Recently, the American Psychiatric Association announced upcoming changes to its guidebook for mental disorders, known as the DSM. Someone with "gender dysphoria," for example, will not longer be called a "natal male" or "natal female" but rather an "individual assigned male/female at birth." The new language implies that biological sex is "assigned" by doctors and nurses rather than a biological reality, a view favored by far-Left activists and intellectuals but far from mainstream in the general public. And in redefining men and women in this way, the American Psychiatric Association is signaling allegiance to one side of an ongoing culture war.
And yet, the American Psychiatric Association is not the only scientific institution that has done so. The America Psychiatric Association is part of a trend of science organizations "going woke," siding with Leftist elites on controversial topics over race and gender.
Much of this is done through language policing; the American Psychological Association has started to discourage the use of words like "elderly," "senior," "birth sex," "born male/female," "pipeline," "spirit animal," or "violent" language like "killing it" or "take a stab at it." Endorsing racial "color blindness" is also out. The American Medical Association begins its language guidelines with a performative land acknowledgement (though no actual plan to give land back to Native American tribes), and forbidden words include "Caucasian," "disparities," "equality," "illegal immigrant," "sex," "slave," and "blacklist." "Low-income people" should be referred to as "people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers, gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements."
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