Over the past few years, the engineering of language has become so blatantly Orwellian as to stir up more backlash than it successfully controls thought. One recent Washington Post social media post had it that “a transgender Democratic lawmaker” has been “silenced in the state House after criticizing GOP colleagues who support a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children.” Much of this patter is tendentious, charged, and just plain uninformative. The default is to read it without learning that the lawmaker in question was “silenced” because of disruptive behavior breaching Robert’s Rules of Order for a parliamentary body, not for the particular subject of the protest. Meanwhile, “gender-affirming” and “care” are terms that only make sense if you agree that gender is imposed from birth, unrelated to biological sex, and that fashionable treatments by American clinicians constitute something intrinsically beneficial rather than harmful.

But that’s just one example. These types of euphemism make up vast and ever-increasing swaths of the progressive lexicon in government and journalism and advocacy, making moral stridency unavoidable but communicative clarity an ever-steeper hill. Branding a comprehensive scheme for legally mandated group discrimination as “equity” or the maiming and mutilation of autistic 8-year-olds as “gender-affirming care” might finally be a bridge too far. Forgive this shallow objection as a former practitioner of the dark arts of spin, but is there no artistry to political sugarcoating anymore?

[Jesse also writes as The Ivy Exile on Substack. Be sure to bookmark it. — Ed]