Was there a memo? Did I miss it? When did “sexual” get chopped off “trans” and replaced by “gender”?

Seriously. When was the last time you heard “transsexual” instead of “transgender”? I can’t remember. Seems like a long, long time. Not since Klinger on M*A*S*H, not since Ru Paul, but definitely before preferred pronouns became a thing.

When I was in college in the 1980s, there were crossdressers and there transsexuals, and it was a matter of cultural literacy to understand which were which; as I recall, the most important distinction was one just loved silk and the other cut his junk off.

Crude, but that was basically how we all understood it. And none of us would even dream of being rude to anyone in either camp. We’d simply be polite to their campy selves and move on, because that’s how we were raised. If we were judging them, we did it silently. So yes, “I’m judging you silently” was a thing once, a good thing, especially when compared to the un-housebroken savages you see currently hurling spittle and screaming on college campuses, in my humble opinion.

But this is just what progressives do. It’s why we transitioned through global cooling, global warming, climate disruption, to climate change. They change the names of things. When ACORN, the activist group, became too toxic, they didn’t cease operations, they just changed their name. So is that what happened here? Did the left change the name to suit their purposes? They’ve done away with “sexual” and replaced it with “gender” as surely as they separated and segregated the two terms: “‘sex’ is different from ‘gender’” we are told. This is how they explain it. Biology determines “sex.” “Gender” is something we “identify.” Okay. Alrighty then!

Well, I identify as someone who knows there are only two sexes, and can objectively identify both, and my pronouns are “I won’t endorse this nonsense.” (Since words have no meaning anymore, “pronouns” can be any string of words.)

I’ll be polite, as I was in college. But if you want anything more out of me, you won’t get it, because I will not  encourage and affirm mental illness.

Image: Matt Riggott, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.