To think that in the current dire state of the NHS finances it's a no brainer that first priority for mastectomies goes to cancer patients?

[TigerDrankAllTheWaterInTheTap]

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of whether the NHS or any doctor should ever be doing a mastectomy on a very young person with gender dysphoria, there is no question at all that a woman diagnosed with breast cancer needs treatment as top priority. (Or a man, in the very rare cases where a man gets breast cancer.)

The tweet I've attached is outrageously insensitive. The person concerned is using a mass blocker on Twitter so will never see most of the responses it's getting (mostly very negative indeed). Life in an echo chamber.

It's very worrying also to see the insistence that getting this surgery, that drug, has to happen right away or the person concerned will self-harm, maybe even try to commit suicide. This is very irresponsible. Ideas that like get hold from constant repetition.

Yes, so do I. Could peak trans most of the nation.

I hate the current trend to cast out anyone who even gives the time of day to someone on the 'wrong' side. How can we learn if we're all sitting in our little boxes with our fingers in our ears going 'la la la not listening'?

Yanbu at all.
I am not gc and I often find myself at odds with other mners wrt trans issues but this is actually ridiculous.

If someone wants a non cancer related mastectomy they should pay for it!!

Meanwhile I've been refused a hysterectomy despite having a, in my consultants words "a very high level of issues that have required investigation and trestment" and at a "greater risk of cervical cancer, admittedly" because.......drum roll........"you can't be certain you won't want any more children".

What worries me (and I am female and not a TM despite username which I must change) is that there genuinely are woman who do not know that ‘person with a cervix’ will refer to them. This is a true story:

I worked on an NHS switchboard around the time Jade Goody died when rates of people getting smears shot up. A woman rang one day and said ‘Hello, I want to book in for one of them ear tests. And I said do you mean a hearing test? And she said no, there was nothing wrong with her hearing. But she wanted one of those ear tests. It had been on the news and she’d heard that she should have one. So I asked her which news programme she’d seen it on so I could look it up, and she said ‘Well all of them, it’s been everywhere’. And I’m sitting there feeling kind of stupid and that I may have missed a really important news programme when she pipes up ‘Yes, it’s been everywhere, Heat Magazine, Woman’s Own, Closer, you have to have it to stop you getting cancer like Jade Goody did’. Penny finally drops and I say ‘Oh you mean a cervical smear test’? And she says ‘YES, that’s it! A cervical EAR test!’ I explained that she had slightly the wrong end of the stick and put her through to a nurse who could explain a little more what was involved.

Which was funny at the time, but it does sort of highlight the issue that campaigning to ‘people who have a cervix’ isn’t going to work for some of the worst educated and disadvantaged women who are likely to be the ones who don’t know they should be screened and exactly who this campaign should be aimed at. Women who are aware they are ‘a person with a cervix’ are probably already aware that cervix needs checks.

Ditto women with English as a second language. Women in that situation are much more likely to be able to understand what ‘women’ means than ‘person with a cervix’. Ditto if they’re having family members translate. There is a woman at my children’s school who speaks little English and mainly communicates using her 9 year old son as a translator. I don’t think he’d understand what a cervix was let alone feel capable of explaining it to his mother. ‘You need to have this test because you are a woman’ he could manage fine.

I really don’t buy that this is just harmless inclusive language. I think it has the potential to harm some of the most vulnerable marginalised women in our society.

Excellent point Gerard170 could not agree with you more. This is not inclusive in the slightest, it’s excluding the most vulnerable women in our society and that is misogyny and that is wrong.

So on one hand, trans people are definitely not suffering from a mental health issue and it's transphobic to suggest that they are - but on the other hand, being trans and not getting what you want immediately (hormones/surgery/other people swearing black is white) will possibly run the risk of suicide attempts. Nope, that doesn't sound AT ALL like a mental health issue.

What it reminds me most of, is the chilling group behaviour of adolescent anorexic sufferers, urging one another on and threatening self-harm. We don't have any qualms about calling anorexia what it is. Or about recognising it as something that is exacerbated by social contagion.

Yet nobody wants to name what appears to be going on in the current epidemic of rapid onset gender dysphoria. Because they don't want to look like a bigot. We are letting our young people down.

I really don’t buy that this is just harmless inclusive language

From the perspective of 30 years in TEFL, and a long term resident of a country where I navigate p my life in my second language....it is far from inclusive of non native speakers of English.

It merely layers an unspoken complexity over what could be very simply communicated issues, ideas, instructions and advice.

And that's before we get to pronouns. Even at C1 level (advanced) students in the swing of conversations will muddle the bog standard pronouns we currently teach. I recently saw some of the shiny, bright young things get all excited about updating materials to include the made up ones. My heart, it sank.

Suddenly all the twee motivational bollocks popping up on my professional timelines, whiffing on about "inclusivity", makes sense. They are barely out of their training, and already think they know so much they can confidently hurl a bunch of made up pronouns at elementary and intermediate learners. Of all ages. I swear to god if I open a new edition of Headway and find a xir lurking in there I am retiring on the spot. I am too old for this shit and I know by the sweat of my own language learning brow how hard it is already, before unicorns are encouraged in to fart sparkles all over the target language.

I point blank refuse to use my students as a vehicle for somebody else's identity politics. They pay a ton of money many of them have to borrow, progress is hard earned and a lot rests on them achieving the required levels. I'll be buggered if I'll have any part of making the mountain they have to climb even more slippery.

"you can't be certain you won't want any more children"

Somewhat OT I know, but you bloody well can.

When somone shows you who they ar belive them

"really don’t buy that this is just harmless inclusive language. I think it has the potential to harm some of the most vulnerable marginalised women in our society."

This. For supposedly "intersectional" feminists and woke bro allies they don't understand what this word means, they don't appear to give a fuck about this.

I believe that Gerard.

When I was in hospital with a life threatening condition that needed surgery to resolve it (surgery that I had to wait three weeks for because although I had an acute condition, I was stable and there were numerous emergency surgeries that continually bumped me off the list each day, although I somehow managed not to throw a hissy fit because I thought my needs were greater than someone who had been in a RTA, but anyhow...), my friend visited me. I had a catheter in place and I had asked her to bring me in some San pro because the hospital stuff was crap. In a convo relating to catheters and periods it turned out that my 40 year old friend was unaware that women had a urethra and had always thought she peed out of her vagina.

Many, many women are woefully ill educated regarding their anatomy (through no fault of their own) and “neutral language” goes no way to help address this problem.

^ yes there have been threads on here where women haven't realised the urethra is separate from the vagina.

Also didn't a charity like the Eve Appeal say that people are more likely to know the male terms for genitalia and the various bits than they are the female?

And often vulva and vagina are mixed up etc.

We are very aware of that group Hen and they are unscrupulous. At the risk of sounding like a bunch of conspiracy nuts they are using ASD Trans identifying people as a cover up. They are young, whilst the group targeting them are mostly made up of one demographic. They need the youth element to hide what we believe to be their true intentions.

I'm not aware. Can you fill me in? (autistic parent of an autistic little boy who doesn't follow gender norms)

Just another example of how the transmovement considers that women are disposable (get rid of them and replace with transwomen).

The language thing is very worrying. I live abroad and have done for 15 years. I can hold conversations in the native language and manage day to day life eg parents evening, drs appointments etc. I would instantly register a poster calling for women to pay attention. 15 years on and I still didn't have the foggiest what cervix translate as. (I've just google and the word looks a bit like words related to agriculture and nutrition. It would not ping my radar at all)

15 years on and I still didn't have the foggiest what cervix translate as

Just realised I don't know the translation for cervix either. I had a baby here, they must have mentioned "we are now going to poke at your cervix" during examinations, but the baby is now 18 and I still don't know what it's called.

I live in Germany, lived here on and off since the 1980s, so I'm pretty fluent, highly educated
... but
I've just realised I don't know the German word for cervix

I learned the word for woman on day one, 30+ years ago.

Also, I agree the reality is that many women - actual women - don't know the correct words for various bits of their own anatomy in their own language

So, in being "inclusive," to please the TRAs
we are risking the health of the most vulnerable women, some of the least educated, or those with English as a 2nd or 3rd language

That's not inclusivity; it's privileged bollocks

mostly from the sex that has actual bollocks

Also didn't a charity like the Eve Appeal say that people are more likely to know the male terms for genitalia and the various bits than they are the female?

That doesn't surprise me. When I was going through puberty I was very worried that I had an intersex condition or some other disorder. Why? My genitals didn't look like the illustrations I'd seen. I had a clitoris and visible labia minora. I didn't know the names of these parts or that they were perfectly normal and I was much too embarrassed to mention it to anyone. I did know what a cervix was! Sex education at school was fairly clear about that. But the outer parts were just all described as 'the vagina'

Ok Toby. I have just peak-transed and you can give yourself a big pat on the back for that.
I am now on your side Toby, in that I do think trans-gender surgery is extremely important. In order to get you out of the gene pool.

September is Gyny Cancer awareness month:

Professor Clare McKenzie, RCOG Vice President, writes..
"Sadly, more than 21,000 women are diagnosed with one of the five forms of gynaecological cancer each year in the UK. In 2014, more than 7,750 of these women lost their battle. Despite these alarming statistics, gynaecological cancer remains a taboo subject among the public. We know that stigma, embarrassment and a lack of knowledge about the disease, are key barriers for women to talk openly about gynaecological cancer and seek medical help.

A new survey by The Eve Appeal now reveals a shocking number of women know little about their own anatomy; with nearly half of those surveyed unable to identify the vagina on an anatomical diagram, and 45% of women couldn’t point out the cervix.

Awareness of female cancers was also low; the survey found that 14% of women could not name a single gynaecological cancer, and 8% thought breast cancer was a type of gynaecological cancer. This survey highlights a growing need for better sex education. If women are better informed about what is normal or not when it comes to their gynaecological health, there is a higher chance they will seek help. This knowledge will equip young women for the future, and work to remove the stigma associated with gynaecological cancer.

In the wake of these statistics, The Eve Appeal has launched this year’s Gynaecological Cancer Awareness Month with a theme focusing on knowing our own bodies (#KnowYourBody)."

www.rcog.org.uk/en/blog/gynaecological-cancer-awareness-month-know-your-body/

Thanks R0wan.

Rowan, that's quite shocking. Nearly half of women surveyed didn't know where the vagina was?!

I have also lived abroad for many years. I am fluent in the local language. When I was pregnant with my first, I bought a book on pregnancy in that language, precisely to make sure I knew all the relevant vocabulary. But I doubt everyone will do that. Appealing to people with a cervix rather than women to come for important medical screening is highly irresponsible.