Downgraded "Issues"

There are many words we put in front of ‘‘issues’’: ‘‘women’s,’’ ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘L.G.B.T.Q.,’’ and so on. They tend to function, intentionally or not, as big, rippling flags, signaling to anyone outside their scope that the problem can be respectfully ignored. Let somebody else worry about it: the people whose ‘‘issue’’ this is. (Never mind who made it an issue for them in the first place; it’s theirs to solve now.) To call something a ‘‘woman’s issue,’’ for instance, is to relegate it to the presumably small and narrow subset of human concerns of interest exclusively to women. ‘‘Women’s issues’’ might be used to mean ‘‘problems women are likely to face,’’ or it might be used to mean ‘‘problems women enjoy caring about’’ — as if problems were a matter of taste, like enjoying romantic comedies.

-- "Everywhere You Look, We've Downgraded Real Problems Into Mere 'Issues,' " by Carina Chocano, The New York Times