What Justifies Dramatic Changes in Language?

Claire Lehman (Founding Editor of Quillette) is asking a perfectly honed question here:


Screen Shot 2020 10 24 at 12.25.01 AM

Here’s an analogy that I’ve often used in conversation: Let’s start with some numbers: “In the United States, there are 41,000 registered persons who had an amputation of hand or complete arm.”  Since there are about 328M people in the U.S., this means that 1 out of 10,000 Americans has only one arm.  Does that mean that when I’m presenting to a group that I would  be  bigoted and insensitive if I ever said, “Raise your hand if you have a question or comment”?  Does the fact that only .01% of the population lacks an arm (and that 9999/10,0000 have two hands) mean that I need to change my language? Can the rare people who lack an arm really not figure out that I’m not making fun of them or insulting them in such a situation? Who is being unreasonable?

I’ll conclude . . . what are those numbers for carefully diagnosed gender dysphoria (versus self-reports by high schoolers)?

Gender dysphoria occurs in one in 30,000 male-assigned births and one in 100,000 female-assigned births.[46] Estimated rates of those with a transgender identity range from a lower bound of 1:2000 (or about 0.05%) in the Netherlands and Belgium[47] to 0.5% of Massachusetts adults.[48] From a national survey of high-school students in New Zealand, 8,500 randomly selected secondary school students from 91 randomly selected high schools found 1.2% of students responded “yes” to the question “Do you think you are transgender?.”

Share

Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

Leave a Reply