According to The Daily Mail, the Biden administration’s health secretary recently endorsed a gender clinic in Alaska. The secretary is a man who identifies as a woman. The clinic advocates for replacing the term “mother” with “egg producer.”  

Somehow “Happy Egg Producer Day!” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Mother’s Day.” As a colleague of mine noted when she heard the story, “That really is The Handmaid’s Tale.”  

Language matters. Especially from people who occupy positions of cultural power, from the media who call this man a “she,” to politicians who claim he is a powerful woman, to a clinic obscuring reality. When they detach from reality, incoherent and dangerous ideas like this are the result. 

Reality, however, has hard edges, and neither our bad ideas nor our bad language can change that. The farther afield from reason and science our cultural elites wander, the more revolutionary it will be to say what is true.