I have borrowed the following from the very wonderful Women and Girls in Scotland in the hope it illustrates the importance of words to MNHQ. The bold type is my addition.
wgscotland.org.uk/what-we-stand-for/
We believe that women and girls still need to be protected on the basis of sex, as we suffer exploitation, discrimination, inequality, and injustice due to our reproductive sex, and indeed this is recognised in current UK equality legislation. As such, we are undertaking a process of reviewing laws, policies and proposals in order to identify where the needs of women and girls are not being considered or met, and we are working to address where this is the case.
We also believe that women and girls should be able to organise as a sex class in order to address the oppression we face as a protected class. We believe that female people should not be the only class of people that cannot organise around the axis of our oppression – i.e. sex – and as such, our group is part of the women’s movement campaigning for the liberation of female people from our subjugation under patriarchy.
We of course welcome allies in this endeavour, but we feel it is of the utmost importance that women know that we do not have to be the one liberation movement that centres all people, not least because this notion itself is rooted in a patriarchal conception of womanhood that functions to pressure women to put the needs of others ahead of our own. That women and girls are the only oppressed class of people expected to set aside our own liberation movement and instead fight for the equality of all people, only serves to demonstrate how crucial the women’s liberation movement is.
We also reject any notion that the erasure of females as a class of people could ever be a tool of inclusivity. We cannot address what we cannot recognise. If we cannot recognise sex, we cannot address sexism or indeed the political significance of females as a sex class. Female people will always have shared interests due to our reproductive sex, and we should be able to acknowledge and name ourselves like other classes of people can. In other words, we both need and deserve recognition as a sex class; we should not be dehumanised and referred to by our bodily functions; we should not be prevented from recognising, naming and addressing the basis of our oppression; and we certainly should not be prevented from defining ourselves in public, or from organising as a class politically.
No-one’s personal experiences, beliefs or identities change what women and girls face and why, and nor do they remove the need to address it. As such, we consider the erasure of female people in language and the refusal to recognise us as a class, as deeply misguided and something which results in profound injustice and harm to women and girls. No efforts in regards to inclusion should ever come at the cost of erasing people in this way, and where they do it should be understood that those efforts have failed.