Corrupting ‘gender’ language has a history, as I found while pursuing an amusing academic detour.

One of my first articles as a part-time staff writer for National Review was a short essay about the (surprisingly enjoyable) process of writing two theses for my undergraduate degree. Now, I’m excited to say that I’ve submitted my master’s linguistics thesis on “gender-inclusive language.” Woohoo! As I finish up other work toward my degree, I wanted to share a brief National Review–related anecdote from the course of researching my master’s thesis.

When working on my chapter about the linguistic and philosophical precursors to what we now call “gender-inclusive language,” I read the 1995 article “Womyn: The Evidence,” by linguist Sol Steinmetz, which catalogues examples of the deliberate spelling variation appearing in print. Although a decent chunk of the sources are from feminist publications, “womyn” was also found in the pages of familiar papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. One reference that Steinmetz provides, however, caught my eye: 

Another feminist operating technique is the avoidance of the words “man” and “his.” Thus, women become “wimmin,” “womyn,” and, most frequently, “womben.” [“Shanties, Shakespeare, and Sex Kits: Confessions of a Dartmouth Review Editor,” the Heritage Foundation Policy Review, Fall 1989]

First of all, “Shanties, Shakespeare, and Sex Kits: Confessions of a Dartmouth Review Editor” is a fantastic title for an article. But on a more serious note, I found it interesting that, decades ago, a conservative college student apparently also wrote about progressives on campus who corrupt language. (I guess I’m not exactly original!) I decided to look for the article, but Steinmetz had not named the author, so I started googling.

I then came across the 1992 law review article “Political Correctness on College Campuses: Freedom of Speech v. Doing the Politically Correct Thing,” which has a very long footnote that attributes the “Shanties, Shakespeare, and Sex Kits” article to “Harmeet D. Singh.” 

That name sounded familiar. I wondered, how many conservatives named “Harmeet” could there be? So I looked up Harmeet Dhillon, who is the current assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. In the “Education” subsection of her Wikipedia page, it says that she attended Dartmouth College and eventually served as the editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review. So there was strong circumstantial evidence that Harmeet Dhillon had written the article; but I wanted to confirm this, and I still wanted to read the article itself. 

Eventually, I found an online PDF of the relevant issue of the Heritage Foundation Policy Review and confirmed that the author is indeed the same Harmeet. Her article is rather entertaining, as she summarizes some campus controversies and the Dartmouth Review’s deliberately provocative stories. The portion on “womyn” and feminism that I was particularly eager to read contains the following anecdote: 

When feminists began to demand funding for a Women’s Resource Center, the illustration accompanying the Review’s story was an engraving of a sinister-looking castle with a ring of bats hovering over it, and the caption “Welcome to the Wombat Zone” — a play on the feminists’ self-designated title of “womben.” Two years later, even after the feminists established a small-budget center on the edge of campus, most of the student body refers to them as “wombats.” The Review’s ridicule of feminist tactics has led to their effective political neutralization on the campus.

The Dartmouth Review’s antics — like holding “a formal lobster-and-champagne dinner for themselves on the day of a student fast on behalf of world hunger” — were so notorious that the publication and some of its student affiliates were written up at length in the New York Times. The article, “At Dartmouth: The Clash of ’89,” mentions Harmeet as the Dartmouth Review’s editor and says of the student-run publication: 

The college is determined to be progressive; the student agitators are determined to keep it as it is. These students not only trust a lot of people over 30, they aspire to work for them, to become them. Their goal is a job on The National Review or The Wall Street Journal. Patrick Buchanan, George Gilder, R. Emmett Tyrrell and other notable conservatives are on The Dartmouth Review’s advisory board. The masthead includes a box: ”Special Thanks to William F. Buckley, Jr.”

So, a current National Review staff member who is a conservative college student writing a thesis criticizing “gender-inclusive language” accidentally discovered a decades-old article criticizing feminist language on campus by a conservative college student — and that student was the editor of a paper that thanks National Review’s founder. 

Lengthy research projects can lead you down paths you didn’t know existed, and on those little intellectual detours, you might learn something interesting even if it isn’t the type of data or argument that ends up in your final draft. What I gleaned from Harmeet’s article was that the campus climate today harks back to that of decades ago. Sure, campuses weren’t always as crazy as they are today, but it has certainly been a long time since they were remotely politically neutral.