This article is taken from the March 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I do not think that The Journal of the American Medical Association intends to be funny, but sometimes it is.

For example, I recently saw on its website a paper titled A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction. Evidently, the journal is now so misogynist that it considers the word woman an insult in itself.

To the N-word must now be added the W-word; soon, if the linguistic Savonarolas have their way, there won’t be enough letters in the alphabet to designate words which must never be pronounced on pain of excommunication by the monstrous regiment of the righteous. Frailty, thy name is person!

Then there was a paper titled An Uncommon Cause of Acute Chest Pain. It began as follows: “A patient in their 50s presented to the emergency department with 20 minutes of substernal chest pain … ”

Obviously, the doctors looking after the patient were agnostic as to whether the patient was a man or a woman. The use of the plural possessive adjective to describe what belongs to one person is now not only common, but de rigueur, if not outright obligatory: his and her will soon be the two H-words.

Interestingly, the second paper came from China, where of course they are fully accustomed to ideological lying. Perhaps, then, the Chinese are becoming as tediously decadent and trivial-minded as we in the West, which would be good news inasmuch as it would save our bacon; but possibly also, the editors of the journal insisted on intersex language as a condition of publication.

There is a giant ideological lie behind the locutions used in both papers, which is that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice or of random allocation at birth, an unimportant detail medically. If people choose to believe such rubbish, it is up to them; but when the repetition of such a lie is imposed as a condition of employment or advancement, when everyone must assent in public to what he knows to be false, then has totalitarianism arrived.

Who won the Cold War? Certainly, it was not the West.