Have you come across the word ‘transabled’? This is a new one on me, and I find it a frightening term, expressing a depressing idea. ‘Transabled’ people are like ‘transgender’ people – they don’t like the body they’ve been born in. A person who calls themselves ‘transabled’ was born with a normal, healthy, fit body but wishes they had a disability. Some are now saying they choose to be disabled and live their lives hooked to a machine. The impairment a ‘transabled’ person wishes to have can take the form of anything from paralysis to amputation. According to one website: ‘Hundreds of thousands of able-bodied people around the world look upon the physically disabled and covet their lives. From a young age they see people in wheelchairs, leg braces, or without limbs and wish that they, too, could live disabled.’

The same website tells the story of one woman who likes to get around in a wheelchair or using crutches, spending most of her time wearing leg braces and not using the bottom half of her body. She has found a doctor willing to cut her sciatic and femoral nerves to disable her legs, and she’s saving up for the $25,000 surgery. This is stuff I really didn’t want to know about. But this is where the ‘transgender’ nonsense has got us. You will remember those transgender activists who claimed they were ‘born in the wrong body.’ Making bodies fit in with disturbed minds is now giving us able-bodied people who want surgery to make them disabled. This insanity has got to stop. We need to banish such damaging and dishonest words as ‘transabled’ and ‘transgender’. These are dangerous words and they are hurting people.

Speaking to Peta Credlin on Sky News I used the word ‘problematic’ – and almost immediately a Speccie reader, Tony, picked me up on it. Our esteemed editor also loathes ‘problematic’. So, what is the problem with ‘problematic’? It has a respectable history. It’s recorded in English in 1609. Behind it is a French word problématique, and behind that is the post-classical Latin word problematicus. The earliest definition the Oxford English Dictionary gives it is ‘presenting a problem’. But it has more recently become a fad word to show moral disapproval. In the United States, the Atlantic magazine also dislikes ‘problematic’ where Teresa M. Bejan writes: ‘Academics like me love to describe things as problematic. But what do we mean? We’re not saying that the thing in question is unsolvable or even difficult. We’re saying – or implying – that it is objectionable in some way, that it rests uneasily with our prior moral or political commitments…. In principle, every usage of the term problematic should be followed by an explanation. Is the situation or person in question unjust, immoral or unfair? Racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted? Wrongheaded, perhaps, or just plain wrong? All too often, the explanation never comes.’

She also says we owe the current popularity of ‘problematic’ to French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, adding: ‘Althusser… strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, to death in 1980. The fact that many who embrace his terminology today would now reflexively describe Althusser himself as ‘problematic’  – instead of ‘misogynistic’ or ‘violent’  – illustrates how successfully the word has slipped the bonds of social theory to become an all-purpose term… of opprobrium.’ The Merriam-Webster Unabridged suggests that ‘problematic’ could be treated as a synonym for ‘dubious’. And that, perhaps, tells us why we no longer need the word – if something (or some area we are discussing) is doubtful, why not just say ‘dubious’ instead? That’s looks to me like a good solution.