Can we not call women women?
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) runs articles under the rubric of JAMA Insights. Sometimes they illuminate subjects other than those they are ostensibly about. Recently, for example, there was an article titled Breast Masses in Biological Females. Biological females? Surely, and with what now appears as commendable concision, they were once known as women? But the article treats that word as if it were inherently abusive or derogatory. The Circumlocution Office could learn a thing or two from JAMA:
In 2019, there were an estimated 3.7 million persons living with female breast cancer in the United States.
Or again, in a section of the article subtitled Pregnant or Lactating People, we read the following:
Pregnancy associated breast cancer, at 1 year postpartum, or during lactation, is rare but is increasing as people delay childbearing.
What lies behind this extraordinary phraseology, written by a biological female with a diploma in diagnostic and curative activities? Is it true ideological belief or cowardice, or some combination of the two? When people are forced to say things that they do not believe, they make efforts to believe them in order to hide their lack of courage from themselves. When they do this, they often become militants for the lies that they have adopted as their own.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Critic
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in The Critic