Here’s a cool word for you: Neologism. Its component parts are from the Greek word for “new” (neo) and “word” (logos). In other words, it’s a brand-new word in a language. At one time, of course, every word had its day as a neologism, but we tend to think of them as words created to respond to new inventions.

My favorite neologism is the “acoustic” guitar. It used to be that there were simply guitars. However, when electric guitars came along, the wordsmiths decided it wasn’t simply enough to have guitars and electric guitars. The non-electric versions needed their own name, so acoustic guitars were born.

The thing about both electric and acoustic guitars is that they really exist. Things get hairy when you’re trying to integrate reality and fantasy to pretend that both are real. That’s what’s been happening with the so-called “transgender” movement.

Image AI and an X screen grab.

The “transgender” activists have taken something that’s either a mental illness (that’s when it’s pathetic), a hormonal imbalance (which I suspect occurs when pregnant women still have the Pill circulating in their bodies), or a sexual perversion (when it’s disgusting or criminal) and argued, instead, that it's a biological reality—that is, there really are people who are born in the wrong body when it comes to their sex.

In fact, as I’ve been documenting for several years, there’s not a scintilla of evidence backing up the idea that human sexual biology is anything but binary. When a person’s sex is not binary, as with the very rare condition known as “intersex,” that’s a birth defect, not a new or mixed-up “gender.”

Trying to get a fix on the amorphous nature of fantasy has led to some interesting linguistic feats. Because of the hundreds of “genders” and orientations that activists have thought up, we no longer have men and women, which is the biological norm and needs no further introduction. Instead, we have a neologism: Cisgender.

What does cisgender purportedly mean? Per Oxford Languages, the online version of the venerable and once sane Oxford England Dictionary (and the dictionary on which Google relies), “cisgender” is defined as “denoting or relating to a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex registered for them at birth; not transgender.”

This neologism means that so-called transgenderism and all the other 64 billion “genders” are no longer deviant, non-biological identities. They are on a cultural, moral, and biological par with “cisgender.”

Needless to say, leftists have embraced this nonsense. Thus, in a New York Times article about using a single dose of an antibiotic after sex to reduce syphilis and chlamydia cases, we find this nonsense:

The evidence so far supports the case for doxycycline use only in gay and bisexual men and transgender women. Previous studies have shown that a single dose of doxycycline taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex substantially cuts the risk of S.T.I.s in these groups.

“The majority of S.T.I.s in the United States occur in cisgender women,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the National Center for H.I.V., Viral Hepatitis, S.T.D. and TB Prevention at the C.D.C.

“Studies of whether doxy-PEP works in cisgender women should be implemented as quickly as possible,” he said. (Emphasis mine.)

“Cisgender women” show up in the essay three more times, so it’s not just the CDC embracing the pretense that mentally ill, hormonally imbalanced, or perverted men can announce that they are women and relegate real women to a neologism. The Times is right there with the CDC. (Interestingly, the article also never mentions that abuse of antibiotics can render them ineffective when really bad diseases come along, nor does it counsel abstinence or safe sex.)

It turns out, though, that when women refuse to accept that they’re being neologized (a neologism of mine!) right out of existence as one of the two biological sexes, the New York Times must bring out bigger guns than “cisgender.” That’s how we get to the Times’s report about a brave handful of women on the San Jose State University volleyball team who didn’t want a man in the locker room. Along with members of teams that play against San Jose State, they sued.

So far, and typically, a California judge has sided with the fake woman. This will undoubtedly go on for a while.

However, I don’t want to talk about the facts of the case. I want to talk about the New York Times’s continued degradation of language and reality. It turns out that when the “transgender” rubber hits the reality road, the term “cisgender” is no longer good enough. That’s how we get this:

On its website, the N.C.A.A. says trans volleyball players are eligible to play if their testosterone level is less than 10 nanomoles per liter — that’s at least four times more than what many experts say is the top of the range for non-transgender women, and in the typical range for adult men. (Emphasis mine.)

The phrasing is subtle, but it’s gone beyond the pretend “parity” of “transgender” and “cisgender.” Now, “transgender women” (i.e., mentally ill, hormonally imbalanced, or perverted men) are the standard against which everything must be judged. This is a 180-degree inversion of reality.

Expect to see more of this doubling-down on sexual fantasies in the coming months. You might find that counterintuitive, given that it’s pretty clear that part of why Trump won is because Americans hate the whole “transgender” madness. They know that there are only two sexes and they especially want their kids protected from the crazy.

However, the political left has invested itself in the fantasy for over a decade, while it’s been inculcating this madness in young people for much longer than that through academia. This is their reality, fake though it may be.

People don’t suddenly abandon their beliefs because of an election. Instead, they double down to validate their prior positions. Or, as W.S. Gilbert might have said, they work even harder “to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”