Transing the past - the BBC (surprise) has gone all woke on Call the Midwife

[stumbledin]

I gave up watching this ages ago when it stopped being realistic and became all syrupy.

But I got caught in an "iPlayer wont load" loop and kept being sent back to the christmas special of CtM.

And in one scene they show new forms for taking medical records, and guess what they had a space foe "Gender"! as if anyone in the medical profession or even the world at large would have used that word when what they were recording and needed to know was Sex.

Just posting this to vent, not really expecting anyone to be surprised at the BBC, but you would think they would make some effort to keep the medical part of the story accurate.

In fact its surprising they haven't transed the whole series and renamed it Call the Midperson!

I would not assume this was wokeness so much as a timeline error, which are common in historical shows.

The show did go downhill a fair bit when it moved on from the biographical stories that really evoked the sense of peering into the past, and instead the plot-lines began to revolve around 21st century issues.

Ludicrous! But I wonder if that really is wokeness, or incompetence, or a careless and unprofessional mixture of the two? I have noticed that it's very rare to see heroes or heroines of historical dramas expressing the usual behaviour and opinions of their times.

The characters we're meant to like usually have impeccable 21st century outlooks. Because it is of course impossible to imagine good people in other times thinking differently from us.

I was rather cheered when Shelagh reassured the woman who had suffered seven miscarriages that she was definitely a mother and had been for a long long time.

SANDSUK take note.

Yes I saw "gender" on the wristband. Ridiculous. It wasn't even a word then was it?

@2fallsagain

Yes I saw "gender" on the wristband. Ridiculous. It wasn't even a word then was it?

It was a word used in relation to grammar.

But it's not uncommon to see it used inappropriately in historical dramas instead of "sex". Quite a few people, including tv writers, don't realise how the language has changed, and it's common to see all kinds of anachronisms in language in those kinds of productions.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed this.