It is rare for college professors to take a stance on language in today’s woke world, but particularly a female voice in academia.
Valerie Hudson, professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, recently wrote an opinion editorial critical of woke gender identity politics. The title of her editorial is, “Our language is being corrupted,” and refers to the importance of traditional societal definitions as the Left commandeers definitions of males and females in an increasingly woke environment.
Hudson emphasized that, for Christmas, she bought her children dictionaries which “were published before the word “woman” was redefined by some dictionary publishers. She believed that the recent redefinitions of “woman” are problematic and detrimental to feminism and equality.
She highlighted the Cambridge University Press’s redefinition of “woman” to include “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth (example, ‘Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.’).” Hudson pointed out that ducks, by the same logic, could redefine themselves as sharks, and therefore makes the entire practice of redefinition of gender as a farce.
By redefining women, it diminishes the importance of women in society, Hudson claimed. Hudson said that these redefinitions belittle or dehumanizing women into “uterus-havers” and “menstruators,” which reverses decades of progress in women’s rights.
She called this redefinition a form of erasure of women’s rights and “blatant misogyny.”
Hudson concluded:
“Now, however, we have women accosted by men in women’s restrooms, and women who dare say anything are too often vilified for calling them biologically male. Even worse, we have had the most vulnerable women — women prisoners — trapped in cells with biological males, which has already resulted in physical abuse and allegations of rape.
When the ducks cannot say “That’s a shark,” or women can’t say male, you have stripped from them the ability to even identify those who may harm them. That we have so corrupted our language to the favor of men, by asserting that biological males can be “women” and must be called “women” if that is what men want, is deeply wrong.
I, for one, will not bend the knee to this blatant misogyny, so I’m buying those uncorrupted dictionaries while they still exist. Just as the Amish have kept alive their own dialect of English, so dissenters from this conceptual mischief must do the same, and pass uncorrupted language on to those who follow them. For women and for men who value and respect women, the stakes are just too high for complacency.”
Disclaimer: The author took one of Hudson’s classes as an undergraduate student, where it was impressed on him to read news articles from start to finish and not make opinions based on newspaper headlines.
