“EngSoc.” Ring a bell? That’s Newspeak for “English Socialism,” a fictional political ideology and government entity featured in British writer George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the Orwell’s dystopian world the ruling party, “The Party,” has instituted “English Socialism,” abbreviated as “EngSoc.” But is it a fictional political ideology and government? Or is it here and in the real?
In the book, The Party’s ideology is characterized by suppression of individualism, surveillance, and thought control. The key features of EngSoc: The Party exerts control over every aspect of its citizens’ lives, aiming to eliminate any dissent or opposition to its rule; The Party employs the “Thought Police” to monitor and punish any action or thought that goes against its ideology. This includes “thoughtcrime,” which is desiring or thinking something that goes against Party doctrine; The Party uses a controlled language called “Newspeak” to limit freedom of thought by eliminating words that could be used to express unorthodox thoughts, thus effectively reducing the range of thought and limiting the ability to rebel; the symbol and figurehead of The Party is “Big Brother,” who is always watching and is the embodiment of The Party’s authority; the Party uses pervasive surveillance, including telescreens that both broadcast Party propaganda and monitor citizens in their homes; citizens are expected to simultaneously accept two contradictory beliefs, a concept known as “doublethink,” which functions to ensure loyalty to The Party, as it requires people to believe whatever The Party tells them, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
I might have reported this a little while ago on social media, but it is looking pretty certain now that, under a Labor government in the UK, purposely calling someone by the “wrong” gender pronoun could lead to jail time of up to two years. The premise behind the law is that it is anti-discrimination action—that is, it is discrimination to correctly gender a person. This would bring “transphobic abuse” into line with assault and harassment motivated by hatred on the grounds of race or religion, which are currently punishable by up to two years in prison. (See Labour to jail people who use wrong gender pronouns on purpose under hate crime law.) Just like the surveillance cameras installed through the United Kingdom, everything about this proposal is in line with Orwell’s warning about the island’s future totalitarian state.
On the terrain of truth, since gender is an objective fact about a person, it cannot be an act of misgendering a man to refer to him by the pronouns that align with his gender, but rather is an act of gendering. Misgendering occurs when, for example, a person refers a man as a woman. Sometimes men look like women, but they are still men. Misgendering is understandable in cases of ambiguity. But people almost always get it right. (And even if they get it wrong, even intentionally, how can the state punish an individual for being mistaken or obnoxious?) This is because our species is evolved to see gender. It’s a primal reflex. No one should be punished for intentionally yielding to their natural history (see Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module).
Redefining correctly gendering a person as “misgendering” is an Orwellian move. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell identified a number of slogans that flipped the truth, e.g., “War is peace” and “Freedom is slavery.” In Orwell’s novel, truth flipping kept the people subjugated. The queer slogan “Transwomen are women” is an example of just such an Orwellian move. What Labor wants to do is force citizens of a free country to affirm the delusions and/or politics of those under the spell/advocating a queer worldview. This is just like the British government jailing people who refuse to say “Two and two is five.” The word that captures the essence of this is totalitarian.
Troubling in itself, but adding insult to injury, reflecting on this as a native America, is the fact that the United Kingdom is my mother country. For Labor to be behind such an authoritarian measure tells us how far the official political left has fallen away from the principles of Enlightenment. Some will object that this is only a possibility. Even if this doesn’t happen, that it was being floated it itself a terrible and frightening thing.
freedom and reason 