Med School Deans Fall Into Linguistic Ambush

WASHINGTON - July 15, 2026 - PRLog -- Asked whether only women can have a baby, deans of leading medical schools fell into a linguistic ambush, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who confesses to having used the tactic of linguistic misdirection himself.

But ironically Rep. Mary Miller, who asked the loaded questions, herself seems to have fallen for the same misleading terminology when she asked "Has a non-biological woman ever had a baby?"

But the term "biological woman," like the tern "biological man," is redundant - like "round circle" - since all men are biologically male, regardless of what is going on their minds or what feelings they may have. . . .

Abraham Lincoln exposed this fallacy - a linguistic trap cleverly designed to misdirect thinking - and Warren Buffett recently adopted it, with this simple example:
QUESTION: If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does it have?
ANSWER:  Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Trying to talk about non-biological women isn't just inadvertently redundant.  Rather, it misleads people into perceiving such a person as just a slightly different kind of women. . . .
It's similar to what cigarette manufacturers did when they tried to slow down the nonsmokers' rights movement's early campaigns to ban smoking in many public places. The tobacco industry coined and very cleverly promoted the phrase "environmental tobacco smoke"

This misleading nomenclature was cleverly contrived to subtly suggest that smoke particles in the air were just part of the natural environment like carbon monoxide - something we just have to expect and put up with.

Similarly, using phrases such as "sex assigned at birth" is dangerously misleading because it implies that sex reported at birth is somewhat arbitrary, and possibly subject to change later in life. . . . But the phrase, and the suggestion that sex is arbitrary and subject to change, is dangerously misleading.

For example, no one would ever ask a new mother what weight or eye color was "assigned" to her baby at birth.  Rather, birth certificates may typically note a baby's date of birth, sex, weight, eye color, etc. - not because these attributes are allocated or assigned, but rather as facts which can and are objectively observed at birth.

Accepted medical science has shown that, aside from a very tiny percentage of all births - . . .  - human babies are either male or female, and not male or female simply because someone made an arbitrary assignment at birth. . . .

Surely the medical school deans knew all this, but they nevertheless became flustered, and tried to duck answering what should be a simple question, says Banzhaf.

http://banzhaf.net/   jbanzhaf3ATgmail.com   @profbanzhaf