In our recently submitted grants we had to change “traumatic brain injury” to “concussive brain injury” and “male and female mice” to “male and non-male mice” because traumatic and female are now verboten words that can get our grants killed. It’s insanity.
Noam Ross, a computational researcher part of Grant Watch, told The Chronicle that Grant Watch doesn’t know exactly how grants are flagged for termination, but “suspect that these words are part of a search process for selecting them based on [The New York Times article] and other reporting.”
I like this one since it's straight from the horse's mouth. As expected it is less blatantly horrible. No doubt the other words are indeed also tabooed, but it doesn't surprise me that one's like "female" are secretly rather than explicitly forbidden.