When we allow the other side to the set the terms of discussion, and police ourselves to conform to them, the battle is already lost.
WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 25: Rachel Levine, nominee for Assistant Secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, testifies at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee February 25, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. Levine previously served as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. (Photo by Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty Images)
"Richard Levine was born in 1957 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb 20 minutes north of Boston. He went to Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah...
While still in school, he married classmate Martha Peaslee; the couple would go on to have two children, one boy and one girl.
...To understand how the situation has developed at such a breakneck pace, we have to realize how rapidly and readily social conservatives have ceded ground to the progressive left.
...Even conservative writers, when addressing what was once a controversial subject, tend only to employ the preferred pronouns and new chosen names of the individuals in question.
Deadnaming, they know, is a grave and unforgivable sin. 
It would be practically unthinkable for any respectable journalist to use “he” or “him” when referring to Dr. Levine, to say nothing of the gendered birth name Richard.
This proscription results in bizarre constructions like “She has two children from his marriage to Martha,” and this from the Washington Post, which defies parody even as it stabs at something like humor: “The staid office where Rachel Levine works as the Keystone State’s top doctor is lined with family photos, including one perched high on a shelf that was taken on a vacation long ago, when her children were young and she was a broad-shouldered man named Richard.”
Words matter, and not just because it’s nearly impossible to win a fight in which every rule is set by your opponent...Read all.
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