Doublethink reminds us that the transfiguration of words in public life is a bad thing. This week, a few judges in California made up a new definition for the word marriage. And all over America, people are redefining the words man and woman.

I feel an intense amount of pity for folks who consider themselves transgender, but wanting to be a member of the opposite sex doesn’t make you one, and no amount of cosmetic mutilation to your genitals will cause you to become one. Remember when there was all that hubbub a few weeks back about the “man” who was pregnant? Yeah, that wasn’t a man. She was a woman-one who has taken hormone therapy and had radical surgery to look more like a man, but a woman nonetheless. I’m something of a pedant when it comes to words-they have definitions for a reason.

Definition is a powerful rhetorical concept, and it was one of Adam’s first jobs, to name the animals, which is to say, to define them. Definition is everybody’s job, and getting the definition as close as possible to reality.

The Times Sunday magazine has a tremendous story, both tragic and comic, on transmales, or girls who call themselves boys.  The story focuses on Rey, who had the wicked problem of being a girl, who wanted to be a boy, but who also happened to attend Barnard College, a school for girls.  I call the story tragic because, well, it is.  And I call it comic because, well, the gods must be crazy in a world like this.  Rey’s problems began in the dorm.

In the first week of September, he found out that his roommates had complained to the college’s freshman housing director about being asked to share their rooms with a man. They wanted Rey to find somewhere else to live. According to Dorothy Denburg, the dean who spoke to Rey about the situation, these young women were disturbed when Rey told them on the first day “that he was a transboy and wanted to be referred to by male pronouns.” Rey’s roommates had, after all, chosen to attend a women’s college in order to live and be educated in the company of other women.

But Rey is a conservative next to Jordan Akerley, who rejects the use of pronouns.

“I find pronouns cumbersome and self-limiting,” Akerley told me, which is why friends use the name Jordan, a name that Akerley says she intends to make official this year.

Facts have a way of being cumbersome, I suppose.

Read this ginormous Times magazine piece about single-sex education and how it’s gaining popularity in American public education.  There are a lot of enemies to single sex education, the principle of which is the ACLU, and just about anyone else who sees gender seperation as some kind of discrimination, some kind of admission that the public schools don’t work, some kind of something.  The beastly article, which has a lot of good anecdotal information, ends with this common, tired argument against single-sex education.

Given the myriad ways in which our schools are failing, it may be hard to remember that public schools were intended not only to instruct children in reading and math but also to teach them commonality, tolerance and what it means to be American. “When you segregate, by any means, you lose some of that,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there’s also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy.”

Well, at least public school champions are finally admitting in public that schools teach philosophy and worldview, not only in their curricula, but also in their design and mission.  Nevertheless, let’s make sure to keep the kids mixed and keep ignoring solutions to the failing system.  Our kids might be stupid, but at least they’ll be tolerant of their own ignorance.

This book reviewer calls Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love the most popular travel writing of the last two years, and the most “self-absorbed, culturally oblivious and vaguely sexist” one, too.  It’s the Lifetime Network meets the Food Network meets Methamphetamines.  He calls is adventure porn for women:

Around the middle of the 20th century, pulpy American men’s magazines published what has come to be known as “adventure porn” - breathlessly told tales that involved hairy-chested men fighting crocodiles, exploring rivers and surviving diseases in far-off lands.

This newer book, he says, is the same thing for women, although not so well-done, and not so literary.  The reviewer recasts the plot as if told by a man, and you get his point.

Women have it hard.  Men have it hard, too, but in very different ways and in so many different respects.  So, this post is not a slight to men, to virility, to masculinity, or to general American manliness.  (The American ideal of what it means to be a man is as screwed up as the American ideal of what it means to be a woman.)  Nevertheless, with a woman very close to being nominated to run for president, the issue of women and power and leadership is the subject of this Nicholas Kristof column.  It’s kind of passe to talk about women and leadership.  We’re supposed to be over it, to be on board with the idea that a woman can be president, boss, CEO, etc.  And so there’s been less talk of this in Hillary’s campaign.  But Kristof says that doesn’t mean it’s not a big issue.  He makes a good point.  He says that female leaders in a monarchy have it much easier than female leaders in a democracy:

In monarchies, women who rose to the top dealt mostly with a narrow elite, so they could prove themselves and get on with governing. But in democracies in the television age, female leaders also have to navigate public prejudices - and these make democratic politics far more challenging for a woman than for a man.

I might change “prejudices,” which plays to some prejudice of the ignorant populi, to something more like “expectations.”  But I’d agree with the rest of this.