These are heady times for fans of dystopian future literature. They no longer have to read about their favorite subject-we are all living it now. When the leftists aren’t trying to ruin Halloween with talk of cultural appropriation (an absurd notion in a society that prizes its melting pot status), they’re busy telling us what we can and cannot say.

Even (especially?) people in positions of great power get taken to task by the Word, Thought, and Deed Police.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May is currently under fire for describing female humans who have babies gestating inside of them as “pregnant women.”

The horror!

Thankfully, the Prime Minister is sticking to her superior sense of reality.

From The Telegraph:

Theresa May believes using the term “pregnant women” is perfectly “acceptable” after reports the Government requested it not be used by the United Nations because it excludes transgender people. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has confirmed that it made a request to the UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) not to exclude transgender people from an important treaty. But a Downing Street spokesman has moved to downplay the significance of the request and said: “Of course pregnant women is an acceptable term.”

Oh, I forgot to mention that the complaints were coming from a government agency and not some random crackpot progressives who like to wander the streets un-bathed and complaining.

Not to worry, they have a solution:

According to the Sunday Times the FCO’s submission on proposed amendments to the covenant suggested the term be replaced with “pregnant people” in order to include transgender people who have given birth.

We have now arrived at the three-way intersection of semantics, feelings and reality.

One can hold whatever views one wants on transgender people but that doesn’t change the fact that “people” don’t get pregnant. Women do. Someone who identifies as a man but gets pregnant is doing it with decidedly female anatomical apparatus. Taking umbrage with someone for calling a pregnant woman a pregnant woman is as nonsensical as being offended by someone who says mature giraffes have long necks.

One of the more insidious aspects of the left’s creeping hold on free societies is the arbitrary assignment of which speech is and is not acceptable. The goal, of course, is to ultimately control the way a given population thinks about something by controlling the way people talk about it.

The progressive left has been doing this in a more passive way for decades. Abortion is “choice,” taxes are “revenue,” and so on.

Now, they are becoming bolder. We’re whooshing down the slippery slope that was created when labeling something “hate speech” started giving people and institutions to punish (again, arbitrarily) others for using words deemed unacceptable.

In the hands of progressives, hate speech is any speech with which they don’t agree. It was bad enough when it was mostly academics forcing this upon students who couldn’t defend themselves. With the left, however, no concession is good enough. They always want more. That brings to the point where they now want to legally punish people for not engaging in approved group speak.

So these semantics arguments that seem innocuous at first are actually quite important.

A pregnant woman is a woman.

A pregnant man is science fiction.