2020, Los Angeles resident Bennett Kaspar-Williams, 37, gave birth via caesarean to a healthy baby boy with his husband, Malik. But in the process of having little Hudson, Kaspar-Williams was troubled by the constant misgendering of him by hospital staff who insisted on calling him a “mom”.
So this mother seemingly objects to "motherhood" even being a term we can use in our discourse and is intent on having a shift in the language of the whole society simply to accommodate a noncomformist wish to be a known as a father—one of two—in the family.
That's a bold ambition because, on behalf of a microminority, as mentioned above, the whole civilisation's experiential awareness of the necessary elements of a healthy family — that the child be raised by the combined efforts of a mother (with all her female attributes) and a father (with all his male attributes) — is pushed aside for the purpose of complying with the social fad of self-invention.
To oppose this ambition is not to discriminate against a woman who identifies as a man but to express biological and psychological reality.
We also have the case of an English biological woman who likewise gave birth but wished the child's birth certificate to identify her as the father. The Guardian reports:
His passport and National Health Service records were changed to show he was male, but he retained his female reproductive system.
Both the high court, in September 2019, and the appeal court, in April 2020, ruled that even though he was considered a man by law and had a gender recognition certificate to prove it, he could not appear on his child’s birth certificate as “father” or parent.
The chief justice, Lord Burnett, came down in favour of the right of a child born to a transgender parent to know the biological reality of its birth, rather than the parent’s right to be recognised on the birth certificate in their legal gender.
Burnett said that laws passed by parliament had not “decoupled the concept of mother from gender”. He said any interference with McConnell’s rights to family life, caused by birth registration documents describing him as a mother when he lives as his child’s father, could be justified.
To put it another way, words matter, with society taking on the role of protector of a child's right to know where they came from. Society knows that this knowledge of origin is also important in safeguarding lines of heredity.
Then there is the tragic case of a loss of a baby because medical records showed the transgender patient as a male whereas in reality the patient was a woman about to give birth.
Read Abigail Shrier's powerful examination of the transgender phenomenon Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. While some transgender cases are genuine, it is clear that much of the explosion in cases in recent years is an outgrowth of troubled youngsters being infected by a contagion spread by gender ideology activists through social media.
But, to continue my theme, Shrier cautions that gender ideology "also frames the unintended consequences of medical professionals' fudging science, rewriting medical definitions, and tolerating shoddy research to placate activists".
"At each stage, doctors may have thought: Where was the harm? And so, as a consequence, judges now decide the fate of children and their families based on phony, medically unsubstantiated metaphysics, as if it were factual that all adolescents have an immutable, ineffable 'gender identity', knowable only to the adolescents themselves," she continued.
"This is gender ideology—the belief, not backed by any meaningful empirical evidence, that we all have an ineffable gender identity, knowable only to us. This identity has no observable markers, and it is immutable (until the moment we change our minds and reveal ourselves as 'gender-fluid,' of course). It is promoted by virtually every practitioner of 'gender-affirming care', it is unfalsifiable, and its hold on our legal system is gaining ground," Shrier warned.
New research is also raising questions about transgender medicine.
Dr. Lisa Littman has a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, showing that the majority of those who have de-transitioned, that is, reversed their initial decision to change their gender identity, say they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a medical care provider before they initially transitioned.
Speaking on the Megyn Kelly Show she said it's heartbreaking what's happened to some of these patients. "These young people didn't get the evaluation, the support, the kind of mental health services that they needed and instead, were really rushed to medical transition and surgery," she said.
As far as pronouns are concerned, it is a courtesy to use whatever name or pronoun a person wishes, just as we use nicknames that a person has accepted. However, as with nicknames, we know there is a reality that is official or true, which takes precedence when the circumstances demand over whatever has been assumed by way of personal preference.
The point is that we must not let unreality strangle what is real, whether in matters affecting legal responsibilities or social responsibilities or social behaviour. All of us have a responsibility to protect each other, and women are more vulnerable in our present society than they have been under traditional standards of behaviour arising from Christian teaching.
Legislation in most Western jurisdictions permits a woman to declare that she is a man, or vice versa, showing how gender ideology has taken hold among the prominent institutions as activists have waved the banner of "human rights" and bullied the elite to comply to their demands, illustrating how activism can be effective..
But in everyday use, especially within the family, we can continue to hold on to reality and refer to those who have transitioned in this way: "She is a woman identifying as a man"; "He is a man identifying as a woman". Most importantly, we need to ensure we do not let the biological male in particular dominate spaces preserved for biological women as a whole.
The reality is that no matter how a biological male may demand that they are a woman, that can never be the case. Why cannot the male say, should the matter ever come up, that they identify as a woman. Society does a disservice to transitioned males by calling them a woman as in the case of the Jeopardy winner or of the transitioned male Admiral Rachel Levine, who " is one of USA Today's Women of the Year, a recognition of women across the country who have made a significant impact".
That Levine would serve nicely as clickbait for USA Today was clear.
By being aware of all of this degradation of social discourse we will steady the ship of society as the woke elite press on in exploring the far reaches of unreality and compulsion.
💢 See also Maledom gets in the way of women's rights
The Dangerous Denial of Sex: Transgender ideology harms women, gays
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