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Pregnant people?! It's 'women'

405 replies

BIWI · 19/09/2023 14:57

Two links to surveys today, from Kings College London and Cardiff University. Both surveys wanting to speak to 'pregnant people'.

It's women who get pregnant and give birth. Male members of our society are unable to conceive, grow and birth babies.

Please, please, please - why are you accepting these requests? Do you not read them first? (Especially seeing as you allow them to post their links for free).

I'm appalled that Mumsnet is now complicit in erasing the word 'woman'.

OP posts:
AnSolas · 20/09/2023 14:55

Graciebobcat · 20/09/2023 14:25

The survey could have used the word women throughout with an add on for the miniscule number of females with a 'gender identity'. But we all know it's not about transmen, but about uncoupling 'women' from their bodies because the men won't allow us to say ONLY women get pregnant, have periods etc.

Do we all know that?

A conspiracy of men and TRAs put together these hospital and university surveys using the word people in order that women can be uncoupled from their bodies and not be allowed to talk about women getting pregnant?

Or do you think it's more likely that it was a mixed group of people or predominantly women putting the surveys together, looking for inclusive language and getting it wrong?

It is a cop out.

Women and only women have babies.
Babies are 100% dependent on other humans so "somebody" has to step up and talk about babies and rights.
When the baby is in the woman that is a ethical issue.
All through the process of growing (or not growing) new humans there is a clash of rights.
The sperm provider and the woman.
The baby and the woman
The state and the woman

The ideology that women can be uncoupled from their bodies and not be allowed to talk about women getting pregnant avoids all the silly womens rights issues that crop up when the grow the new human is a woman only thing.

EasternStandard · 20/09/2023 14:58

Cailleachian · 20/09/2023 13:10

I dont get the "lets not tie ourselves in knots" after explaining why we need three terms for female people, centred around age, rather than using the term "people".

The whole thread is an insistance that female people are women "by definition". This is the whole mantra, female people cannot be people because they are women (with girls tagged on as somekind of afterthought for "women in training").

What I am saying is that being a woman is not a desirable state of existence, its something that female people are coerced into largely by other female people who have been brainwashed and are now repeating the indoctrination.

The category of "woman" is something that men have defined - not as some kind of neutral descriptor of "female people" like many here seem to believe, but as an ideological categorisation of what they want female people to be.

No. Women is not about men

It’s adult human female and separate to men entirely

Including their wants

loislovesstewie · 20/09/2023 15:03

Animals have words to define the male and female of the species as per biology. Just that ; in humans it's man/woman.

Alstroemeria123 · 20/09/2023 15:05

BIWI · 20/09/2023 14:51

I'd prefer go by what our legislation has defined than by anything De Beauvoir has written!

"As to age, the Equality Act 2010 says "a woman is a female of any age".

Its predecessor, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, says, " "woman " includes a female of any age".

I think the law is wrong in this case. Girls are not women. It’s a legal fiction.

Same as legally, people with XY chromosomes and a GRC are women.

Cailleachian · 20/09/2023 15:13

BIWI · 20/09/2023 14:51

I'd prefer go by what our legislation has defined than by anything De Beauvoir has written!

"As to age, the Equality Act 2010 says "a woman is a female of any age".

Its predecessor, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, says, " "woman " includes a female of any age".

And the GRA 2004 says that woman includes a male with a gender recognition certificate.

Male people have disproportionate control over the law.

loislovesstewie · 20/09/2023 15:13

No! people with XY chromosomes can never be women.

PinkRoses1245 · 20/09/2023 15:14

But I'm a person first. and who cares.

Theeyeballsinthesky · 20/09/2023 15:17

And yet here you are!

all women are people
not all people are women

Heyhoherewegoagain · 20/09/2023 15:21

Do you always work so hard to take offence 🙄

Cailleachian · 20/09/2023 15:42

But it all ultimately comes back to "who is a woman"?

And my answer is that I dont really think anyone is, any more than anyone "is" a Leo or "is" a INTJ. Woman is an ideological construct that is imposed on female people from birth as something inevitable that they will become.

EasternStandard · 20/09/2023 15:44

Cailleachian · 20/09/2023 15:42

But it all ultimately comes back to "who is a woman"?

And my answer is that I dont really think anyone is, any more than anyone "is" a Leo or "is" a INTJ. Woman is an ideological construct that is imposed on female people from birth as something inevitable that they will become.

Pp put it well

Animals have words to define the male and female of the species as per biology. Just that ; in humans it's man/woman

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 15:46

Woman is an ideological construct that is imposed on female people from birth as something inevitable that they will become.

No, I don't see that being a woman needs this kind of ideological baggage. A woman is a female human who has reached adulthood. No stereotypes needed. You do you.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 15:53

Same as legally, people with XY chromosomes and a GRC are women.

Not for all purposes, no. It's not that simple. There are exceptions.

Theeyeballsinthesky · 20/09/2023 16:02

A women is an adult human female. That’s it! No more, no less

just like a mare is a adult female horse or a hen is an adult female chicken

that’s literally all a woman is

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 16:05

GoodOldEmmaNess · 20/09/2023 12:57

Because women is a man-made ideological concept, not a material difference of biology.
No it isn't. Words don't just mean whatever you want them to mean, no matter how hard you try to make them do that. You'd be closer to the mark if you said that 'lady' is a man-made ideological concept, since it evokes notions of class, behaviour, etiquette, femininity, which are all socially constructed realities. But woman, no. It refers to the 'material difference of biology' of which you speak.

Are you getting confused between 'women' (ie the word) and women (ie adult human females)? Clearly all words are human constructs since we create language and use essentially arbitrary sounds to designate parts of reality. But that doesn't, without extensive further argument, entail that the parts of reality so-designated are themselves constructs, otherwise our self-designation as humans or as mammals or as extended objects in space would all be similarly 'ideological'.

That is an arguable view (though you'd need to present the arguments!), but what it doesn't do is indicate why we need to treat the word 'woman' as more of an ideological construct than, say, human or table or shoe.

Edited

This.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 16:07

There was a very recent survey that showed that a lot of people do indeed think that transwoman is the word for a female human who identifies as a male.

Roughly a third of those polled.

GoodOldEmmaNess · 20/09/2023 16:43

The category of "woman" is something that men have defined - not as some kind of neutral descriptor of "female people" like many here seem to believe, but as an ideological categorisation of what they want female people to be.

That is simply and totally false. Otherwise how could entire women's movements under the banner woman's rights women's liberation , active over many decades, contain the manifestos that they do contain. Namely, that women - the sex category that has historically been oppressed by men and subjected to confining gender stereotypes, etc - must achieve social equality, an end to male violence, and the right to pursue their lives regardless of confining gender stereotypes.

You absolutely cannot deny that, linguistically, the term woman has been used by women to name a material sex category and to assert their own autonomous material reality and their rights.

And if you really, truly do believe that the term woman does not simply designate the material sex category, then why are you not campaigning for the introduction of a term that does designate this category, since clearly we cannot speak clearly of this category - or our rights - without naming it?

It is not the traditional use of the term woman that is "an ideological categorisation of what [men] want female people to be". It is the RE-definition of the term 'woman' by the so-called trans rights movement (essentially nothing more than a form of men's rights activism) that converts the term into an ideological one when it divorces 'woman' from its traditional meaning (adult human female) and recreates womanhood as an idea in men's heads, ie as a projection of men's own desires about the women they want to 'be' or screw or screw over.

That re-definition is not an organic evolution of language; it is a deliberate imposition, to deprive us of a term that defines the sex category to which we belong, so that we no longer have the conceptual framework to articulate the demands that womens rights movements have historically agitated for and to some extent achieved.

And reference to de Beauvoir's "women are not born but made" is not the gotcha you think it is. It is a perfectly unexeptional rhetorical statement, conveying the fact that the manner in which women experience themselves in a sexist society is created not simply from their biological starting point but from the social accretions to which that starting point is vulnerable. Time and again people pretend that they don't understand the idea of rhetorical forms of expression, just in order to shoehorn in a quote that - very superficially - gives them a momentary veneer of having said something that they can substantiate philosophically

GoodOldEmmaNess · 20/09/2023 17:03

Honestly I don't know why I keep responding to Cailleachian's words. It reminds me of when my son asked me 'Why can't you tackle in tennis?' Just soo sooo wide of the mark that it is hard to find the footholds that will get us back to talking sense.

Eg 'This is the whole mantra, female people cannot be people because they are women.' What? Whose mantra? The term women (in conjunction with the term girls) means the same as 'female people'. So this alleged mantra is equivalent to saying that 'female people cannot be people because they are female people'. An absolute word salad.

Cailleachian · 20/09/2023 17:27

But I am suggesting an alternative - female people.

At the root of women's liberation is liberation from being a woman. Not from being a female person, because being female is a material state, but from being a woman.

Take "woman identified woman" (1970).

"As the source of self-hate and lack of real self are rooted in our male given identity, we must create a new sense of self. As long as we cling to the idea of "being a woman" we will sense some conflict with that incipient self, that sense of I, that sense of a whole person"

http://lzigelyte.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/queertheory/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Woman-Identified-Woman.pdf

Or the SCUM Manifesto (1971)

"To be sure he's a Man', the male must see to it that the female be clearly a Woman', the opposite of a `Man', that is, the female must act like a faggot. And Daddy's Girl, all of whose female instincts were wrenched out of her when little, easily and obligingly adapts herself to the role."

https://www.2ra.co/uploads/2/6/8/6/26862532/scum_manifesto.pdf

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 17:32

@Cailleachian

You have a huge blind spot. Being a woman doesn't require any ideological baggage by default. It just requires being born female and surviving to adulthood. Gender" is where that ideological and stereotypical view comes in.

MillicentTrilbyHiggins · 20/09/2023 17:33

At the root of women's liberation is liberation from being a woman. Not from being a female person, because being female is a material state, but from being a woman.

That's not what women's lib is, is it? I thought it was a movement set up to gain equality between the sexes.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 17:34

This is academic theory that you're quoting. I've read some of it, but nothing of this nature is in fact necessary to be a woman, and most women worldwide haven't read any of it.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 17:36

I don't need to be liberated from being a woman. I'm fine being a woman, it's the discrimination, harassment and disrespect from the opposite sex, and the internalised version of it from my own sex that I'm objecting to.

Cailleachian · 20/09/2023 18:01

Its hardly academic theory - the Radicalesbians and Solanas werent professors or something.

@MillicentTrilbyHiggins feminism as "equality between the sexes" is what men tell us feminism is. That is not feminism, feminism is centring female people.

Take abortion, it is perfectly equal for people of neither sex to be prosecuted for having an abortion, both men and women treated completely equally. Only equality is then a shit show for female people.

On the other hand, the right to bodily autonomy is critical for all people and it is for all people to determine whether or not they want to continue with a pregnancy. That is also equal.

Male people will always argue for the version of equality that suits them best.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 20/09/2023 18:02

It's theory. Most women aren't interested and don't feel any need to engage with it, rightly or wrongly.