Advice (and moral support) please re: changing women's language

[SybillTrelawney]

Recently someone at work posted a link to an article about "chestfeeding", and expressed surprise that "breastfeeding" might be considered transphobic. There followed a string of replies, some fairly benign, some pretty ridiculous (I would love to quote them, but I'm not sure it would be wise), and one pointing out that the removal of certain language can actually have safety implications, e.g. women who don't know what a cervix is may not realise they need to be screened if the word "women" isn't explicitly mentioned.

Then someone (a young woman) wrote a long post saying that they don't think it does any harm to women to refer to them as "people who ..." or similar, because it's more inclusive to minorities and moves us away from gender binaries. They also said we should be thinking about how resistance to changes in language could look to people who are trans or struggling with their identity, and that we should take any opportunity we can to make things less difficult for them.

Please will you help me construct a response that is safe for a mostly-reasonable-but-increasingly-woke workplace? I am feeling so frustrated, angry and helpless, and I am sick of this kind of nonsense being left unchallenged. I need to explain (in the "kindest" way possible), why in fact it can be harmful to women to have changes to their language imposed on them without their consent, and the hypocrisy in saying we need to be mindful of the language that trans people want us to use, but not the language that women want to be used about them.

Gender, which is often termed 'sex role' when thinking of other species is the thing which trans people are attempting to change. Or at least they are attempting to change the outward representation of their sex role since many trans people report to have always felt like the other gender.

Biological sex is assigned at conception and is linked to several characteristics, including genetics and appearance of reproductive organs.

Biological sex is what should be being referred to by medical professionals when talking about reproductive health as it is the most relevant in these circumstances. Therefore, women have periods, women breastfeed, women ovulate, women give birth.

Biological men do not do these things. They may wish to change their name to a female name, to be referred to as she and express themselves as stereotypically female which is OK, and something we should all be supportive of to make sure these individuals are included in society. These people should have the same rights as everyone else.

None of this should be controversial. This is basic bio.

I messaged you but I just remembered another personal example.

Growing up my brothers best friend’s mother barely spoke or read English. My brothers friend translated anything she needed to know. (Kids translating for parents was far from unusual where I grew up). Easy for a teenage boy to tell his mum, ‘it says women need to have this checkup at the doctors’ pretty much impossible for a teenage boy to try and explain the term ‘cervix’ to his mother in a language he didn’t speak very well.

But I don’t suppose working class immigrant women are the sort of minorities that matter to the sort of person who thinks changing the language to remove easy to understand terms specific to women should be done to please biological males.

I have another friend who died from cervical cancer. For some of us this is really personal.

@SybillTrelawney I really think that you need to be clear, succinct and bullet-pointed. Your listeners clearly have closed minds and the attention span of a gnat, so be concise...

• if you erase women you have no way of describing 51% of the population
• If you erase women you are erasing women's sports. Period.
• if you erase women you have no more women MPs, no more women doctors. You are putting women back to where they were before the suffragettes.
• male privilege is A THING
• but we can only call out men's privilege if we have a thing called women

-i am a woman, and a mother. How dare you attempt to minimise my lived experience. I so nearly died in childbirth to raise a generation who claim motherhood is an abstract concept (etc etc or whatever your own personal rant is!!)

No point being wordy. Or 'kind'. That's their game.

It is harmful to refer to women as people

The inability of the world to see and respect the differences between women and men , the fact that the default person is male , costs lives. Female lives

Invisible women book

I'd probably lose my temper and tell the young woman to checknher goddamn privilege and think about not excluding immigrants.

I've just been talking on another thread about doing A-level French, which is certainly a higher level of formal education in a second language than you can assume any refugee has, especially women from countries that don't value women's education. That puts me, or at least younger me at B2 level in French.

Do you think I know the word cervix? No I bloody don't. We didn't do how to talk about women's health issues without mentioning women. Circuitous language, even if it avoids polysyllabic vocabulary, is a very high level of language. We did straight-forward commentary on nuclear power and recycling, leavened with learning to make anodyne analysis of French literary classics.

I did not do cervix, person with a cervix, uterus or fallopian tubes. In fact, I am certain that the majority of my class didn't know what a cervix was in English.

And now we're expecting more of immigrants in our health information pamphlets than would be expected of teens hoping to do French at university! It is horrendous class-privilege.

A few points:

• If it's OK to erase the words "woman", "mother", etc, why are we not also erasing the words "man", "father"? There's a huge double standard here and I would encourage people to think about why that is (hint: misogyny)

• Sex discrimination exists. Violence against women exists. We still live in a patriarchy. So if you erase the word "woman" you have no way of naming the problems, let alone addressing them.

• if words are important to trans people when it comes to their identity, what about people who feel that being a woman (biological female) is important to their identity? Why do a small minority get to dictate how the majority describe themselves?

Also see 4w.pub/the-move-to-erase-women-from-periods-pregnancy-and-parenting/

Ask if it is not exclusive of many other people with protected characteristics: those who speak English as a second language ( indirect racial discrimination) especially those with languages with gender concepts like French), people with autism who will find the concept of speaking other than the truth very difficult and will have a whole new level of stress added to communications with others that can be very challenging, people with learning difficulties who may have difficulty with speech, people with dementia . So are you being kind and inclusive of all these people who are all protected under the Equality Act and why do they deserve less respect, kindness and protection

In addition to the points made, stress that it’s not inclusive to remove words describing the majority of the population, that it’s reductive to label women as body parts and this is something that is exclusively happening to women so why would anyone motivated by an interest in equal rights advocate for this.

Clear and accurate language is the cornerstone of good safeguarding and healthcare and this particularly applies to children and all vulnerable adults. Words you are using to describe your own body and what happens to it.

Could you say something about how it’s important to find the right balance amongst all minority groups, vulnerable people and people with special needs so that everyone can easily access the services and provisions that the need and feel able to use the correct language (ie not be laughed at, cause offence or be misunderstood). This applies verbally and in reading and writing - and not just in health awareness but in legally binding documents such as consent forms.

Different groups need to be considered. I’ve been looking at this for something else and it is high numbers:

English as a second language - for 10% of the population English is their second language. 1.3% of the population can speak English but not well and 0.3% cannot speak English at all. (2011 census). So 6.6m people affected.

Young people - 19% of the population are under 16. (As 2018 - ONS website)

Elderly people - people over 65 =12m people/ people over 75 = 5.4m people (Age UK website)

Autism affects 0.9% of the population. 5.5m people (Autism society website)

Illiteracy- 16.4% of people in England are described as having ‘very poor literacy skills’ (Literary trust website) so 7.1m people in England alone.

Learning disabilities- 1.5m people have a learning disability (350,000 are classed as severe) (NHS website)

Religious/cultural groups (can’t see the numbers - but I mean different areas of the country having their own dialects, groups having their own rules on education and opportunity, distrust of public bodies etc)

Bea Jaspert wrote an article on this that I found oddly compelling. Obviously I am fully aware of the situation, but I think bringing it all together the way she does sends a powerful message about the end point of all this.

beajaspert.substack.com/p/lets-form-an-alliance

Excellent replies here. I need to keep this thread for reference.

I do think the points about clear language are important ones. This approach excludes groups who don't have English as their mother tongue (is even that now forbidden?)

Does anyone remember the plain English campaign? And when the public sector was getting whacked for using impenetrable terms? Have we all moved - collectively - so much that we can now play about with English like this?

I also think that there is a serious point in that: if you can't describe or be told about the subject of a sentence or an issue, you don't know what it is. So things don't get addressed?

What's next? Shall we hide disability because it's "more inclusive"? Eg:

"Some people found the entrance cumbersome"
"Disabled people who use wheel chairs could not open the door"

Which sentence describes what is meant? Who is impacted by the crappy doors? In the first sentence, you don't know.

If women are allowed to be hidden and subsumed then seriously, who's next?

That I would love to live in a world where gender never needed to be given a thought but because of the inequalities that women experience based on their sex then women’s language like their experiences must remain defined. Breastfeeding is a woman’s issue and to separate it from women is offensive when already so many women are excluded from support. Breastfeeding women and people who breastfeed (or chest feed erm if they want inaccurate terms) can be referred to together. There is nothing kind in reducing me to a person who breastfeeds when it was one of the first moments that connected me to my breasts, to women through time and where I realised the freedom in being in a room with just other women.

Also point out that men have breasts and can get breast cancer so in what way is breastfeeding not an inclusive word?

The use of cervix havers is a particularly egregious example given that cancer charities have in previous years done many studies and awareness campaigns to say that using such specific medical language alienates a lot of women, and you should use plain language to reach every woman:

E.g.
metro.co.uk/2020/11/09/almost-50-of-women-dont-know-where-their-cervix-is-finds-study-13561743/amp/

And
WHEN YOU SAY – "vagina"
EXPLAIN IT WITH – "a woman’s intimate area / where a baby comes from"
www.jostrust.org.uk/professionals/cervical-screening/language

It's just so disheartening when the charities then discard their own advice in the pursuit of "inclusivity" and throw vulnerable women under the bus.

Which is better, remove female specific language to abate the gender dysphoria of less than 1% of the population, or use clear language to ensure the up to 50% of women (who due to education, disability or language barriers can't comprehend these terms) get the healthcare they need and save their lives?

Another example was that of SANDS charity describing bereaved mothers as "birthing parents". In order to be inclusive to trans-men/non binary females they denied women the language of mother and motherhood to describe themselves, when surely they know how much those terms mean to those who have lost a baby?

Why are some identies more important to validate than others?

Ultimately the argument works both ways, if it's important to use the language and preferred pronouns of some people then that consideration should apply to everyone. I want to be referred to as a woman when I access healthcare and support, not a dissociated set of body parts.

srh.bmj.com/content/41/4/248

Barriers to ethnic minority groups taking up screening include using language and that some women "did not recognise the terms ‘cervical screening’ or ‘smear test"

Everyone's said it far better than me, but this stuff really gets on my nerves. Women are not kindly support units and there is no moral righteousness in creating a real risk to women's health - to women's lives frankly - so she can feel woke and display how much better she is than all those other boring women. Because she isn't and women will die from this dangerous and dehumanising erasure of correct, accessible language in relation to health campaigns. If she's really bothered, she can do something about the biological essentialism of men's health campaigns although she won't thankfully.

Menstruators, people with a cervix - referring to people by bodily function or body part is dehumanising. Health care professionals know this - they now know not to talk about 'the broken leg' in bed 4. This same dignity and respect must also apply to women.

Also, i would like healthcare providers to be respectful of the language I prefer: inclusive language must also consider the needs of women.

Great thread

Some of these great responses should be stickied at the top of this board.

AnyOldPrion Thanks for that article, I've saved it.

There’s an epidemic of this bs in work places right now. Posting the link to a thread I started earlier in the week asking for similar help. Got some really useful responses. Will post a link to this thread there too.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4157028-dealing-with-wokie-BS-around-gender-at-work

I find it all so exhausting. To be facing this crap at the same time as when so many of us have been hit - surprise! - with the disproportionate burden of coping with school and nursery closures. Now, on top of juggling childcare, home schooling and day jobs, we also have the additional burden of having to take on stupid colleagues at work wanting to throw us under a bus to prove their woke credentials.

Good luck sisters. We’re going to need each other. I think of this board as my outsourced brain extension, as the one i come with frankly cannot handle all this crap at the same time.

Thank you all so much for these brilliant responses! I haven't had a spare moment today, but when I get one I'm going to go through all your posts and links, and try to piece something together that covers all the main points. It might get quite long, but I think all of this need to be said, and I am not going to be strong-armed into staying quiet on this issue.

I feel a small gimmer of hope that I might get through to a few of the fence-sitters with some of these arguments, because e.g. the points relating directly to health and safety are pretty basic, and pretty hard to argue against without sounding like a nasty piece of work (though I suppose someone will find a way — logic doesn't tend to be their strong suit). Appearing "kind" seems to be the number one priority of most of these people, so I think I need to appeal to that.

I found it absolutely mind-boggling that the woman who wrote the post could say, without a hint of irony, that she didn't think it did any harm to women to change their language. I'm just imagining the chaos that would ensue if anyone dared say the same thing about trans people and their pronouns.

There's a really good article from Lionel Shriver about this in the Times just now. You may find some useful quotes there. She's no fan of any of this shit.

Also I saw someone using the term "Stop Linguicide" today which I thought was a rather good word.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/breastfeeding-is-now-chestfeeding-why-are-the-language-police-trying-to-wipe-out-women-wfqmws0j0