If you want to control people’s thoughts, begin by commandeering their words. Taking this Orwellian lesson to heart, Virginia’s Fairfax County public school system recently stripped the phrase “biological gender” from its family life curriculum, replacing it with “sex assigned at birth.”

Without permitting parents to opt out, public schools across the country are teaching children that “gender” is neither binary nor biological. It’s closer to a mental state: a question of how girllike or boylike you feel. Students will fall anywhere along a gender spectrum, according to these educators.

So how girllike does any girl feel? The answer might reasonably be expected to vary throughout adolescence, depending on whether a girl was just dumped by a boy or tripped in the hall. Mishaps that once only compromised one’s pride now threaten a child’s gender identity, the ever-evolving claim to a “girl card.” As if adolescence weren’t already hard enough.

This is the left’s allegedly defensive battle, waged on behalf of an aggrieved microminority even as it sets its sights on broader ideological territory. Consider recent state and local actions punishing those who decline to use an individual’s pronouns of choice. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation last year threatening jail time for health-care professionals who “willfully and repeatedly” refuse to use a patient’s preferred pronouns. Under guidelines issued in 2015 by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, employers, landlords and business owners who intentionally use the wrong pronoun with transgender workers and tenants face potential fines of as much as $250,000.

Typically, in America, when groups disagree, we leave them to employ the vocabularies that reflect their values. My “affirmative action” is your “racial preferences.” One person’s “fetus” is another’s “baby boy.” This is as it should be; an entire worldview is packed into the word “fetus.” Another is contained in the reference to one person as “them” or “they.” For those with a religious conviction that sex is both biological and binary, God’s purposeful creation, denial of this involves sacrilege no less than bowing to idols in the town square. When the state compels such denial among religious people, it clobbers the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, lending government power to a contemporary variant on forced conversion.