Does anyone else remember the documentary “What is a Woman?” I didn’t watch the documentary (I’m not much for films), but I watched some of the clips of Mr. Walsh’s interviews. (Some people will be offended that I take an interest in Walsh’s work. You will have your opinion, and I will go on being interested.) I shouldn’t have been surprised at the astonishment of trans activists when pressed for an answer to this most fundamental question; if they answer it in any meaningful way, they upend the whole idea of transitioning. What’s worse, a contrary opinion to the question of transgenderism is seen as threatening. This idea has resulted in people being locked up in the People’s Republics of California and Canada for carrying Bibles in public. (I don’t remember where I first heard that appellation, but I thought it was apt.)

We have a copy of the Webster’s New Century Dictionary from 2001 that I use. The entry for “woman” says this: “An adult human female; the female sex.” A dictionary is about the most boring, innocuous book there is. The Bible at least has enough authority to scare someone. Could I one day get in trouble for carrying a dictionary? It’s kind of a funny idea, but the idea of a dictionary being hate speech maybe isn’t so far from the truth. Even as fundamental as the basic idea of human sexuality is, I think this is a symptom of an even deeper problem concerning the break down of communication and thought itself.

Relativism was presented as a nice way of being tolerant; if we let everyone go on believing what they want, then everyone will be happy. It unfortunately did not manifest that way. Relativism is not the idea that it’s fine to have your own opinions. Relativism is the idea that everyone can define right and wrong for themselves; your opinions shape your reality; in essence, you become the god of your own little universe, making up rules and destroying them as you please. If I try to deny your reality by imposing thoughts or opinions of my own, I’ve not just disagreed with you, I’ve committed a form of sacrilege. You might even be slightly aware that I’m the god of my own universe, but in the ancient mythologies of pagan religions, the gods were constantly fighting each other. There was no mutual respect. You might say those were just stories, but they say something about people. If people think they have absolute power, they will defend it to the death.

This arbitrary rule-making and rule-breaking does not just apply to sexual norms. I frequently argue with people my own age about the appropriate use of words. I once had a co-worker use a word in a way I did not understand; upon asking her what it meant, she told me that it did not matter, and refused to define the word. I get treated like a weirdo when I won’t laugh at “brain rot” that has no meaning and so contains no joke. Social media is replete with comments full of sentence fragments so garbled that no one can tell what the original poster was trying to say. Even some of our most prominent politicians struggle to communicate. What was Kamala trying to say about yellow school buses? I haven’t the foggiest. Why does Trump constantly swing back and forth on Iran like he can’t make up his mind on what to do? I’m not sure anyone can figure it out.

It’s disadvantageous to be unable to read, but being unable to speak is cataclysmic. I, personally, have very few thoughts that don’t involve words. Words are the fundamental unit of human thought. How are we supposed to think without words? Communication is necessary for thought. It’s a dialogue with yourself – or with God.

How does relativism figure into this? If a society can use relativism to disrupt its own social organization through transgenderism, it seems harmless by comparison to just upend a word here or there. It’s only one word, after all. But it’s not just one word anymore. A “Nazi” used to refer to a member of the National Socialist Party; now it’s anyone who smells like they might be conservative. Maybe people think it refers to a dictator, but I think even by “dictator” what is often meant is someone who enacts legislation they dislike. (It seems to me a fixture of American government that most of the legislation is disliked by at least some people. Was every presidency a dictatorship?) Meanwhile, a real socialist senator never gets the appellation of “Nazi”, and rightly so because he’s an independent. Stalin was a dictator but you couldn’t call him a Nazi. (If you don’t think he was a dictator, I dare you to read even a little bit of The Gulag Archipelago and try to still think that. Actually, if you read it you’ll know how laughable the application of “dictatorship” to our present situation is – and you might have nightmares.) What’s a racist? It used to refer to someone who believed that another race or races were fundamentally inferior to their own. What is a racist now? A white person. Even if a white person says he’s not racist, that makes him more racist. By the original definition, isn’t that racist? (But you’d be called a racist for saying that.)

Obfuscating and confusing words in this way was probably once a political decision, and it worked. But it mainly worked because the words had become vague symbols, arbitrarily defined, without meaning, able to be reshaped however you want. Not only can I get in trouble if I think these words have a fixed meaning – as in the case of “woman” – but it makes it impossible to communicate with others about “women”. We can’t even compromise on a middling definition of the word, because the other person’s definition of the word is absolute within their own universe. You can adopt any definition for any word that suits you, and other people have to accommodate your narcissistic vision. Heaven forbid you would have to learn and use the correct definition.

This has an unforeseen consequence: it guts the words of all meaning, and you don’t need the meaning to feel entitled to use them. You’re no longer obligated to learn what words mean. How should you use them? However you want! Grammar no longer matters, and sentence structure becomes confused. We all communicate via Shorts now, anyway; no one needs to read. (Thanks, China.) You’re well within your rights to use the word “skibidi-toilet”. What does “skibidi-toilet” mean? I don’t think it means anything, and that’s the problem. Plus, it sounds truly horrible. I think it was G.K. Chesterton who complained a century ago about scientists inventing words like “antibodies”. (I tried to find the original quote but I wasn’t able to.) I don’t think he could conceive of the state of English now.

All this synthesizes to make speech that is no longer intelligible, not to me, not to anyone else, not even to yourself. The young person barely understands what he says. If someone else makes a statement about it – “I agree” – he can react to that, because reacting is instinctual; even babies react. If I ask him about it, he is now required to think seriously, and he doesn’t understand his own words well enough to tell me about them. What’s worse, if thinking is a dialogue, he cannot understand his own thoughts well enough to have a useful dialogue even with himself. Legions of people have swallowed the lie that they can remake English however they like. The result is that people who were intelligent as children are now stark raving mad. They cannot think, and it’s difficult or impossible to get them to think. They are missing the tools that make thought possible, and so their own minds are in disorder. Words are also integrally connected to memory. How much of their lives will they actually remember when they look back in their 60s or 70s?