Rolling back existence

From The New York Times:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

If, as Wittgenstein suggests, the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world, this initiative goes beyond rolling back recognition and legal protections. Recognition presumes the existence of that which is recognized. This initiative seeks to roll back existence, erasing identities and insisting that persons are who the government says they are. I think of Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”

[Ludwig Wittgenstein describes solipsism in the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus 5.62: : “The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”]