Sorry, but you can’t tell women we’re not mothers
LAST week, the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust proudly announced that, as part of a new policy designed to address ‘ health inequalities’ for ‘marginalised and disadvantaged groups’, use of the word ‘mother’ is to be replaced by more ‘inclusive’ terminology.
Thus its maternity services will henceforth be known as ‘perinatal’, pregnant women are to be referred to as ‘birthing parents’, breast-feeding is now ‘ chest- feeding’ and breast milk is either ‘chestmilk’ or ‘milk from the feeding parent’.
Of course, the ability to bear children is not what defines a woman. There are plenty of childless women who are proof of that. But the biology itself is unique to the female of the species. Pregnancy and childbirth are women’s experiences. Breastfeeding is a woman’s experience. So is menstruation. Like it or not, these are biological characteristics which are nontransferrable.
To acknowledge this is not an act of bigotry, it is simply a fact, like observing that snow is cold.
It also does not mean that someone is hostile to the existence of trans people or to their right to be treated fairly.
AND yet in the lexicon of modern trans terminology, even to think such thoughts, let alone say them out loud or in print, is considered a hate crime. Any woman who dares question the new orthodoxy is instantly demonised as a Terf – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist – and set in the metaphorical stocks.
Shutting down dissent in this way is – as the experiences of women like JK Rowling ( cancelled for objecting to the term ‘people who menstruate’) and Suzanne Moore (pushed out of her job at the Guardian by colleagues scared of being tarred with the same brush) prove – a very effective way of neutralising opposition to dogma.
Bullies and rigid i deologues understand that most people are easily scared, and when handed a pitchfork will generally run with it if it means they themselves won’t end up on a spike.
It’s a tactic used not just by radical trans activists, but also by BLM and the environment lobby. Bend the knee if you know what’s good for you, or suffer the consequences.
As George Orwell so skilfully expressed, once you can persuade people, through fear, to believe things that are patently not true, you have won.
As Winston says in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.’
I fear this is the situation millions of women face. Unless we agree that we no longer exist, that our biology no longer belongs to us, unless we willingly deny the physical reality of what it means to be female, we face being vilified by the armies of the woke who will accept no other truth save that which they have themselves devised.
This is wrong. Of course trans people should be made to feel welcome in the context of maternity services (indeed, all services). But not to the point where their rights begin to eclipse all others.
And this is the key. In trying to accommodate the needs of a small group of complex individuals we run the risk of obliterating those of the majority.
Women haven’t t raditionally owned much in this world. Like the trans community itself, we’ve had to fight hard for our rights, and too many still are denied them. But pregnancy and childbirth, that’s always been uniquely ours, our one superpower no one can take away.
So, you see, you can’t just park your tanks in our maternity hospitals and expect us to surrender. You can’t tell us we’re not mothers, or tell us we can’t breastfeed. If that makes me a Terf so be it. Rather that than a liar and a coward.