“Gender Affirming Care” -- What would George Orwell Say?

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” – George Orwell

By Andrew Walden

The mass media is like a parasitic brain implant from science-fiction.  It fills any void ceded to it by the human host, by degrees suppressing the individual consciousness. 

On Friday, March 24, 2017, the Associated Press implanted the idea that males could become female and vice-versa.  Did you notice?  Do you remember that you once did not believe this?  These questions are real-world tests of the degree to which you are actually in control of your own mind.  

Today in Hawaii, HB1875, awaits Conference Committee assignments.  It purports to protect juvenile “Gender-Affirming Health Care Services” from “abusive litigation.”

Let’s talk about the real abuse—of your mind.

How and when did “gender affirming care” become the substitute term for “castration”, “double mastectomy”, or “hormone drugs?”

We asked Chat GPT:

• “When?”
• And “What would Orwell say?”

AI is part of the media.  So, it wasn’t easy.  But remember: John Henry did beat the machine.  With a sufficiently powerful consciousness, you can turn the tables and make the symbiote serve you. 

After chiseling away reams of ‘newspeak’, we finally got an unequivocal response to the first question.  Answers to the second question then flowed freely.  We carefully checked and corrected each quote:

Q:  Show me only the precise term "gender-affirming care." What is the earliest usage?

A:  The precise term "gender-affirming care" is a relatively modern linguistic shift. Its earliest appearances in formal academic and medical literature began in the early 2010s, gaining significant traction around 2016-2017 before becoming the standard institutional term by 2021. 

Earliest Documented Usages

• 2012: (WPATH Standards of Care 7): The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) moved toward "affirming" language in its 7th edition, using related terms like "gender affirmation" and "affirming" to describe the model of care.
• 2016: (First Peer-Reviewed Title): One of the earliest academic uses of the exact phrase in a study title appeared in July 2016 in the journal LGBT Health, titled "The Cost-Effectiveness of Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Individuals".
• 2017: (Clinical Guidelines): The Endocrine Society published its updated clinical practice guidelines in 2017, which began integrating "gender-affirming" as the primary descriptor for hormone treatments and surgeries. 
• 2021: By the time Arkansas passed its first-in-the-nation SAFE Act ban on Gender Affirming Care in 2021, the term had already been solidified in the professional manuals of almost every major U.S. medical association.

The akamai reader will notice that the floodgates opened only after humans were re-programmed by the Associated Press.

Q: What would George Orwell say about the emergence of this new term for castration?

A: To consider what George Orwell might say, one would look to his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, where he argued that political language is often designed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Orwell would likely analyze the term "gender-affirming care" through the lens of Newspeak or doublethink—concepts from his novel 1984.

1. Euphemism and Political Evasion

Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, criticized the use of "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness" to shield the reader from a mental image of reality.  He argued that when a politician or institution wants to name something without calling up a "mental picture" of the physical act, they use abstract phrasing.  From his perspective, replacing a specific biological descriptor like "castration" (a word with a visceral, ancient meaning) with a broad, clinical, and positive-sounding phrase like "affirming care" would be a classic example of language used to bypass the imagination--“every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”

2. The Narrowing of Thought

In 1984, the purpose of Newspeak was to narrow the range of thought by eliminating words or redefining them so that "a heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable.”  Orwell might argue that by framing the medical procedure as "affirmation," the language itself pre-emptively settles the moral and medical debate:

• To "affirm" is inherently viewed as a positive, supportive act.
• Therefore, to oppose the care is framed linguistically as "disaffirming" or "negating" a person's existence.

3. Orthodoxy and Ready-Made Phrases

Orwell despised "ready-made phrases" that "construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you."  He believed that a person using prefabricated political jargon, “has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.” 

“The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.”

Orwell would likely view the rapid, uniform adoption of the precise phrase "gender-affirming care" across medical, legal, and media institutions as an example of orthodoxy—where the language is adopted not for its precision, but as a signal of adherence to a specific ideology.

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