Controlled Speech

 

You must all henceforth refer to me in the plural, and as the Queen of Portugal

Disturbingly, I recently had to fill out a form that had a field for my preferred pronouns”—and it was a required field. One more in an ever-growing list of restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Now nobody is allowed to hold the self-evidently true position that pronouns are an element of English grammar, not subject to personal choice. Any more than you can just decide to require others to stop using the terminal “s” on verbs in the simple present, third person singular. And everyone else must fall in line.

This is sometimes claimed to be simply a matter of being polite, or of considering the feeling of the person referred to. But the pronouns required are always in the third person. The person spoken of is normatively not present; otherwise you would address them directly. So this cannot apply. The point is purely power and control.

There are too many other multiplying examples of enforced speech used to control thought: all the invented “phobia” terms, used to preemptively imply that anyone who raises an objection to homosexuality, Islam, transvestitism, or whatever, is irrational, if not insane. The terms “native,” “aboriginal” or “indigenous” applied to North American Indians and other cultures: no people on Earth is aboriginal or indigenous, so far as we can tell. And all of use are native to the land where we were born. “First Nations,” similarly, requires us to pretend that some band of a couple of thousand people is a “nation.” It violates the dictionary and the anthropological definition. The proper term for what we are referring to here is actually “primitive”; or “tribal,” or “Stone Age.”

A similar case of mind control is the use of the word “gender” beyond the field of grammar and not as a mere synonym for sex. There is no such thing as gender distinct from these two uses; the word is invented and enforced to force us all to think or pretend there is. Similarly, we are forced to call men women and women men, on command.

And that is the key element of all these restrictions: the thing we are forced to say and to aver is always something obviously false. The truth does not need to be imposed; only lies do.

Which is one reason why we must recover freedom of speech.