Article in Huffpost about transphobia in midwifery

I'm another one who is really losing patience with this.

If you want to be referred to by your preferred pronoun, that's fine, and I'm sure the midwife would have been more than happy to accommodate.

Wanting the literature to change, because of a vanishingly small number of transpeople who give birth alongside the huge number of women who give birth every year?

I'm assuming he would pay for the change to be made and all the new leaflets to be printed, yes?

It just smacks of trying to erase women from everything. To be trying to erase them from pregnancy and birth is horrendous. I have never understood how you can 'feel' one gender or the other, as I have never felt "Oh yes, I am a woman now" - except for after giving birth. It is the one time I have felt strong and empowered as a woman, rather than as a human being.

If you have the bits to make and carry a baby, you are biologically a woman, and that is what the leaflets are referring to.

When I was pregnant, I was labelled high-risk. I didn't identify as high-risk. I was subjected to some invasive and some highly inconvenient procedures because of this. I sucked it up for 9 months as it was probably in our best interests and I didn't have an awful lot of choice. You just get the fuck on with it.

It really does seem like language is more important in transworld than actual people and real impacts. Absolutely midwives and HCPs should be supporting transmen through their pregnancies, absolutely they should receive all the support they need to get them through what must be a period of severe cognitive dissonance and emotional upheaval. But women can't afford for women to be erased from this highly critical and often controversial area of our biology and our lives. Not everything is about sodding gender.

My take from this article is mostly how great it is that a significant group of midwives have objected to their guidelines removing the word 'woman' and replacing it with 'pregnant individuals'. It was a really really crap change, and yes it does erase women and that is a massive problem. When it comes to being pregnant/giving birth of course it is all about biology!

I also would have thought that the guidelines need a special section on trans people as they may well find pregnancy very difficult or have issues from the use of hormones or having had surgery. Is it really so very very hard for people to accept that they are in fact quite different and need special consideration rather than force changes that don't apply to the vast majority of other people and may actually harm them?

Interesting that this comes from transmen, but is still fundamentally all about attacking women.

Actually ... rabbit hole.

If we eradicate all language distinguishing different categories of people, this author wouldn't be able to identify as a man, would he? He'd be identifying as a person, and all pronouns would be replaced with "they". Where's your transgenderism then, huh?

Oh, I've lost patience with all this. He was having a baby, therefore engaging with the womanly facts of his body. Yes, I know that sounds weird but anyone decent would go with the pronoun.

People do stuff that's out of the norm. One of those things is to identify as a man but do something only women can do. Fine. Sometimes I use a loo labelled "men" even though I'm not a man. I own shoes marketed as men's; my tiny, adult nieces own shoes labelled "children's". Get used to it, fgs.

Italiangrey it's a very difficult area which has been so politicised that it's hard to tread carefully.

I completely agree that individual should be treated with kindness and sensitivity.

Sunshineandsilverbirch yes 1984, here we come. Where nothing means anything, or everything!! We must not let it happen. But we must not forget that there are all kinds of people with real needs, so I hope we can be caring. As i am pretty sure those midwives would be!

Amethyst24 you are so right.

The politics are complex and I haven't consolidated my thought processes around this subject area yet.

However while I would absolutely expect that anyone who is pregnant should be treated with kindness and respect regardless of how they identify I have deep misgivings DS about the erasure of the term 'woman' from something as central to womanhood as giving birth to a child.

There must be a way to deal with the (presumably) tiny number of cases in a sensitive way without throwing the metaphorical baby out with the bath water.

I am also clear that I am not a Ciswoman, I am a woman.

I have no problem with trans men and women. I believe it must take tremendous courage to transition and would be happy to be supportive to any friend, family member or colleague who chose to embark upon that journey.

But I remain concerned that we are heading towards an Orwellian type of Newspeak, (an ideologically purified dialect).

No134, I don't disagree, but it would at least make clear the murk there currently is about sex, identity and gender. In an ideal world, of course, there would be no murk, but given that there is, and people use the word "gender" when they mean "sex" and women feel their identity is being appropriated, surely there's a case for just drawing the lines differently? Surely no transwoman, however strongly she identified as a woman, would lay claim to female biology?

So if we just start framing FGM, abortion, childbirth, menopause etc as "female" issues, in which gender plays no part, we might find ourselves able to step away from the appropriation of "feminine" as a gender identity claimed by males who want to have it?

(I'm very new to all this - I'm sure such arguments have been discussed at length by people far better equipped to discuss them than I am.)

PS and I don't think it helps trans people who need support and encouragement, this just puts people's backs up (IMHO).

Utterly ridiculous and totally insulting to imply that midwives should not have the right to sign a letter on such an important issue. It is highly offensive.

If Trevor wants to be called a man, fine, I am suer midwives would happily do so, but do not erase the word 'woman' or pregnant woman' from literate for the benefit of a tiny minority who are using their female bodies to give birth.

It's the emperor's new clothes!

This kind of thing has real consequences. Here in the United States, we've already had a case where a judge decided that discriminating against a breastfeeding woman wasn't sex discrimination, because they'd have discriminated against a breastfeeding MAN, too, so why are you crying about it?

Being unable to describe these issues as "women's issues" takes away an ability to discuss why and how female people are being oppressed in the area of reproductive control.

How many trans men actually choose to get pregnant and give birth? A vanishingly small number. So much so that Thomas Beattie was on the cover of time magazine or something wasn't he?!

How is "female-bodied man" any kind of a meaningful utterance?

FFS

I'd be happy referring to "pregnant people" rather than women if I was asked. If someone with a womb prefers to use male pronouns it doesn't bother me at all.

Why would you not accept use of the word woman while giving birth? I don't profess to understand the gender politics at all but if you managed to get pregnant and are prepared to go through pregnancy and childbirth, even if you've transitioned to being a man at some point (presumably not surgically and hormonally) is it really such a stretch to accept that you at least have womanly traits during this period of time even if you leave them behind you as soon as labour is over.

Is it really so horrible to be a woman even if you are choosing to do things that only women do?

I find this strange set of assertions about identity, divorced from any connection to biological facts, to be a bit unsettling. It's all a bit special isn't it.

woman/man comes to be used to describe identity, and female/male to describe biology?

I think I could cope with this much better than things like "women identified persons" and "birthing individuals". The whole article made me feel old and confused.

I wonder whether all this might lead to a bit of a semantic shift, where woman/man comes to be used to describe identity, and female/male to describe biology?

So "I am a female-bodied man" or "Midwives offer care to females of all genders" etc.

And feminism ceases to be about women's rights but about female rights.

I'm sure a pregnant person who identifies as male in terms of society must have to do a lot of work coming to terms with the clear discord between their sex and their gender. Maybe the removal of the word woman from literature would help with this but that has to be weighed against the harm that does to women in general who benefit from the positive use of the terms woman and mother to describe the experience they are going through.

I've thought that Katie. If being misgendered for example is so painful*,
surely pregnancy and birth must be infinitely worse.

*I don't think it's right to misgender someone. Just using it as an example of comparision.

Moreover, Trevor McDonald changed since I last saw him.

I just don't get why a trans man would want to give birth? How would that experience fit in with identifying as male?
I am a pregnant woman. That's what I wish to be identified as. Pregnancy is a woman's issue. If some pregnant women want to called sir then that's fine but you can't expect 99.99% of the population to change language to suit you.

If you are capable of conceiving and bearing a child, then you have a uterus and ovaries, and hence biologically you are a woman.

Socially you can identify as whatever you want, but for the purposes of the biological function of reproduction, you are female. There's something really bonkers about calling standard biological terminology offensive just because some people identify with a social gender that doesn't match their biological gender.