Recently, on social media, I wrote that “I can accept that word usages and meanings change. What I can’t accept is you changing the usages and meanings of words.” I had been arguing about gender and sex and the history and contemporary usages and meanings of these words and needed a concise way to rebut the objection that usages and meanings change over time. I accept what is an obvious point: word usages and meanings evolve. Let me add to it a sociological truism: the evolution of words reflects broader societal changes. But radical changes in the usage and meaning of words, especially over a short period of time, are not evolutionary; they are revolutionary, in that such radical change is the work of a transformative political-ideological agenda.”
In his 1949 novel Eighteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell introduces the concept of “Newspeak,” an intentional strategy in the use of language where existing words are given new, often narrower, meanings that align with the ideologies of the Party. In the case of the totalitarian superstate Orwell imagines, Oceania (composed of the Americas, the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa), the linguistic revolution can be understood in sociological terms using the typology Barrington Moore, Jr., devised in his 1966 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. In this typology, he differentiates between “revolution from above” and “revolution from below.”
Revolution from above describes a form of social and political transformation orchestrated by elite groups within a society, typically those in positions of power. This contrasts with revolution from below, which emerges from grassroots movements or popular uprisings. Elite transformations are often attempts to preempt or counter potential revolutionary movements from below. Although Moore focuses on social, economic, and political factors, it follows that strategies and mechanisms employed by ruling elites to consolidate power include various forms of ideological control and manipulation, including the shaping of language and discourse. For Orwell, whose focus is more concerned with linguistic manipulation as a tactic, Newspeak ensures that language only supports orthodox views and eliminates any possibility of unorthodox thoughts.
The usages and meanings of sex and gender provide a ready example. Concerning language around gender and sex, the use of “sex” to mean sexual intercourse began to appear in English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s and 1930s, this usage had become more common, albeit still considered somewhat euphemistic and informal. The term “sex” had entered the English language centuries early to denote male and female. It continues to be used this way. The word’s evolution to encompass multiple meanings reflects broader societal changes, including shifts in attitudes towards discussing sexuality more openly. Here the change in usage and meaning comes from below, that is from the people, at first as indirect speech. Widespread use of the word this way was promoted by the sexual revolution of the second half of the twentieth century.
In contrast, the usage and meaning of “gender” in academia and politics is the product of elite manipulation, designed to manufacture a myth that gender is not a description of reproductive anatomy and a product of nature; instead, it is a sociocultural construct used to straitjacket people. The categories of men and women were conceptualized as the result of socialization and enculturation into masculinity and femininity, rather than as a result of natural history and inevitable sexual development. This use stems from a shortening of two other terms: “gender role” (a synonym for sociology’s “sex role”) and “gender identity.” The first refer to social roles organized around gender, making it a valid social science concept, which is to say one can observe social roles and infer their normative expectations and associated values. The second construct, a psychiatric concept, pertains to the internal subjective perception of gender, which is theorized to occasionally diverge from one’s biological sex, thereby making obsolete the centuries-long usage of “gender” as synonymous with reproductive anatomy. This is an instance of Newspeak.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the individuals responsible for creating and propagating Newspeak are members of the ruling Party’s elite inner circle. Specifically, the organization responsible for language manipulation and control is the Ministry of Truth. In the Ministry of Truth, there is a department called the Records Department, which is responsible for the creation and dissemination of Newspeak. Today, in the United States the analog to Orwell’s Party is the Democratic Party and allies popularly known as RINOs, or “Republicans in Name Only,” which is the face of the corporate state, The corporate state controls the cultural, educational, and media apparatuses. This is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in America (this is true for Europe, as well). The content projected by these sense-making institutions has a progressive character. Progressives are relentless corrupters of language.
In his Prison Notebooks, produced while in confinement under the Italian fascists, political theorist Antonio Gramsci introduced the concept of “hegemony” to explain how dominant ideologies and ruling classes maintain power in society. According to Gramsci, hegemony involves the control over both the economic base and the cultural superstructure of society. This control extends beyond coercion and physical force; it encompasses the ability of the ruling class to shape the beliefs, norms, and values of society, thereby manufacturing consent and legitimacy for their rule.
Gramsci argued that the ruling class achieves hegemony through the construction of a complex network of ideologies and institutions, what I have referred to as the extended state apparatus. This apparatus includes not only traditional state institutions, such as government and law enforcement, but also civil society organizations, educational institutions, media outlets, and cultural producers. Through these institutions, the ruling class disseminates its worldview, promotes its interests, and marginalizes alternative perspectives. Gramsci’s model of hegemonic control elaborates Moore’s “revolution from above” thesis, as well as Orwell’s conceptions of power in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In several essays on Freedom and Reason, I have illustrated progressive hegemony by focusing on the propagandistic uses of gender and sex, which I have summarized above (see, e.g., Gender and the English Language, which also covered the propagandistic exploitation of racial disparities). For the balance of this essay, I will focus on the redefinition of the concept of “equity” and the pairing of the redefinition with the doctrine of “inclusion” in current institutional practices concerning matters of gender and sex. For general purposes, progressives redefine equity to thwart the ethic of individual merit and intentionally reengineer the composition of institutions and relations to serve their ideological and political purposes, which are functional to the expansion and deepening of the corporate state. Women’s rights provides us with the paradigm of progressive reengineering, so this will be the concrete example used. As I have done with concepts associated with sex and gender, I will accurately define the word “equity” then show how progressivism perverts it meaning.
When individuals are in some way substantively different from other individuals, as in the case of women and men, if the law treats them irrespective of their group differences, equality under the law may result in substantively and unjust disparities. Women’s rights therefore seeks equity, which, in this case, is properly understood as the pursuit of justice rooted in objective observations that men and women are different and immutable, the result of millions of years of primate evolution governed by the universal principles of natural and sexual selection, as well as normal sexual development.
Progressives violate the principle of equity by allowing men to access and participate in activities and spaces reserved for girls and women since men as a group have significant advantages over women, which is why those activities and spaces were segregated by sex in the first place. The inclusion of men in sports, for example, at least in a just and rational society, is a practice that can’t be negated by magical incantations, such as the paradoxical slogan “Trans women are women,” since trans women are as a matter of biological fact men, i.e., adult male humans. That this oxymoron governs access to activities and spaces established for women is a chief indicator that our society is neither just nor rational, governed not by fact and reason, but by progressive ideology.
Progressives disguise the violation of the equity principle by misconstruing the term to mean “equality of outcomes,” thereby robbing opponents of male inclusion in female activities and spaces of the relevant term covering the principle at hand. Moreover, this fallacious interpretation of equity as recommending or justifying practices ensuring that everyone ends up with the same results, regardless of their starting point or individual circumstances, is an ideological cover for an authoritarian reengineering of the social order. I want to spend a few moments elaborating the second purpose of progressive Newspeak.
The idea behind policies seeking outcome equality is that true fairness is achieved when everyone reaches the same level of success or well-being. The problem with the pursuit of equity defined in this way is that it requires significant intervention in social life that inevitably takes the form of redistribution of resources and stations to achieve equal outcomes, thus perpetrating injustice in itself by undermining autonomy, individual merit, and the principle of fair competition, potentially leading to widespread inefficiencies and popular resentments. Indeed, by denying the fact of individual and grouped differences, pursuit of equal outcomes is totalitarian in its consequences. As such, it is destructive to progress.
One way of helping others understand this is by having them read Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” published in the October 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There, Vonnegut tells the tale of a government that enforces extreme measures to ensure that everyone is equal in every possible way, not just in terms of opportunity but in terms of outcomes as well. The government accomplished this by imposing handicaps on individuals who possess above-average abilities. Intelligent people are forced to wear devices that disrupt their thoughts. Strong people must carry weights to limit their physical abilities. Beautiful people are required to wear masks to hide their attractiveness. And so on. This forced equality results in a society where mediocrity is the norm, and exceptional talents and abilities are suppressed.
If this is what is popularly known as equity, then a free people who wish to advance as a society over time must reject the principle. But, in reality, progressives don’t really seek these ends. Policies aimed at achieving equality of outcome are not about ensuring that everyone ends up with the same results but is a cover for an ideology that justifies practices that redistribute resources and opportunities to particular groups favored by those in power. It is a cover for favoritism, where resources are directed not based on objective needs but on subjective preferences and political calculations. The aim is to re-stack a supposed hierarchy by recruiting members of groups organized politically on the basis of grievance in order to achieve hegemony over the whole population, who are controlled through an extended state apparatus. Progressives thus repurpose equity for the identitarian strategy of tokenism, typical of substantively authoritarian systems, however nominally democratic. When those unfairly disadvantaged by such redistributions object, they are smeared as “bigots,” “racists,” “transphobes,” and “xenophobes,” the meaning of these words also controlled by progressive-capture institutions.
If accuracy and precision in language is valued, if we want to avoid confusion in communication and debate, equity actually means equality of opportunity. In other words, the goal of equity is to provide everyone with the necessary resources and support to have a fair chance of achieving similar outcomes. Equity is differentiated from equality, or perhaps more precisely it is a type of equality, where, instead of treating everyone the same, systems recognize that different people have different circumstances and that the allocation of resources and opportunities requires careful attention so individuals can potentially reach an equal outcome. This means providing varying levels of support based on individual needs and group differences to ensure fair treatment. Strict equality cannot account for differences; as a result, it sometimes perpetuates existing disparities for those who would otherwise thrive. To cite an obvious example, equality would mean giving everyone the same set of stairs, regardless of their ability to use them, whereas equity would require providing a wheelchair ramp for those who cannot use stairs, ensuring that everyone can access the same building.
I want to emphasize that equality of opportunity does not guarantee equality of outcome. People differ in effort and talents. We can see this in the National Football League (NFL), where some players work harder and have more talent than other players. League performance is raised in competition because those who cannot complete at the elite level are cut from the team independent of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Those whose contracts are determinate or who are benched are replaced by those who excel, and the sport becomes ever more demanding and exciting as new standards are established and higher levels are achieved. The sport progresses in this way. To maximize the pool of outstanding athletes, society creates opportunities for young men to participate in sports and removes any barriers that might prevent potential talent from rising to recognition.
However, because of the natural and profound differences between men and women mean that including men in women’s sports would disadvantage women and present a danger to their health and safety. One of the most apparent distinctions between the groups lies in physical size and composition. On average, males have greater muscle mass, larger bone structure, and higher levels of testosterone, contributing to their advantage in strength and power-based activities. Additionally, differences in muscle fiber composition, with males typically having a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, can lead to enhanced explosive strength and speed. Moreover, physiological factors such as lung capacity and cardiovascular endurance also exhibit variations between sexes, with males often having larger lung volumes and higher aerobic capacity. These differences can influence performance in endurance-based activities, where oxygen delivery and utilization play crucial roles. To be sure, individual variation exists within each gender. The distribution of these capacities are overlapping. However, the distance between the means is large and immutable. In this way, gender differs altogether from other demographic categories.
Sometimes disparities naturally emerge when equity rules are established and followed. This is in fact why men don’t compete in women’s sports. The group differences prove the fact that our species is sexually dimorphic. We have sex segregated activities and spaces because of this scientific fact. In the 100-meter dash, the world record for men is around 9.58 seconds, while for women, it is around 10.49 seconds. In the long jump, the men’s world record is over 8.95 meters, whereas for women, it is over 7.52 meters. In the 100-meter freestyle, the men’s world record is around 46.8 seconds, while for women, it is around 50.25 seconds. In the 200-meter individual medley, the men’s world record is around 1:54.00, whereas for women, it is around 2:06.12. In singles tennis, the fastest serve recorded by a man is around 163.7 mph, while for women, it is around 131 mph.
Equity is about leveling the playing field so that everyone has a fair opportunity to achieve similar outcomes. Equity focuses on fairness by addressing individual needs and circumstances to promote equal access and opportunities for all. To accomplish this, sex-segregation in specific activities and spaces must be preserved, and the definition used in determining inclusion based on objective scientific categories. My recent discourse on social media prompted reflection on the evolving nature of language, particularly in the context of debates surrounding gender and sex. While acknowledging the inherent fluidity of word usages and meanings over time, I remain steadfast in my conviction that deliberate and rapid alterations to these linguistic norms represent more than mere evolution—they signify a profound societal shift driven by political and ideological forces. The transformation of language, especially when undertaken abruptly and with clear intent, reflects not a natural progression but rather a revolutionary agenda aimed at reshaping fundamental aspects of our social fabric. These changes result in injustices and interpersonal harm. Therefore, while we must acknowledge and adapt to linguistic evolution, we must also remain vigilant against attempts to manipulate language for ideological ends, recognizing the broader implications for discourse, identity, and social understanding.
freedom and reason 