I’m writing this having just recently read articles from several sources reporting the efforts of the current administration to flag for censors’ review words that have to do with DEI, gender fluidity, transgender people, gender-affirming care, and gender identity in material published from or grant applications from the CDC, NSF, and NIH. Here is a segment of the report posted by Inside Medicine:

The CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not merely its own internal periodicals, Inside Medicine has learned. The move aims to ensure that no “forbidden terms” appear in the work. . . . 

In the order, CDC researchers were instructed to remove references to or mentions of a list of forbidden terms: ’Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,’ according to an email sent to CDC employees . . . .

Even the term “pregnant person” rather than “pregnant woman” appears to be too much of a concession. The writer points out that censoring these terms affects not only articles specifically about transgender care but also articles in which gender is a factor in health outcomes or those in which gender categories are employed as meaningful demographic terms for purposes of data collection and analysis. 

The Inside Medicine article continues a bit further on, “What can and cannot go forward appears to require approval by a Trump political appointee, an explicit requirement for any public health communications under the Trump Administration’s gag order.” At this time, they point out, only one person representing that administration is in a position to oversee this censorship at the CDC. 

All of us who read the news have had some time by now to consider the effects and forms of censorship in school and public libraries. The language restrictions imposed on CDC research and reporting take the question of language censorship to a new level as well as constituting a more explicit violation of first amendment rights. The term “Orwellian” has appeared with increasing frequency in articles and public discussions over the past months as language itself has become a subject of political dispute, a litmus test, and a casualty of a propaganda machine that declares certain words harmful or harmless and assigns new shades of meaning to common terms—or new meaning altogether. 

This might be a good time to reread 1984, a book many in my generation read in high school English classes, but which in more recent years has become, like Moby-Dick or War and Peace, more often vaguely invoked as a culture marker than actually read. Let’s just review for a moment. One of the dystopian features of the totalitarian control exercised by “the Party” in 1984 is finely tuned language manipulation that includes 1) radically simplifying public discourse to limit nuanced or critical thinking; 2) eliminating words and whole categories of thought that might subvert government control; 3) using acronyms and abbreviations that obfuscate totalitarian initiatives; and 4) slogans that in effect both normalize and enforce gaslighting, the most memorable of which are the triad, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Just this week we learned that Trump has banned reporters from the Associated Press, which serves roughly 15,000 news outlets, from White House press briefings because they refused to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America after he declared the name change. The refusal was based on the fact that the Gulf of Mexico is international waters, and the American president has no singular right to rename it. In 1984 the resources devoted to control of language are comparable to those devoted to military and economic enterprises, underscoring Orwell’s point that whoever controls words controls thought and whoever controls thought has near total control of a population. 

One of these forms of control is deliberate confusion. Are self-contradictory proclamations we hear not infrequently deep paradoxes or bald-faced lies we might find ridiculous but for the weight of political authority behind them? 

I wonder, in a similar vein, whether we have paved the way for this kind of language (and mind) control by too readily accepting terms that are disseminated, often applied inaccurately, without sufficient critical inquiry. Just to cite one instance, I wonder if we’ve too quickly accepted the term “peacekeeping forces” without asking what kind of “peace” is being kept by military force, or how peace is being defined and by whom.

And I wonder, when flight attendants note the presence of military personnel on board and thank them for their service, how often we pause to ask ourselves whose purposes or agendas they’re currently being required to serve—or why we single out military commitment as service but not the dedicated and often sacrificial service of teachers and doctors and parents and those who clean our office buildings. 

Terms like “service” or “security” or “defense” or “protection” are mapped onto very different realities now than they were in the last war actually declared by Congress—World War II.  And even in that heavily documented and redacted war, history has shown us how many undeclared, dubious and costly tradeoffs those words masked. 

I think, too, about what happens when immigrants are indiscriminately called “illegals,” or when students speaking up for Palestinian rights are labeled “anti-Semitic” and on that basis threatened with deportation. I think about how the word “deportation,” unsettling as it is, masks the violence involved in sending working, tax-paying people to countries they’ve never lived in, sometimes without their children, with no resources, and, as of this week, to prisons in Guantanamo or El Salvador. The word becomes a thin cover for what looks suspiciously like ethnic cleansing.

Erasure or deliberate reconstruction of words matters. Linguistic erasure, as recent history has shown us, is a step toward social and legal erasure and the consequences unfold swiftly, especially when they end up as key words to be flagged, spun, obliterated, or punished on legal documents.  

In the appendix to 1984 Orwell provides a lengthy explanation of the forms of language control exercised by “the Party.” “So far as it could be contrived,” he writes, “everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into . . . familiar shape. . . .” 

What some regard as trendy or even offensive terms may be inconvenient, annoying or unsettling; they may seem like roadblocks to the easy, familiar flow of social discourse, but language often evolves this way. Coinages that come from the people groups most affected may expose biases or reflect stark injustices people need to name, sometimes in order to survive. Some terms may seem to threaten the social order. But banning them is a self-defeating strategy as well as a form of oppression more consequential than we may realize. Besides which, attempts to legislate language generally backfire.

People find ways to speak their truths. Words that tell lived truths are as fundamental to our shared health and wellbeing as daily bread. And a language that succumbs to legalism ceases, as George Steiner put it, “to grow and freshen,” or to be capable of precision or poetry or the power to heal.