One of the few pleasures of our post-sexual revolution age is watching progressives struggle to keep up with the runaway train that they themselves have launched down the tracks and towards the cliffs. As a prime example, Congress’s perkiest Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on CNN recently to complain to Anderson Cooper about the Texas Heartbeat Act—and promptly forgot that men can get pregnant, too.
She started by claiming that the Heartbeat Act “is about controlling women’s bodies,” and then hastily added “and controlling people who are not cisgender men.” For those not keeping up with suddenly popular terms that keep getting chucked at us, “cisgender” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.” There’s a word for us now too, you see. AOC, however, apparently forgot the word “transgender,” which is understandable considering how fast things are moving along.
At this point, alarm bells were surely clanging loudly inside AOC’s skull as she realized that her wokeness social credit score was plummeting and her internalized transphobia was gushing out of her mouth and getting everywhere on live TV. Anderson Cooper frowned inscrutably at her. AOC hastened on, this time personalizing the tragedy of the new pro-life law by stating it was really “is about making sure that someone like me, as a woman…”
Ding ding ding! She’d done it again! For AOC, you see, is a cisgender woman—precisely the sort of person she was trying not to refer to with any specificity. Her eyes widened, and she plunged into a correction: “…or any menstruating person in this country, cannot make decisions over their own body.” Nailed it. For the rest of the interview, she switched to talking about “persons” or “people” rather than “women.” (If only she’d known that Justin Trudeau invented the perfect term for her: “Peoplekind.”)
