We are more than our anatomical parts
“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Person with a Vagina.”
“Man! I Feel Like a Person who Menstruates”
“Oh, Pretty Person with a Cervix”
Apologies to Aretha Franklin, Shania Twain and Roy Orbison, but this appears to be where we’re heading if language radicals get their way.
And they’re getting it, tying everybody up in linguistic knots so as not to offend or get clobbered by the social media mob.
The inclusive objective is worthy.
The erasure of women is not. “Woman” is in danger of becoming a dirty word … struck from the lexicon of officialdom, eradicated from medical vocabulary and expunged from conversation.
Which is a bitchy thing to do to half the world’s population.
It shouldn’t leave well-meaning people tongue-tied, lest they be attacked as transphobic or otherwise insensitive to the increasingly complex constructs of gender.
The Lancet, the prestigious and highly influential British medical journal, put “Bodies with Vaginas” on the cover of its latest issue, referring to an article inside, titled “Periods on Display,” a review of an exhibition about the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London.
Maybe the editors, who tweeted the piece, were just looking for clickbait, with a pullquote on the cover teasing that “historically, the anatomy and physiology of such bodies have been neglected” — this although the author had used the phrase “bodies with vaginas,” only once and “women” four times.
A hell-storm broke out, quite rightly, with readers indignant over the wording. As one, an author of books on childbirth and women’s bodies, wrote: “You’re telling us that you’ve noticed that, for hundreds of years, you’ve neglected and overlooked women, and, then, in the same breath, you are unable to name those people you’ve been ignoring.”
The magazine’s editor-inchief apologized hastily.
This isn’t an argument against gender self-identification. Surely we’re well past that. It’s more about an infelicitous evolution of language, which is fundamentally about communicating clearly. Even if making the argument ends up aligning uncomfortably with reactionaries and regressives with whom I have no truck.
In one fell swoop, The Lancet — remember, this is a medical publication! — reduced womanhood, biological or metaphysical, to purely anatomical parts, a gross reversal of the century-long campaign to, not only achieve equal rights, but for women to be seen as more than their biological and rampantly objectified, sexualized packaging. This is fundamental to feminism and humanism. And we are seeing, in legislation passed or coming down the pike in U.S. to severely restrict abortions, basically undoing Roe vs. Wade, how fragile these gains can be.
That Lancet episode was not an over-woke outlier.
The American Civil Liberties Union took detestable liberties by deliberately mauling the words of beloved and brilliant Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in marking the one-year anniversary of her death. Reaching back to comments Ginsburg made during her confirmation hearings in 1980, wherein she spoke about the right of women to obtain an abortion, the ACLU unilaterally removed “woman,” replacing it with “person.”
It came out thusly: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a (person’s) life, to (their) wellbeing and dignity … When the government controls that decision for (people), (they are) being treated as less than a fully adult human and responsible for (their) own choices.”
Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, also subsequently issued a grovelling mea culpa, promising he’d never again drastically alter quotes in the future. But is that really a lesson that needed to be pounded into his head?
And still Romero tried to justify his interference by claiming that Ginsburg would have supported more inclusive language.
Maybe so. I would really like to know what she might have thought. But we don’t and can’t and it’s outrageous for anyone to mishmash the justice’s voice.
Women have abortions. Or, I suppose, in the tiniest of numbers, people born with female genitals who identify as male or fluid can terminate a pregnancy.
Women have babies. Or, in the tiniest of numbers, people born with female genitals who identify as male or fluid, can get pregnant.
Yet in 2016, the British Medical Association recommended staff use “pregnant people,” instead of pregnant women. A British hospital now instructs maternity ward staff to use “birthing people.” The Biden administration’s proposed 2022 budget substituted “birth people” for mothers. Rep. Cori Bush has used that term, while her congressional Squad teammate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has talked of “menstruating people.”
These are women I admire, but they’ve jumped the shark.
This recalls the point bestselling author J.K. Rowling was trying to make, wryly, in a tweet that got her bludgeoned by the mob: “People who menstruate. I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
Rowling was branded a TERF — activists do like their neologisms — meaning trans exclusionary radical feminist. As if she was hostile to the trans movement, which she assuredly is not. Some bookstores removed her work from their shelves. Were she not a gazillion-selling author, Rowling could have lost her publisher.
In Britain, where roughly 680,000 people do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, according to government figures, midwives at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals were told to start using terms such as “chest milk,” instead of breast milk. This, apparently, because some transgender men who give birth and nurse their babies were distressed at being reminded of what they were doing with those lactating female appendages. Although surely “breast” is a genderneutral term, as both sexes have them and both can develop breast cancer.
This is all directly a phenomenon resulting from trans activism run amok.
I get the passion for recasting language, to improve gender and LGBT equity, to minimize the “cognitive mental salience” of males.
The movement has been spectacularly successful in the progressive West, although English isn’t as heavily gendered as, say, Italian or French. Truly, props for an undertaking that has given voice and power to a demographic historically oppressed, horribly shaped and disproportionately subjected to violence!
Merriam-Webster was the first dictionary to add genderneutral pronouns “they” and “themself” to refer to a person whose “gender identity is non-binary.”
But these examples go far beyond insistence on neutral pronouns, into an outer orbit of linguistics where both women, as a gender, and “woman” as a noun are being blotted out.
There’s more than a whiff of misogyny to it. Why “woman” the no-speak word and not “man?” Why not “persons who urinate standing up” or “people who eject semen?”
Certainly there are words — they are slurs mostly — that are no longer acceptable. “Woman” shouldn’t be one of them.
The battleground of language has turned into a baffleground of agendas.
I am woman and I am roaring.