Paging Dr. Orwell

(Or, The Very Real Risks of Adopting Gender Newspeak)

In Orwell's 1984, the goal of Newspeak was to so control and restrict the language that any fact the leadership found ideologically troublesome “ …should be literally unthinkable.” Forget saying it. You would no longer have the vocabulary necessary for the idea to form in your mind.

I was reminded of Orwell’s passage about “literally unthinkable” facts (it’s in the book’s appendix) when reading an essay published by STAT and authored by a pediatrician named Candice Mazon:

“Recently, I prescribed estrogen to a young woman with primary ovarian insufficiency — a condition in which her body doesn’t make enough estrogen naturally. This hormone replacement is standard care, medically necessary, and entirely uncontroversial.

“Yet if I were to prescribe the identical medication to a transgender girl experiencing gender dysphoria, I could face felony charges in six states. The medication is the same. The careful medical evaluation is the same. But one is celebrated while the other is criminalized — with devastating consequences for the children whose futures hang in the balance.”

The Newspeak trick of calling a gender-confused boy a “girl” can change our thinking processes profoundly, yet many of us will barely notice. Thanks to the good(?)doctor’s rhetorical trick, the reader pictures, first, a young woman, next, a teen girl, and a medication that is unfairly denied to one of them.

Maybe Dr. Mazon is unaware that a new paper—a review of previously published research—shows that large, repeated doses of estrogen can increase a male’s risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune diseases, and dementia (that’s the short list) and can shorten his overall lifespan. The paper shows that, contrary to the claims that these drastic interventions are worth it because they prevent suicide, suicides actually increase among males on estrogen, most likely because the mental illnesses that underlie their gender confusion are never treated.

“Devastating consequences,” indeed, but if the reader is persuaded that the boy in the second paragraph is a “girl,” the dangers to males can be ignored.

Today, influential people everywhere are doing their best to persuade you that conversing in “Oldspeak” (i.e., using the plain English meaning of everyday words) is somehow evil, bigoted, rude, or ignorant.

Around the same time that Mazon was Newspeaking away the dangers of using chemicals to help boys mimic girls, journalist Matthew Yglesias was busily gushing on Substack about how much he admired Delaware Congressman Tim McBride’s approach to pushing the transgender agenda. Except, of course, that he called Tim “Sarah,” because Tim wears women’s clothing, make-up and hairstyles, and pretends to be a woman.

Yglesias agreed with McBride that, instead of shoving gender ideologues’ demands down everyone’s throat all at once, the trans lobby should ease the public into transferring all the rights previously reserved for women and girls to men. This, Yglesias called “true political leadership.”

The reason Yglesias’s piece caught my eye is that its preamble was quoted on X by another journalist, Ben Ryan. Here’s the quote:

Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that in accordance with our policy that comments must be civil and constructive, anyone who misgenders Congresswoman McBride or Chase Strangio will get an automatic 24-hour ban.

By “misgenders” Yglesias meant that their correct sexes must not be mentioned. That’s Oldspeak. Anyone who refused to refer to Mr. McBride or Ms. Strangio by their Newspeak pronouns and other Newspeak identifiers would be punished.

But we can still think and write and talk in Oldspeak. Men are men. Women are women. No one gets to choose his or her sex.

Don’t let them ease you or shove you into saying otherwise, because the goal is to eventually make the understanding of these facts “literally unthinkable.”

That a journalist would oblige his readers to either respond in Newspeak or be censored is astounding.

That a second journalist, one who actually writes about the dishonesty of people pushing experimental drugs and surgeries on kids, would applaud this censorship is beyond appalling. But this is what Ben Ryan tweeted in response to Yglesias’s demand for false sex identification:

“Bravo to @MattYglesias for forbidding misgendering, which is cruel and only reflects poorly on the character of the person calling Sarah McBride ‘he’.”

Reality can be cruel in many ways but this isn’t one of them.

Do not submit. Keep it real. Because a lot of what Orwell envisioned about punishing people for thought and speech crime in his novel, 1984, rhymes with what we’re beginning to see, not just in the USA but throughout the developed world.

My forthcoming book, Sacrificial Lambs: A Liberal Reporter Exposes How the Progressive Left Harms Children in the Name of Gender Ideology (Pitchstone Books, November 2025), is now available for pre-order on Amazon.