People who have the condition are born with ovaries?!

I really wish I didn’t believe people could be as stupid as that. It’s terrifying.

Even putting aside the woman / language issue the article is medically illiterate. A persistent cough can be caused by reflux which can be diet related. Of course a Doctor is going to ask about your diet.

When Normandie Luscher, a 35-year-old illustrator in Syracuse, went to the doctor for a persistent cough, she felt judged for her size. “The doctor was like, ‘So, tell me about what you’re eating,’” says Luscher, who’d already had bariatric surgery to treat the prediabetes she developed from having PCOS. “I was just like, ‘Why? What does that have to do with anything?’”

I agree a single email won't change anything but during the election campaign I was struck by politicians saying 'that never comes up on the doorstep' when asked about single sex spaces. I think we often think someone else is raising issues for us when actually we have to be the ones doing it. While organised campaigns are good I do think individuals saying 'this is wrong' are useful too.

I was going to say that posters on mumsnet have said it

and then i got proof 😀

which is ironic 🤔

Ah yes, the othering of black women proving sexism, racism amd misogyny are very much alive and well at The Guardian.

Welcome to the best corner of the internet, OP. You'll find it full of information. Ignore the sad little men and their confused female assistants who occasionally plop on these threads. I find it best to "grey rock" those.

You’d know if yiu had x ray eyes

obviously…

but you know what i mean

do you have xray eyes?

or do you not really know…

You know this how?

Such a good point. I mean I’ve never seen my ovaries but have to assume I have some due to having periods the last 30-odd years and conceiving and gestating two babies during that time. If you haven’t had periods or babies, how are you supposed to know?

If someone hasn’t started their periods by the time they’re 16 (which will be at least 50% of people), should they all go to their GP to ask for investigation? After all they might have ovaries they don’t know about.

@lunaandlily If you're a medical officer in a boxing organisation that is now affiliated to the IOC and is running an appropriate system to ensure that women can compete more safely in international boxing, that's great news and I'd love to hear more on how you set that up. However, should you be posting intimate medical details of one of your competitors on the Web?

If you're just a member of the public like us, maybe you don't know the details of Olympian's bodies any more than we do.

Actually they do talk about women in the article, but it's stating that black women are under diagnosed, so for some reason the author is happy to talk about women if they are a particular ethnicity but not women generally.
I was fuming about this article, a condition that only affects females, and we aren't even allowed to mention that.

Are you sure about that? Have you seen them? Do you have evidence? Are you Imane's Dr and breaching confidentiality?

The controversy over Imane was because they almost certainly have a DSD (see comments from IOC and interview with the trainer) It's therefore likely that they don't have ovaries, but have internal testes that fueled male puberty and giving male advantage.

@MontagueMoo - three of the examples of the use of 'women' are direct quotes. The fourth 'black women' from the context were most likely also the words of the expert being indirectly quoted in that section.

So no, the person writing the piece avoided using the word 'women' herself. And also 'girl'. Many of us had PCOS symptoms starting in our teens, and it would have been so helpful to know the reason for the acne, the infrequent but so painful periods - and maybe get appropriate treatment. It's seriously, misleadingly exclusionary to talk in terms of 'menstruating adults' being the group who suffer from PCOS with no mention of girls. Hell, the piece wasn't even 'inclusive' of those who identify as 'nonbinary' or as transboys!

This piece wasn't written as it was to be 'inclusive'.

Imane Khelif has ovaries but if you call her a woman on mumsnet, you better watch out. Never happy, you lot.

💐
Great post.

Yet inevitably every example of 'people with PCOS' is a woman. Obviously. So what do they think they're achieving?

That is very moving, @Boudiccaofsteel . I wish someone from the guardian could read it. I'm sorry you have had to struggle with this horrible condition, and that idiotic stuff like this has made things even harder for you.

It's actually sinister . As a woman who has suffered badly from PCOS I was trying to find any info about PCOS and latest research. I was shocked beyond belief to find some absolute nonsense on the net that PCOS women were trans. I cannot imagine what I would have felt as a scared and confused teeneager struggling with PCOS symptoms had I seen this. It is incredibly dangerous to suggest a woman with pcos is any thing other than a woman or a girl because frankly every day you live with this disorder you feel less than other women as is: and as a teenager growing up in the 80s I cannot begin to imagine what a young teenager would go through today with unrealistic besuty standards promoted by social media.

i could easily see how a young woman would feel like she had no option as a PCOs woman to opt out of womanhood entirely where she would never be accepted as not beautiful enough and try and find "acceptance" as a "man".

I used to feel so awful as a teeemager that I thought the only man who would ever be interested in me would be blind because of how horrible I looked. Craxy but those teenage years are hard. And to put this in context I did not have the facial and body hair issues that many with PCOs have being a natural blonde: with me it was rapid weight gain, awful periods, acne and scalp hair loss

And for any young girl reading this please do not take note of this rubbish. You are 100 per cent a woman, a strong fine woman. I kept my PCOs a secret for many years but I never experienced anything but support from my friends when I told them. Ignoring the nonsense online, we probably know a little more about it now and the advice I would give is to make sure to do exercise that you enjoy and find healthy alternatives to starchy carbs that you can work into everyday meals as crash diets will not work for you long term .

It's got nothing to do with being inclusive,@Confusedovaries

As a previous poster points out, the number of transmen (women identifying as men) who have PCOS is tiny. Since when have women, let alone a tiny minority of women, been able to single handedly change the way society talks about them. No-one listens to women.

No, this language mangling is being driven by men. Specifically men who want to claim the word woman. In order for men to claim the word woman, they have to uncouple its definition from female biology. Its concept cannot be biology dependent. because they lack that biology.

Monroe Bergdorf famously told women not to wear pussy hats on a woman's march, because it's exclusionary.

Shon Faye gleefully wrote on Twitter 'women, enjoy your erasure.'

It's deliberate. And it's being driven by men.

You won't find any articles talking about people with prostates, or sperm providers, or people born to fertilise. (Someone will want that as a band name, or maybe a sperm donation charity).

The other thing is, and this one always gets me, despite the determination to mangle language and prevent people from using it accurately, these activists also rely, one hundred percent, on everyone absolutely using it correctly in their heads.

how else would anyone know what the hell they were talking about, unless they were relying on every reader being fully aware that only women have ovaries. You can't see them, how do you know you've got them? We all accept the only women have them, but have to pretend we don't accept that.

Articles like this fully rely on a knowledge that they are going out of their way to stop you from talking about.

Good article, thanks. Note: Decreases Overall Inclusivity (for anyone arguing to do this to be inclusive)

Those are women.

They support it, depressingly, but any benefit to them is incidental, IMO.

@Confusedovaries
you may find this article interesting and potentially useful in formulating arguments against removing sex based language, ie woman, girl, female, from women’s health.

it seems to happen less from men’s health but I think it is beginning there too now.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2022.818856/full

And this is why language mangling is unhelpful.

Women, females, the cunty kind, irrespective of if the plumbing works, who "transition" are referred to as transmen not transwomen.

Transwomen are the ones born with cock and balls, usually not ambiguous ones either.

Then again it should be argued that anyone with cock and balls (regardless of how these were acquired) and boobs (also regardless of how these were acquired) is a transwoman.

To be fair, it affects people born without eyes more.