Milli Hill author of Give Birth Like a Feminist surprises TRAs by being a feminist.

As someone who works in the birth world I have seen first hand how they replaced breast with chest feeding and birth mother has been replaced with gestational carriers. Also a rather large organisation insisting on putting everyone through trans ideology training
Please join Arm here's hoping more people speak out only women can give birth that's the biological norm.

I’ve followed Milli on twitter for some time because I feel there’s a real lack of conversation in feminism around how women are treated in pregnancy and childbirth, despite it being a massive issue for a huge number of women.

Give birth like a feminist is absolutely brilliant and I recommend it to anyone, it articulates and describes the issues so well.

It’s a massive shame to see arguing and divide happening over trans issues (I’m sure I’ve seen milli tweet before that she’d received criticism about her book for not being trans-inclusive enough) because it just detracts from the issues of childbirth that aren’t discussed enough as it is!

@CaraDuneRedux thanks for quoting that important insight from @Kaiserin. I think you are absolutely right about the potentially thought-provoking effects of strategically using "person" to highlight how we expect women to put up with pain, risk, inconvenience and discomfort that just wouldn't be tolerated by men.

I'm just about to start going through the process again with maternity services, and frankly, I am dreading it. As a (male) consultant said to me last time around "if men were having babies, they wouldn't put up with all that - they'd be queueing out of the door for a cesarean." At 30 weeks, he was the first person I saw throughout the whole process who I felt spoke to me as an adult, as an equal. Ironically he was also the only man I saw throughout the whole process too.

It is far, far too common for women's concerns and fears about giving birth to be routinely dismissed, or for misinformation provided. You only need to look at the pinned post about the Montgomery case at the top of AIBU, or read the thousands of stories that have been posted on here over the years to know that misogyny is indeed entrenched in maternity services.

Thank you for making an important point.

Going to quote the second bit of Kaiserin's very thoughtful post about the experience of being treated as less than a person because you're a woman giving birth (before the quoted text disappears too), because I think it's too important to lose).

Sadly, though (completely independently from the trans debate), I also feel there is a lot of entrenched misogyny in maternity services, and sometimes, reminding everyone that women are indeed people (not just baby carrying vessels, or some strange alien creatures) might be useful.
I remember my own experience through the maternity system, and the literature and language that surrounds it, and I often felt that my experience as a person was dismissed or reframed "because all that stuff is normal since you're a woman" (in the same way, say, that period pain is routinely ignored or minimised). And that if you took that dismissive language, and replaced "women/woman" with "people/person", suddenly the icongruity (in expecting a person to put up with crap such as no pain relief, etc.) would look obvious, and it becomes easier to fight for our rights.
In other words: I strongly believe (through personal experience) that some people (including women) are conditioned to see women as less than human, and (strategically) using terms such as "person" (in certain contexts) can help break that conditioning. And it can be particularly relevant in the context of giving birth.
(However, dehumanising crap like "uterus havers" has no place anywhere)

(Also on board with her comments in the first part of her post, which I don't think was inflammatory at all. I wish we had better counselling so people who felt gender dysphoria could make peace with their bodies - and also that society would be more tolerant of gender non-conforming behaviour, while at the same time actually accepting that sometimes sex matters and we segregate spaces according to sex rather than gender identity.)

Impressive fortitude shown there.

That is a very good post.

The third screenshot in OP's tweet especially.

Good woman.

Removal of healthy tissue or surgery on healthy bodies would be a better options. Words like 'mutilate' bring so much baggage with them, so they are better being used by those who have had surgery, but it would be good to have guidance.

Also, there are detrans people on reddit who use words like "mutilate" to describe what happened to them.

So why are they/we being told that's not okay now?

Yes, I'd like to understand too, why a single word can't be removed if it's really so triggering. Feels like a kick to the stomach to see that post deleted. Upsetting.

Deleting posts like that is awful. Things just keep disappearing and unless a bunch of detectives on the thread can work out why, you never know.

There's no explanation of the current word ban list or what might now be a thought crime.

This isn't okay @mnhq - please can you at least start clarifying why you're deleting things in your deletion messages?

Can MN not just remove the offending word from a post instead of deleting the whole thing??

Great. I was thinking of buying her book and now I shall definitely do so!

Toesandfingerscrossed oh dear that is worrying to hear about your tutor. I get the impression that the mindset has infiltrated the younger student cohort, but I'm worried that it's coming from lecturers too! I have noticed that The Practising Midwife has gone woke and talks about birthing people now, but at least they use the term as an add-on to women, not a replacement.

Unfortunately there's a very strong "be kind" mentality running through midwifery (I think as an antidote to the bullying and lateral violence that also plagues the profession). That means that a lot of midwives will just blindly accept this. I swear there are a lot of us still out there though who are sane!

The monitors (not mnhq mods!) are extra tetchy at the moment. Understandable.

Hold on a minute, did a woman talking about her birth experience, on Mumsnet, a site for mothers, just get her post deleted? Who exactly is objecting to women, on Mumsnet, talking about their birth experiences?

There is nothing inflammatory or unkind in that post. Nothing.

You're supposed to be here for us, Mumsnet. For exactly this.

So, Kaiserin's thoughtful post has been deleted, and as I quoted it in full, I suspect my post will follow down the memory hole. So I c&p'd my response just in case, and I hope you can glean the gist of her post, because it was actually an valiant attempt to try and dialogue with the ideologues. Guess it wasn't obsequious enough.

I said- Heard and understood - personally, I favour the idea of stressing that Women are People too, not defective or secondary humans, and I suspect that many of the well meaning who have adopted the 'Pregnant people' are coming from that perspective. Sadly it has been thoroughly hijacked by the dehumanizing crap. But we can still push back. We're getting very good at that.

Why was Kaiserin’s reply deleted??? Nothing against talk guidelines???

Toesandfingers. Will it have been obvious to group members that people were disappearing from the group just for liking a post? I really hope so.

For anyone turning up here wondering what's going on, as well as checking out this site, there are relevant posts on the breastfeeding & birth blog called "full cream" (which is American). And one or two others from the world of maternity & birth have spoken up, including Katherine Hales of the association of radical midwives.

Oh wow, as a midwife and a Milli Hill fan, this has made my day. She is a huge figure in the birth world, and we desperately need more influential people like her to speak out. Midwives are overall a bit more reluctant, but doulas in the UK have been totally captured by this ideology.

Whoop! The more people stand up to them the better. Things are changing, women are sick and bloody tired of all this bullshit. It's becoming more transparently anti-women by the minute.

OP I do see the light shining brighter. It's a pity those who accuse of bigotry are often more likely to be bigots.

I'm sure new groups will grow.

It's making me a bit hopeful that women will become a stronger force because we really do have to start growling and gnashing our teeth a lot more