Spiked Online editor Brendan O’Neill reacted to a California state Senate committee banning the words “he” and “she” during hearings and said it’s an example of political correctness run amok.
“It’s crazy. It really shows how far the politically correct lobby are willing to go in terms of policing language,” O’Neill said on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday.
“They now want to control not just hateful language and racist language, which we all agree is a bad thing, but everyday speech. ‘He’ and ‘she.’ The words that people use all the time in everyday conversation to describe men and women. They want to dig down so far into how we speak, and ultimately into how we think, that they are willing to ban the most common words in the English language.”
Democratic state Senate Judiciary Chair Hannah-Beth Jackson spoke about the change on Thursday, which affects her committee, and said it’s a matter of gender.
“We are now a state recognizing the nonbinary designation as a gender,” Jackson said. “We are using the phrase ‘they’ and replacing other designations so that it’s a gender-neutral designation of ‘they.’ Basically, that’s the primary reforms and revisions to the committee rules.”
Jackson was a victim of her own rules, however, when she referred to her old grammar teacher as a “her” instead of “them.”
“We are using what my grammar teacher would have heart attack over. We are using the phrase ‘they.’ My grammar teacher’s long gone. And I won’t be hearing from her. If any of you—”
She was cut off mid-sentence from several people in the audience who corrected her and insisted she use the words “them” or “they.”
“There is kind of transgender extremism at moment. Now, I’m fully in favor of trans rights. I think trans people should have same rights as everybody else. But there is this kind of trans extremism, which presumes that anyone who uses words like ‘he’ or ‘she’ is being disrespectful to trans people or disrespectful to nonbinary people,” O’Neill said.
“I think it is going to spread,” he continued. “We’ve seen similar developments in the United Kingdom, for example, where feminists who are critical of transgender politics are hounded and harassed and their meetings are closed down, simply because they think we should still have the right to talk about men and women.”
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