Of the 199 words recently restricted or discouraged under the Trump administration as too “woke” for the federal government, more than 50 are explicitly tied to sex, gender, identity, bodily autonomy, reproduction, and the sexual body. This is not a coincidence. It is a calculated erasure of the language that allows us to discuss oppression, advocate for justice, and name the power structures that shape our lives.
I recognize this. I remember this.
Growing up, authoritarianism wasn’t some distant political concept — it lived in my house. It was my mother, pressing it into my skin like a balm, ensuring I absorbed every ounce of it. It was in her voice, in the careful curation of what I was allowed to wear, what I could say, and how I was supposed to say it. It was in the ever-present list of what was right and what was wrong. It was in the words I was never allowed to know, the ideas too dangerous for me to hold. For my protection, of course. Always for my protection.
And here we are again.
Again and again, we repeat the very cycles we claim to resist—authoritarian control disguised as care. We live in a society that preaches freedom, yet we’ve been conditioned to accept suppression as security, to see control as protection, to mistake silence for safety. We claim to oppose oppression, censorship, and the erasure of truth—yet we participate in it, often without realizing.
As someone who was once a silenced child, I see how this conditioning shapes not only our childhoods but our entire lives. How silence is taught, then enforced. How fear masquerades as protection. How generations are raised to accept powerlessness as normal, to swallow their instincts, to live without the words that could set them free.
We strip children of knowledge, autonomy, and language, just as it was done to us, believing we are keeping them safe. We do it unconsciously. We beat, suppress, and ignore our children on large scales, thinking we are shaping them into good people, respectful citizens, safe individuals. We equate silence with safety, obedience with goodness, ignorance with innocence.
Now, as an adult, I feel that same infantilization creeping back—the feeling of being small, of having my voice stripped away. The world shrinks around me. Words disappear. Conversations dissolve before they can form. I feel like the child I was then—confused, questioning, knowing something is deeply wrong but unable to name it.
Because the words are gone.
When words about gender, race, disability, justice, and the self disappear, resisting becomes much harder. This does not erase our ability to fight back—history has shown that suppressed people adapt, create, and reclaim language in powerful ways. But for children, who rely entirely on adults for information, the loss is profound. Without access to words, they are left to navigate in secrecy, piecing together truths however they can—sometimes from those who may not have their best interests at heart.
This is how reactionary governance works: control the words, control the thoughts. Control the thoughts, control the people.
When I see these modern attempts to strip away language, I don’t just see policy — I see the echoes of my childhood. The echoes of every child told not to question, not to speak, not to know. The echoes of a society convinced it is protecting children by keeping them ignorant.
We have mistaken control for protection. We do not protect children from harm; we protect them from knowledge. We do not give them tools to navigate the world; we erase the words that might help them do so. And the consequences ripple outward, shaping not just the present but the future.
Those of us here, now, understand the significance of words like resistance, community, connection. We remember the battles fought for them, the power they carry. But newer generations—those growing up without these words—will not have that memory.
How do you teach struggle, resilience, and history when the language to do so has been methodically erased?
How do you convince someone of an injustice they have no words for?
For children, the denial of language is more than suppression—it is gaslighting. They are made to doubt their own curiosity, their instincts, their very selves. When they reach for understanding, they are told they are wrong. When they seek words for their bodies, their sensations, their identities, they are met with silence—or worse, contradiction from an adult who insists they know better. No wonder so many teenagers “rebel”—this is not defiance; it is an existential crisis.
Even when children are given words, they are often left incomplete. Knowing the word “penis” or “vagina” is like knowing the word “carburetor” — useful, but insufficient. It is not just the word that matters; it is the understanding of how it functions, how it connects to everything else, how the body — or the system — works as a whole. Without that, language remains fragmented, stripped of its power to inform, to protect, to liberate.
So where do we go from here? We’ve been told that protecting children from sexual harm starts with education: teaching them the names of their body parts, explaining consent, and making sure they “tell an adult” if something happens.
But this is not enough — and it puts the responsibility for prevention in the wrong place.
Child sexual abuse isn’t a problem children can solve. It is a crisis rooted in adult behaviors, societal structures, and a culture of silence. Until we shift the focus, we will never end it.
Ending childhood sexual abuse has nothing to do with children and everything to do with the adults around them—our accountability, our willingness to unlearn harmful norms, our capacity to build safer communities, and our commitment to disrupting cycles of harm before they begin. Our willingness to use the words. To defy the shame imposed upon us.
Prevention is not about policing children’s knowledge — it is about transforming how adults think, act, and engage with power, desire, and accountability.
Studies show that most children who experience sexual abuse already know something is wrong. What stops them from speaking out is not a lack of vocabulary, but a surfeit of fear — fear of punishment, disbelief, or disrupting their families.
That fear is cultivated by silence. By omission. By a world that denies them the language to make sense of their experiences.
While it is vital for children to have language for their bodies, prevention starts with adults. It starts with breaking our own silence. With challenging the norms that uphold secrecy, shame, and control. With choosing knowledge over ignorance, conversation over censorship, and courage over compliance.
It starts with us.
