We appear to have another phrase that we must not use because it is derogatory, offensive or possibly just something the Woken SS don’t want us to say. Now it’s “sexual preference” which must not be used. For this is to insinuate, perhaps out right shout at people, that sexuality is a choice.

While discussing LGBTQ rights, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Tuesday used a term that LGBTQ activists have called “offensive,” “outdated,” and a “dog whistle.”

“I have no agenda, and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference,” Barrett said, when asked about her stance on preserving protections for members of the LGBTQ community.

The term “sexual preference,” however, is an offensive one, which suggests that sexual orientation is a choice, Lambda Legal, a legal advocacy group, explained on Twitter.

This is the point at which we tell these people to bugger off. That buggering off being simply that there’s a limit to the micromanagement of the language that we’re going to put up with so off you go, bye bye.

It gets worse than that though for the actual complaint itself, the insistence if you prefer, makes no sense anyway.

A preference is a preference. Whether that comes from taste, choice, religion, the internalisation of societal oppression, genetics, in vivo hormones, just the way God made his special little snowflake or because Mom was cold hearted and never demonstrated proper cuddly love.

That one has a preference is nothing at all to do with how one gained that preference. Nor does preference insist nor even imply that choice is involved.

It is entirely possible for me to drink sarsparilla flavoured drinks like root beer. I don’t because I hate the stuff. My preference is for fizzy pop flavoured with kola nuts. How I gained this preference matters not – myself I think it comes from not growing up in the US and thus never developing the taste for sarsparilla. It’s not something we get much in Europe where I did grow up.

But my preferring coke to root beer is just that, my preference. Doesn’t matter how I gained it at all.

So it is with who – or what as we can be open about this and include autophiles and every other rich variety of human sexuality along with our plain vanilla het and gay – have preferences about who they have sex with. To say you “prefer” is to say that there’s a form which meets your needs/desires better. It’s not to say anything at all about how those needs/desires came about, whether they’re inherent or not. And even a choice will be influenced by inherent factors anyway.

Methinks Lambda Legal are just trying to find some other thing we can all be berated for. And if this is what LGBT activism is now reduced to then that battle’s been won, hasn’t it?