Oh dear bbc

[midgebabe]

Article on endrometriosis in the bbc

Get to the section where the black women talks about how much harder it is for black and transgender women to get treatment for this condition

Dear bbc, you may be surprised that in fact only transgender men can suffer endrometriosis. And clearly, being female, they don't actually get a look in on the article, but males , who physically cannit have this condition so can never need surgery, do

Article now correct ..please ignore,,,asked this to be removed as unnecessary

Wait, did they fix this in the few minutes it took you to post?

Doesn't need to be deleted. It shows their mindset. Transwomen first and foremost.

Was it originally incorrect

Was this an article or on the radio?

I saw that too first thing this morning. Glad it’s been updated.

I have found that's how most people interpret it initially,, thinking a transgender woman is a woman who presents as a man.

It's a huge problem having a national debate where the definitions of words don't have a common meaning.

@testing987654321

I have found that's how most people interpret it initially,, thinking a transgender woman is a woman who presents as a man.

It's a huge problem having a national debate where the definitions of words don't have a common meaning.

Me too. Which is interesting, isn't it? Most people hear TWAW and, because they think 'Transgender Woman' means a woman who believes she is a man, they make supportive noises and TRAs claim they have lots of support.

But if you actually look at those responses, you realize people are saying 'women are women', because they haven't caught the jargon and don't realize that a TW is a male.

It's one of the reasons there is so much bad feeling around this, because when people discover they've been manipulated and lied to, they tend to conclude negative things about those trying to deceive them.

It's a huge problem having a national debate where the definitions of words don't have a common meaning.

But plays very well to certain lobby groups who are relying on such a widespread confusion of fundamental definitions to push through their agenda. Notice how activists and lobby groups never explicitly clarify that a man can (or should) be classed as a woman without making any effort to change appearance or undergo medical or surgical procedures.

I don't like black women being lumped in with transwomen again.

Glad they've corrected it to transmen and while I agree sexual and reproductive health of non white women is given even less regard than whit women (which I know is poor) but as a WOC I'm sick of being compared to males. Its not inclusive, its disrespectful.

I saw it this morning as transwomen too, assumed that it was confusion with transmen who could suffer with endometriosis.

Presumably the transgender women was part of this quote originally.

"The majority of black women and transgender men I've spoken to have had poor treatment, but you speak to other women and they're like, 'Yes, I have an appointment'."

It would be interesting to know if she was misquoted or if it was her mistake.

Agree it's completely racist when people lump transwomen with black women as though black women aren't actually women.

Yes, that was the quote. You can still see it in the cache here at the moment
<a class="break-all" href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54513072&strip=1&vwsrc=0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54513072&strip=1&vwsrc=0

I wondered that too re misquoting, as surely the poor woman featured knows the difference, as it sounded like she'd spoken to a few trans people.

This was on the Radio 4 news this am - they just used the word woman - I was waiting for the word ‘people’ - and I actually sighed with relief that the BBC knows that only women suffer from endometriosis.

Clearly I was overly optimistic.

Agreed with pps - so sick and tired of the racism of equating black women with males who identify as women.

Whether this was intentional from the BBC - I don’t know have no faith in them anymore but I think it is part of the TRA narrative to suggest being a GC women is a white middle class thing. When it’s a woman thing.

That term Transwoman was specifically meant to confuse, otherwise the natural meaning, the one that the mind automatically goes to, would be clear - anyone understand what I just said???

Even with the correction I'm not entirely sure this anecdote is helpful: 'but you speak to other women and they're like, 'Yes, I have an appointment'. Clearly there are systemic barriers to women of colour and the maternity statistics are shameful, but the article is about how appalling the treatment of women with endometriosis is generally and an acknowledgement that it is poor. Underneath the article is another story about a white woman’s who waited 17 years to be diagnosed, so in the case of this condition it's clearly not that simple. It's important to hear a black woman’s experience, but would it not be better to back this up using actual statistics to make the point, I.e things are even worse for Black and Asian women because statistics show xyz, rather than an anecdote that exists without context. It's just lazy journalism.

Clearly there are systemic barriers to women of colour and the maternity statistics are shameful, but the article is about how appalling the treatment of women with endometriosis is generally and an acknowledgement that it is poor.

This is true. I think they probably don't collect the data by ethnicity that would show that black women are treated more badly by the medical profession than white women. I realise I risk sounding dismissive of black women's experiences, but the truth is that white women's experiences of this condition are routinely dismissed and belittled by the medical profession.

The same is true in childbirth: women of any ethnicity will share stories of how they were undermined and their concerns ignored during birth. There are reasons why rates of maternal mortality are higher for some ethnic minority groups but they are not necessarily down to racism.

I think they probably don't collect the data by ethnicity that would show that black women are treated more badly by the medical profession than white women.

Agree. The article goes on to say there are calls for this to be investigated further, but this implies, as you say, that there isn't currently enough data. If so then I think they should be explicit about that, instead of using an anecdote.

@testing987654321

I have found that's how most people interpret it initially,, thinking a transgender woman is a woman who presents as a man.

It's a huge problem having a national debate where the definitions of words don't have a common meaning.

Yes that's exactly what I thought when I first encountered the terms.

It contributes to the general confusion, very usefully for TRAs.

Also I really don't appreciate the intersectional line on this. White women have been suffering from medical ignorance on this subject for YEARS. I am going to be pretty fucked off if I am being told I am somehow 'privileged' as white to 'only' wait a six years for a diagnosis . This type of approach to the subject is going to do nothing to improve race relations only fan the flames of grievance on both sides.

Average waiting time of 7.5 years to diagnosis is NOT PRIVILEGE. Not for anyone.

Average waiting time of 7.5 years to diagnosis is NOT PRIVILEGE. Not for anyone.

Exactly!

Are we now in the position of being the dumping ground of all ills. I knew we were before but now we're in a different ball game.

There are reasons why rates of maternal mortality are higher for some ethnic minority groups but they are not necessarily down to racism.

Absolutely, for example it has been found for Covid that ethnicity is a confounder for occupation and location - ethnicity does not have a significant impact.

I also imagine amongst immigrant women of language and access to healthcare will also be barriers - it you watch ‘Ambulance’ then it is clear that not everyone realises healthcare is free at the point of delivery for UK residents. And calling women ‘people with a cervix’ is just going to make that worse.

I read the article early this morning and it definitely said 'transgender women' which was confusing as hell to me. Either they misquoted her the first time round or she has now been misquoted to fix the mistake. I also disliked the lumping together of race and transgender issues. I've seen a lot of 'terfs are racist' type tweets and I think it's an attempt to try and paint us in that light.

As someone who is currently begging doctors to give me something to help with my periods, I'm feeling pretty pissed off. There's a terrible mentality that we are supposed to just get on with it, and that eventually the menopause will sort us out anyway. Oh well, doctors will do fuck all for me right now anyway as my BMI is too high to get any kind of care.

I'm fed up with everything being put down to racism - it's an unthinking kneejerk reaction that is close to causing more problems and division than it claims to solve.

I posted on another thread that if you break the maternity stats down by nationality or mother's country of birth origin as opposed to skin colour you see a very different picture.

Issues that then pertain are culture, language barriers, and average socio-economic status of that immigrant community. You can't call it racism if people immigrating from eg a low-skill country, low education country - who can only ever insert themselves at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder of a high-skill country - have health outcomes associated with that level of income.

To ignore all this in favour of focusing wholesale on the racist attitudes of white people is, well, ignorant. Yet this seems to be the dominant narrative.

Efforts to iron out differences in outcome are doomed to failure if you focus on the wrong things.

Absolutely nothing privileged about this. Endometriosis is one of the many female health conditions that is misunderstood, under researched and under treated because women's pain/health is not taken seriously.