‘Mother’ a word to avoid - why this is so wrong

Looking at the original letter that the post is replying to, I'm wondering about the incidents that gave rise to some of them.

Was a transman ever turned away from a labour ward? Presumably because they weren't thought to be female? Even if they were 9 months pregnant? And if that happened, was it fixed, as in did they explain 'I'm having a baby' and then all was well? Was this an unbearable level of exclusion?

I'm also quite seriously interested to find out if being bisexual excluded you from adoption before 2003? I can believe it, actually, but I just wondered. In general I found the constant squashing of all issues into one LGBTQ+ block difficult.

Correction: she altered the pronouns from she/her to they/them. I have an old brain.

Thanks for posting this OP, very insightful article. I posted recently about a 20-something year old who worked in the NHS and had replaced the word 'mother' with 'parent' in the maternity leave policy, to be more inclusive and couldn't see the harm....this is an excellent answer to that.

@tiktok sounds like she was trying to say she was 'born in the wrong body'.
As in, 'if i had been born in a male body, i wouldn't have to fight so hard for effing respect. plus these feckers would bring me bigger sandwiches'.

This is great to see.
The original Open Letter is completely unhinged in places so it's good to see such a stiff rebuttal of it. What were they even thinking when they cited Hatshepsut as evidence that 'people of the past lived without gender binaries'? If strong female leaders (Hatshepsut, Queen Elizabeth I, Boudicca etc) are to be held up as example of non binary or even trans people simply because they were just kickass women then I slightly despair for the future of feminism. These people sound uneducated.
Also good to see challenged this idea that everyone has to pay these idiots to 'educate' us - I'm not sure it's going to be value for money if they think regressive gender stereotypes are some big lightbulb of insight. Sadly they didn't remember to include the links to their cash apps anyway

Well they may want to get rid of it, but for most people in the world it’s ‘the most beautiful word in the English language’, see this survey conducted by the British Council a few years ago news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4039185.stm

Bit inconvenient that.

Excellent piece. This particular resonated with me;

Our issue is not with individuals but with the ideological claim that beliefs about gender must be prioritised, at the expense of the material reality of biological sex.

We don’t need continual reminders that people hate us just for existing

But women absolutely should get such reminders...

I've mentioned on here before that in my antenatal class, some of the literature changed its wording from 'mother' to 'birthing parent' during the duration of my course.

It genuinely felt degrading and alienating. They might as well have labelled me a brood mare and been done with it.

I've been on these boards a while now, but it was the first time such a term was applied to me directly and it was very jarring.

God that action plan, some of it so petulant and emotive. "We don’t need continual reminders that people hate us just for existing" Grow the fuck up.

It reminds me of that guy doing the Barclays bank rainbow promotion 'Educate yourself..... you don't have to understand, but you should go along with it for my comfort levels'.

They want paying too for this window into their 'lived experience' that no one was asking for.

Powerfully argued and well-written.

I especially liked the line about biological sex being the most inclusive category of women; it of course encompasses all women across language, culture and geography within the history of our species.

The original article tow which this is replying is something to see. I especially like the 'action plan' - they might just as well have written 'bend over'.

Extremely well written and explained. Thank you for sharing that.