The He Devil's Dictionary: A Translator for the Nonsense Now Infiltrating Australian Courts & Parliament

By a veteran observer who is tired, not stupid - and who has no intention of vanishing into the Simpson Desert, however tempting.

Ambrose Bierce, that glorious old misanthrope, rode into Mexico in 1913 and was never seen again. Vanished. Swallowed by bandits, bullets, or the good sense to quit while he was ahead. Before he disappeared, he left us The Devil’s Dictionary, a masterpiece of puncturing pompous language with a sharpened bayonet. I have no intention of wandering off into the Sonoran Desert or anywhere near the Simpson, partly because I lack his nerve and partly because the modern world has already become the satire he was trying to write. What I do intend is a small contribution to the lexicon, offered here as The He Devil’s Dictionary. Call it the shortest lexicon of nonsense that made the law.

These are not words to adopt. They are words to recognise, to translate, and to avoid, before they finish what Anna Cody started when she assured the Australian Senate - on the public record, at Senate Estimates, into a live microphone, with a straight face of preternatural composure - that men can be potentially pregnant.

Let that settle. Then let it curdle.

We now have a national official, paid by you, assuring the country under parliamentary scrutiny that biological males may at any moment harbour a foetus. This is not comedy. This is not satire. This is the endpoint of a forty-year march of postmodernist language pollution, and it has finally crashed through the walls of Australian public law like a deranged bull in a china shop full of dictionaries. Senate Estimates, it transpires, is now the place where biological reality goes to be formally abolished at public expense.

A warning before we proceed: taking any of these terms seriously will severely damage your mental health and sanity. I say this as someone who once maintained an open mind. Now I keep an open mind on madness itself, because madness at least has the decency to admit it has lost its compass. What I keep closed is my patience for imposed ideological language that is now polluting our laws, our public discourse, and the basic biological literacy of the nation. You cannot reason with a person who believes a man is potentially pregnant. You can only translate their Newspeak, laugh to keep from screaming, and refuse to play.

Here is your translator.

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Affirmation - A therapeutic dictatorship in which any statement of biological fact is reclassified as hate speech, and any delusion, if repeated earnestly enough, becomes a human right. Translates to: “agree with me or I will destroy your career.”

Birth-giver - Postmodernist for “mum,” stripped of love, labour, and biology then autoclaved for use in a grievance seminar. Translates as: “I have deconstructed language to the point where I cannot name the person whose body built mine.”

Cisgender - A word created by German paedophiles to be slapped onto anyone by those who haven’t yet discovered the right grievance to monetise. Translates as: a normal person. Using it signifies that you bow down to the paedophile’s agenda because you accept their description of you and others. Otherwise, untranslatable outside of a failed art students’ poetry workshop.

Cuddling consent workshop - A compulsory university event where anxious sociology undergraduates learn to ask verbal permission before touching someone’s elbow, then go home and binge-watch reality television alone. Translates as: “institutionalised loneliness with worksheets.”

Deadnaming - The crime of using the name a person answered to for twenty years before they decided it was oppressive. Translates as: “history itself is harassment.”

Gender (in Australian law) - A floating signifier with no agreed definition, yet which carries criminal penalties for those who fail to guess it correctly. Legally indistinguishable from the word “nice” - everyone uses it, nobody can define it, and the whole edifice collapses if you ask for a second example. Translates as: “whatever a tribunal says it is, right before they fine you.”

Gender abolitionist - A creature who spends eighteen hours a day talking about gender, writing about gender, and rearranging society around gender, only to announce that their true goal is the end of gender. Translates as: “I have built a mountain of jargon so I can stand on top and declare mountains imaginary.”

Gender Fluid - See Non-binary.

Gender identity - The feeling that wanting a pony makes you a centaur. A mood dressed up as a metaphysics, then armoured against all external reality. Translates as: “a feeling, elevated to a fact, then armoured against every question.” Any bloke can have this, whether he, or you know it or not. Looking like a bloke means gender identity. The Federal Court of Appeal said so.

Lived experience - The definitive rebuttal to evidence, reason, or consistency. If a man feels he is a woman, his “lived experience” as a woman begins the moment he says so, and anyone who disagrees is committing epistemic violence. Translates to: “my feelings are your facts.”

Lived name - See Neopronouns, but for people who found their baptism certificate embarrassing. Translates as: “my current performance of self is more real than the parish register, because I say so.”

Misgendering - The crime of using a word (he, she, him, her) that existed for a thousand years before a sociology undergraduate decided it hurt his feelings. Translates as: “reality has been reclassified as rudeness.”

Neopronouns - A moral obstacle course designed by mediocre humanities graduates who missed out on the punk scene. Translates as: “I have no observable hardship, so I shall manufacture a grammatical one.”

Non-binary - A term used by boring mediocre heterosexuals who feel left out and desperately crave attention. Meaningless phrase, quite untranslatable. The closest one can get is the 1980s shortening of pseudo-intellectual - a “pseud.”

Privilege - A cosmic guilt ledger maintained by the perpetually outraged. Any advantage you have is proof of your villainy; any disadvantage they have is proof of your malice. Translates roughly to: “I lost the argument, so I will now accuse you of cheating.”

Pronouns - The grammatical equivalent of a demand that you rewrite English because a stranger had a dream last night. Once a humble servant of clarity (he went to the shop, she ate an apple), now a loyalty test disguised as linguistics. State yours in your email signature or be suspected of violence. Translates as: “I have no power, so I shall police your conjunctions.”

Queering - The process of taking a perfectly functional category (family, literature, science, lavatories) and dissolving it into a puddle of ambiguous gesture until no one can agree on what water is. Translates to: “I am too bored with reality to resist the urge to vandalise it.”

TERF - A slur deployed against any woman who notices that male puberty, male skeletal structure, and male pattern violence are not social constructs. Translates directly from postmodernist doublespeak: “woman who refuses to applaud her own abolition.”

Trans genocide - A statistical illusion in which any misfortune befalling a transvestite festish male (job loss, relationship breakdown, a rude tweet) is inflated to equal the historical extermination of Jews, Armenians, or Tutsis. Translates as: “the only genocide in history where the supposed victims outnumber the general population in terms of rights and the perpetrators apologise for misusing a pronoun.

Trans rights - The demand that everyone - including children, prisoners, and battered women - must accommodate a male sexual obsession, or else be destroyed socially, professionally, and if possible criminally. Translates as: “my freedom to fantasise is your duty to comply.”

Transgender - A man who has upgraded his fetish to a protected characteristic, or a woman who has agreed to obliterate herself for the sake of his comfort. Translates as: “a permanent performative contradiction held together by legal threats.”

Transmisogyny - A portmanteau that allows a bearded man in a dress to claim he suffers from a specific form of hatred aimed at women, without ever having lived as a woman. Translates as: “the ultimate postmodern power move: borrowing oppression from the very class you are erasing.”

Transphobia - Really just means aware of the public shame they should be feeling for their conduct.

Transman - A very confused tomboy. Negligible impact. Only really exists at all to provide a smokescreen for the male transvestites. The long-term impact of these women taking testosterone is a generic look: a balding, bearded Hobbit with Down’s syndrome.

Transwoman - A man who has a transvestite fetish that demands the unobstructed right to perform in public and has publicly to comply with every single one of his demands.

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So there it is. The glossary of a culture that has decided to un-define sex while simultaneously criminalising anyone who notices. Anna Cody says men can be potentially pregnant. The only honest response is to say: no, they cannot. And if saying that loses you your job, your reputation, or your standing before a tribunal, then the problem is not your biology. It is the tribunal.

Keep this list. Share it. Do not use the words. Recognise them for what they are: the crumbling signage of a very old madness that has briefly captured the asylum and found, to its considerable surprise, that the asylum is prepared to pay it a six-figure salary and put it on a Senate panel.

Bierce rode into Mexico and had the good grace to disappear. The ideology he would have eviscerated has done the opposite - it has installed itself in our institutions, our tribunals, our Senate hearing rooms, and our legislation, and it shows no signs of going quietly. My mind remains open to genuine mystery. It remains closed to men who want to be called pregnant. On that, I am as hard-hearted as a hammer and twice as final.