So-called “political correctness” (PC) is an oxymoron: it posits a metric, the implication being that there is an objective standard being referred to, which of course is being rejected in the first instance by PC’s inherent relativism.
Radical social constructionism in its attempt to reject essentialism (race, gender, nationality, class, and so on) through the prevailing politics of identity (race, gender etc.), inadvertently appeals to essentialist talk. This amounts to an outright rejection of liberal universalism which ostensibly is what is being argued for in the first place.
On a related issue, the academic requirement that writers invoke gender neutral language or randomly refer to “his” or “her” smacks of a Russellian/Wittgensteinian logical atomism. If one takes logical atomism in its most generic form to denote that atoms of meaning correspond to the basic elements of reality, then English language speakers (at least) have a problem. Unlike in German there is no masculine, feminine or neuter. To insist otherwise, at best, makes for very awkward phrasing, or at worst, attributes grammatical form that is not part of the English language. The latter is akin to admonishing an orange for not being an apple.
manwithoutqualities 