The OPP’s decision to stop telling us the gender of victims and criminals, whether male or female, is an absurd decision in an absurd era. Once charges are laid, they’ll disclose names, ages, city or hometown and court date, but that’s it.

The Ontario Provincial Police, whose jurisdiction covers 2.3 million people across the province, wants to be seen as modern, so it presumably doesn’t want to risk misgendering someone, although apparently no one had complained it had done so, even in this era of transgender issues.

This is part of a strange trend, the erasure of women, and in this case the harm done to them by violent men.

The OPP shares the general tendency of all Canadian police forces to hold back as much information as possible from the media and the public. This latest move keeps data from the public in an era where data is the story.

OPP Staff Sgt. Carolle Dionne suggested that, in these changing times, it would be wrong to look at someone, misgender them — mistake a woman for a man or a man for a woman — and send out that information, although accurate information on the gender of both accused and victim would be recorded and kept as usual.

They just wouldn’t tell us.

I say it might just bring up other problems with criminals named Lee and Pat, who share a name with law-abiding citizens of another gender. But it would be rare, just as rare as women attacking, beating and raping a large number of men, or so the OPP would imply if it followed this ludicrous policy.

Violent crime is overwhelmingly male and why pretend otherwise? Secrecy harms women. Alberta police tried this before, refusing to provide the names of women murdered by their partners to protect “family privacy.” Some police departments rebelled.

As Myrna Dawson of the Canadian Femicide Observatory told the Globe and Mail, “The bottom line is, if they go this route, there is no way to track men’s violence against women and there’s no way to track transphobic violence.” In this way, the torment and slaughter of women is hidden. In this way, the degradation of language proceeds, as does the backlash against feminism.

It’s a trend. The decision to change specific references to sexual violence — rape, fondling, groping, digital penetration — to the umbrella term of “sexual assault” was partly a feminist effort at ending stigma that ultimately lessened the view of sex attacks as serious crimes. “Sexual assault” is a dry term, as is “gender.”

Take “intimate partner violence” instead of “wife-beating.” It’s more inclusive but it’s jargon, just like the OPP referring to “the individual,” “the accused,” “the suspect” and “person of interest.”

Take “first responder.” Its use came to prominence in the aftermath of 9/11 as media despaired of differentiating among the mass of people who helped that day: firefighters, police, doctors, ambulances, nurses, engineers, FBI, sniffer dogs, coroners, photographers and media.

Now everyone is a first responder and everyone is on the “front lines.” As a measure of psychological suffering, it is a blunt instrument, a poor phrase.

Women are now hit with the latest. Gender is a construct, we are repeatedly told. Which it is, but which obscures the fact that sex is not. Male and female bodies are different. I have long thought that the primary reason for the degradation of women throughout history is that men are overwhelmingly physically stronger. Pretending this is not true does not help us.

“Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men,” a stunning new book by British journalist Caroline Criado Perez, reveals that almost every kind of data refers to men.

Almost everything is designed for men, including airplane seats, heart attack treatments, uniforms, office wear, medical instruments, pianos, keyboards, boardrooms and statistics. That treats a female as an ignorable form of male. The OPP decision makes it worse.

Men are the default. Women are the outliers, the freaks. If anyone happens to be offended by language, it is always women who must give way and consent to being erased.

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Fine, the OPP is gender neutral. Crime is not.

There are many other issues that flow from the craze for gender neutrality, but many seem relatively anodyne compared to the blood, broken teeth and cracked bones of a woman beaten by a man twice her size and strength.

Women design their days and nights around news stories about sexual violence. We live carefully based on the information we have. May we continue to do that?