I am not a "person who menstruates"

It's because it is used instead of woman. I no longer menstruate but I am still a woman and I still need healthcare aimed at women. I actually don't think the distinction between women who have periods and those who no longer do is that significant. Even contraception is still needed for the early years of menopause and equally many women who are still having periods have HRT.

When it comes to healthcare, women are women and men are men.

And accessible information usually is clear and simple, it doesn't tie itself in knots.

Women is an easily understandable expression and trans men know they have female bodies.

Also some trans men presumably stop themselves from menstruating (I would get the injection if I thought I was in the wrong body!) so they aren't people who menstruate anyway!

Just to add to this,

Part of the reason that simple and everyday language aids and improves understanding and retention is via the cognitive load of the message we read.

By even tweaking a message to be more depersonalised and adding an extra interpretative step can be enough to cause a person to not take in the message. Because they might not immediately understand it is for them.

Thank you for a thoughtful and nuanced post. I hadn't thought about the slippery slope of moving girls into womanhood and I see why that matters.

I do, however, think that is something of a recon. The terminology "people who..." has only arisen in the last couple of decades in tandem with the belief that to be a woman (or girl) is an aspect of the mind rather than the body. Before then, "Women and girls...." was a very common phrasing to talk about, well, women and girls.

And with respect, while I also take your point about the right language to connect with distressd people, I think you may ne applying an unconscious value judgement that some people's language matters and some people's doesn't.

As a thought experiment, if you were supporting a young person whose genuinely traumatic treatment by a person of a particular social group lead her to use offsensive and dehumanising language for anyone of that group, would you follow her lead and use the language she prefers then?

You don't have to answer that, but please consider it.

Part of the reason women's language has turned out to be so easy to throw away is that women are so everyday, so normal that it was very easy to just see us as a neutral background for more interesting identies. Kind of like the environment, it's hard to see that small individual acts of selfish damage eventually add up to make the whole thing unstable.

“person who menstruates” depersonalises the information or discussion. Use of girls and women who menstruate is more personal and increases the chance the information is more carefully read and/or retained. Or if the girl or women doesn’t understand what menstruation is, may be encouraged to ask about it as it is directly associated with being a girl or a woman.

Some of these make sense in context - I prefer birthing mother, but I can see birthing person makes sense in some situations such as when the person giving birth doesn't intend to continue as the active mother afterwards

People who menstruate can make sense over just using women, particularly if your target market includes girls and/or discussing something specific to do with menstruation which won't involve all women or girls. It has been used in some spaces to avoid saying women, which helps no one but those who want to feel smug about it.

Calling anyone womb carrier or cervix haver is dehumanizing, and can be worded far better for situations where the need only impacts those with a uterus and/or cervix. I struggle to think of any situation where partner with eggs is relevant. These all come across as ways to avoid saying women.

But why not say "woman who menstruates" or "mother who gave birth" then? The people who do these things are not subsets of "people" in general, they are subsets of the specific half of people who are female, aka "women".

Girls are also female, some of them menstruate, and girls who are mothers are the group of mothers who are significantly at the highest risk across the board. I wouldn't use women who menstruate unless I was only talking about adults - the idea that menstruation or birth makes a girl a woman, makes them adults, is something I actively avoid in my language.

The only reason to use the word "people" is to promote the neo-sexist belief that womanhood is a personality trait not a physical fact with physical consequences.

Or because people is shorter than saying girls and women. The narratives in many cultures that menstruating or giving birth as something only women do, and makes girls into women regardless of their age is something I think causes significant harm, far more than saying people.

I've also used it when working with young people who are very uncomfortable with the physical facts of their bodies and meeting them where they are at. While language is important, I don't think all the fights around language need to happen all the time with all audiences - sure, with the organisations people have discussed, have at them, but when talking to a girl who has been through things many of us have and hates being seen as a girl as a consequence, neutralising the language to their comfort level can often be the first step in getting them to discuss those physical facts, consequences, and health information they need. Pushing the sex-based language at all times can create barriers and entrench them against the realities of their bodies.

While I see the treating sex as a personality trait in older adult rhetoric (usually the older men), I don't see a lot of the young people who push against discussing their sex view it as a personality trait, at least IME. It's more part of reality that has caused harm to them that they don't yet have tools to deal with and often hide away in fantasies where they can make it go away. Neutral language within appropriate context, like person who menstruates as part of discussing the issues they are facing with menstruation, can be part of developing those tools and starting to develop at least a tolerance towards that part of reality that they don't like.

Dr Emma Hilton wrote this about the language around cervical screening a while back. It is still relevant.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1289253876907089920.html

I agree Flirts. I don’t use the term men in dresses either. And I think that some men rock dresses.

As you would know though, I only used the term because it was used to belittle and demean women’s discussion points through the statement that some posters were ‘obsessed’ about those men.

AKA The Izzard Differential, to be a bit Big Bang Theory. Agree.

Not wanting to take anything away from @Catiette and @Helleofabore 's great and thoughtful posts, but I personally don't use the shorthand "men in dresses" because I don't mind men in dresses at all.

I like men in dresses! I think men should feel free to wear all the dresses they want! The world would be better for it.

My issue is purely and simply with men, regardless of what they are wearing, who claim, truthfully or otherwise, to be women. (And also women who claim to be men, but to a lesser extent and, outside the common underlying sexism of genderist beliefs and practices, for different reasons).

It's the difference between a man wearing a fabulous woman's dress because why should only women get fabulous dresses, and a man wearing a fabulous woman's dress because he claims he is a fabulous woman.

Ditto! But the two posts show, it's really quite clear and easy to understand. I've found the "Rhinos' arguments are too complex to address" posts surprising in that respect - it's a new one on me. I mean, I know the overlaps with queer theory mean it can all get "a bit academic", but describing the real-life impacts on women, step-by-step, isn't at all.

I wonder if, just like the current difficulty distinguishing between "hatred" and "disagreement" in other people, there's a similar difficulty in distinguishing between "I find it too difficult conceptually" and "I find it too difficult emotionally" in yourself. This sounds patronising, but I've experienced it too. There are many pieces supporting this ideology that I just haven't been able to face, telling myself it's just too in-depth or tiring, when, actually, what would be tiring would be engaging with arguments I find upsetting and threatening.

I do try to overcome this, though (see my earlier post re. spending 3-hours in a manky café seeing whether I could counter every single point in a whole treatise "explaining" why TERFs are bigots).

I think that's what we all should do. (Not the rather sad station café pitstop part. Not recommended 😂).

cross posted with Catiette

I am sure it has been said before on this thread, but it seems that with the accusations of 'obsessions with men in dresses' we need to address it more often.

When the words that female people use are destabilised so that, for some people, words such as 'women' and 'girls' include any male people who want to claim those words, it means that those words can no longer be used to specifically mean female people. There have been too many instances lately in media where even the word 'female' has been used for a male person.

It is logical then that if 'women' and 'girls' can include male people, that for some people they believe reducing women and girls to body parts makes it clear that they are referring to female people. There is the aspect also that some female people reject the words used specifically for female people such as 'women' and 'girls'. However, making general information on the NHS web pages less clear is harmful to the women and girls who need simple and clear language.

Instead, we end up with someone accepting a well deserved reward for a film about Endometriosis using the term 'people with a uterus'.

I have also seen statistics misquoted by removing the sex category from that statistic making it misleading if they don't recalculate it if needed. Or making it less important by including all of the population. There is a difference between 1 in 10 women and 1 in 10 people (I have picked these ratios at random to make the point).

Destabilising the language that female people need to uniquely describe themselves to include a group of male people was the start and the efforts that we see where we are reduced to body parts or processes are very much a part of that.

Re: "men in dresses", a quick word. I don't use this because of its potential to offend, but I fully understand those who do. It feels relevant to point out, in a thread about women's loss of the ability to describe themselves, that there has been a corresponding loss in our ability to describe the opposite sex, and specifically trans-identifying males.

Using the words "woman" and "female" for them, as seems to be preferred makes it impossible to explain our concerns: just like that, we're silenced. We literally can't express our needs or defend our rights as a distinct group of humans. Frightening.

"Trans women" can be similarly problematic for us, in its grammatical equivalency to "disabled women" or "Black women". It feels inappropriate at best (and ableist / racist at worst) to support the view inherent in this phrasing - that a male is just as much a woman as a female in a wheelchair or female person of colour.

"Transwomen" works for me overall, but is still a huge concession on the part of women that's entirely unacknowledged by society. Imagine "transblack" or "transautistic" or "transjewish" or anything, really. These have a sheer, insulting wrongness to them that reflects society's respect for the integrity of the identity being hypothetically "trans-ed". I think it's significant, in contrast, that "women" didn't benefit from the same defence: social conditioning to "be kind"? aeons of perceiving woman as secondary? I think both of these are relevant. In particular, the conception of woman as "other": if male/man is the default, then it stands to reason that anyone who so emphatically rejects their maleness would be shifted into the more accommodating class of "woman". (This ties in, of course, to why "trans woman" highlights the historical othering of "Black woman"). So, in short, "transwoman" can be problematic for some, too.

Where does that leave us? Because of this corruption of our language, any attempt to argue our case is made, quite literally, impossible ("woman"/"female"), or is forced into implying in the very words used a readiness to compromise that's contrary to what we're saying ("trans woman / "transwoman"). These words have obscured the reality of what "trans inclusion" means for women: "trans women are women", after all - it's literally there in the name! The trans campaign has been an act of astonishing cruelty in this sense, to be honest. Transsexual didn't have the same temerity - and did show far greater honesty, with a specificity that permitted wider public understanding.

And the public are entitled to understand this debate, and to draw their own conclusions about it - particular where the dissolution of previous data, rights and, above all of single-sex spaces is concerned. This is where the BBC has behaved so appallingly - they saw it (see see it) as their moral duty to impose "trans inclusion" on the nation through language, in a way that removes choice. It's anti-democratic, frankly - also in the corresponding, dangerous erosion of trust in the media.

(For more on this, people could google "trans inclusion Dentons document" - which explains how undemocratic political strategies were deliberately used to embed the loss of single-sex spaces in law without clear public understanding and agreement - and "Pronouns are Rohypnol"; I find the title of the latter problematic and it's fairly strongly worded for anyone entirely new to this issue, but it makes these arguments about language very powerfully).

Continuing to focus on public understanding, the above has led to a remarkable naivety about what "trans" actually means. Until very recently indeed, cross-dressing was included in Stonewall's "trans umbrella". Many people haven't heard of AGP fetishism or will say it's been disproven, when a brave google (not recommended!) will reveal an infinity of personal accounts, by males, of exactly this. This, too, is included in "trans" now. It's genuinely upsetting to see the damage that this expansion of the concept of "transsexual" has done to the vanishingly small minority of dysphoric males who would previously have fit this description.

When all this is taken into account, there's actually something to be said for using "men in dresses" as one of the few clear descriptors left to women to make their point. It resolves the issues with giving up the word "women" to a greater or lesser degree, and highlights the often-superficial character of male transition from the female's perspective. Because, the fact is, our perception of reality is just as valid as a male's perception, meaning that his internal perception of himself simply doesn't factor when we meet him in a station loo at 11pm at night. It's Talibanesque to say that the woman's instinctual and rational wariness at seeing a male in this context should be subsumed entirely into said male's unspoken conviction that he's female. To her, as long as she retains the right to her own perception of the world, he is, at that moment, "a male who has adopted an outward appearance more commonly associated with women" - "a man in a dress", as shorthand. Despite this, the Overton window has expanded to normalise "transwomen" into something women would be "crazy" to find offensive, and shrunk to squeeze out "men in dresses" as clear evidence of mere prejudice.

I repeat, I don't use "men in dresses" myself for many reasons, including wanting to avoid hurt to anyone who may be distressed by it. I actually dislike it intensely. And I agree that it sometimes indicates genuine prejudice - transphobia exists, of course it does. But is it always a sign of this? Society has taught us that it is, but I think things are actually rather more complex.

Yes the basic premise is to destabilise the language around things that a group of people wish to change categorisation of. It is queer theory and post modernist theories at work, isn't it?

It’s always so very telling, isn’t it.

Absolutely. And PP seems to have missed the fact that the main drivers for this type of dehumanising language are the men who want to be included in the category of women and don’t want to be reminded that they are not.

If we are broken down into functional body parts, they can sail in and claim ‘woman’ for themselves without pesky biology to impede them.

This is the question - it’s pretty key:
In what way is that not a sexist belief that only some types of minds are right for men and for women?

I see by your somewhat testy response that you have realised that you can’t answer it.

Don’t worry, it’s not just you - it IS sexist to say that a man can have a ladybrain. No trans activist in the history of the world has been able to answer otherwise.

How does a man signify to the world that he is a lady without the use of stereotypes?

Catiette, I think that there are some interesting discussions being had now in academic circles about how society has reacted to a situation where a group's subjective reality based on personal belief has been expected /demanded to be supported as being universal material reality. That article of Holly Lawford-Smith starts to address it and I hope to see more in the future.

Thank you so much to Helle. Her posts really show what I mean by so-called "TERFs'" patience, reason and empathy. (And yes, that we include all females is partly why I tend to use TERF cautiously or ironically!) To call this calm, fair-minded assessment of female need a kind of "prejudice" or "hatred" is so laughable that it could only ever expose the prejudice on the part of the person saying this. It's posts like these, set against the bizarre accusations of extremism sitting alongside them, that first confirmed to me the darker side of trans ideology.

'I'm being criticised for saying TERFs on here are obsessed with men in dresses, yet you're so focused on it you don't seem to have noticed that you've switched the people you're arguing about.'

When is a discussion about language and its use to describe female people and their body processes not relevant also to male people who demand to use female language for themselves or to discuss how using language that is unclear creates a safeguarding issue for female people? The issues are intertwined and discussion of these general impacts to female people are relevant to this thread.

Your posts seem to be intended to shame women who don't share your views through ad hominem attacks, such as declaring that they are 'obsessed with men in dresses'.

'Also I don't understand why you and others in here object to the word TERF - trans exclusionary radical feminist. You don't believe in/accept/agree that trans people have a right to exist in the world with the same rights as other people, ergo trans exclusionary, the position comes from radical feminism.'

The term TERF is a misnomer really. Because most radical feminism centres female people. Even those with gender identities where the female person has rejected the sex category of their body.

Of course, people with gender identities have a right to exist with the same rights as other people. It is hyperbolic to suggest otherwise. The issue isn't that they have the same rights as other people, it is the changes that some of them demand of others. Such as language changes where the rest of society is expected to change established and clearly understood language to be terminology that is less clearly understood by the majority of people.

The point being that has language that has been said to be 'inclusive' for a small group then made the language less inclusive for other groups.

I think that the poster forgets that if they post an opinion on a public forum, that people are free to interact with that opinion any way that they want. If they don't want other women to interact and explain why the terminology does have a negative impact on them and that other women dismissing the reasons with a breezy 'I am fine with it, don't' see the issue' contributes to the collective harm, perhaps they should consider whether the forum is the right place to post their opinion.

Yet, you feel free to personally attack posters who do have a different opinion to yours after you expressed your opinion in terms that seemed to have the intention to provoke a reaction. If you don't want people to interact with your opinion, why would you post it on a public forum?

My dh went to the doctors yesterday, to have his prostrate checked, and the literature talked about 'people with prostrates'!

It’s a way of distancing the female body and its reality from being a woman. It benefits men just as much, if not more.