Word police: A new sheriff in town

     "It is also important to recognize that transgender men and people with masculine gender identities, intersex and non-binary persons may also menstruate.”

          Third sentence in a grant request to the USDA

A news item is circulating around the web. The new U.S. Department of Agriculture Brooke Rollins revoked a grant for $600,000 made to Southern University in Louisiana. The university requested money to study whether the inclusion of synthetic fibers in tampons was a vector for more infections compared with all-cotton tampons.

What is going on here?

This isn't a report on an unnecessary, money-wasting question, but that is how it is being seen in first-glance reporting: tampons for trans people? Ridiculous! 

If, in fact, tampon manufacturers are replacing cotton with something else, and if those substitutes allow infectious growth of dangerous microbes that cotton does not, then it would be useful for the women of America to know about it sooner rather than later, after hundreds or thousands of women have died. We remember the "toxic shock syndrome" problem from a Proctor and Gamble Rely-brand tampon in the late 1970s. Tampons can be a disease vector.

But what this is really about is papering a grant request with key words that might cause it to rise to the top in a competition for funding. The sentence in the original request shows what the grant writer thought the Biden administration people wanted to see. They wanted to show compliance to Democratic orthodoxy on the trans issue. The grant-writer wanted to show they didn't think this was a women's problem. It is a person who menstruates problem. The grant writer is waving the compliance-to-orthodoxy flag. 

The sentence says that possible tampon use by trans men is "important to note." It isn't. It is irrelevant to note. The trans issue was placed so that the grant request would touch an additional benefit-nugget. It was a key word to include in the grant request. Other ones might be "green," "sustainable," "carbon-neutral," "intersectional," or "vegan." Very likely, the first review of the proposal used a computer word-search program, one which looked for and gave higher ratings to grants that had those words. The grant writer wanted that word flagged.

DOGE is doing the same thing, but reversing the polarity of those word-nuggets. Those former good words are now on the forbidden-word list. The grant is hoist on its own petard. The study now fails the orthodoxy test. If it mentions transsexuality, it is out. Grant writers and corporate communicators are scrambling. Words about green energy or diversity are scrubbed out and replaced with words like patriotic, anti-woke, first-responder, and native-born.

A grant request that began as this one did shows how thorough was the pressure to show ideological compliance. A backlash was inevitable, and we are getting it. 

Trump operates with a broad brush. For a while I expect this scrubbing to be a net positive for him politically. But he tends to carelessness and excess. Elon Musk's chainsaw is a good metaphor of that. I expect overreach, and a new, secondary backlash to emerge against Trump-style thought and word control. This may take time.. Americans have a commitment to free speech, but in practical terms it means they want people to have the freedom to speak freely saying things they agree with.

Trump will be stopped when he does things that are unpopular with his MAGA base. That is beginning.

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