On January 6, a 27-year-old woman, Emilie Inman, was stabbed to death inside her home in Berkeley, California, and another Berkeley woman was stabbed on the street, allegedly by the same assailant, a UC-Berkeley student named Pablo Gomez Jr., who was arrested the next day and remains in custody.

The grisly episode has, strangely enough, been turned into yet another skirmish in the “pronoun wars,” a brand-new social-justice cause in which people who describe themselves as “gender-nonconforming” fight for the right to be referred to by their “preferred gender pronoun” or “PGP.” This can be one of the standard third-person pronouns such as “he” or “she”—or it can be a pronoun spun wholly out of thin air, such as “zir” or “xe.” The University of California-Berkeley has been in the front lines of surrender in this battle. In 2014, then-UC-Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, meeting with the campus LGBTQ Advisory Committee, introduced himself with his own PGP.