The lancet on periods “bodies with vaginas”

[Theeyeballsinthesky]

twitter.com/thelancet/status/1441372277786951681?s=21

For fucks fucking sake!!! Incidentally heard the prostate cancer ad about half an hour ago “what a creature is a man” funny how men are not bodies with penises innit

Och Rachel. Didn’t want to upset the men

I’ve emailed Richard - what a strange strangulation of the languate and utter bullshit this is

Just thought-

The place where terms that really do mean 'bodies with vaginas' are used often is in porn.

Then if searching for something with a woman you do mean you want content including a body with a vagina. Not seeing them as people but as a group of holes tits etc that you want to see involved in sex/ being sexually dominated/ being humiliated/ doing things(having things done) that are extreme and likely painful.

The people with vaginas are often described using terms that are insulting/ and the situations they are in might be having parts of her ruined, destroyed, i mean no need to go on.

So I'd say that calling us bodies with vaginas may subconsciously associate us with there for fucking in ways common in mainstream porn.

We already have the normalisation of throttling women during sex. And men seem to quite often 'accidentally' kill us.

I mean I suddenly thought. I've been saying the new language is dehumanising for ages. But only just now really thought about the impact of the connections to sex and onto porn.

[quote FannyCann]Rachel Clarke clarified her deletion of the tweet. Screen shot for posterity.

twitter.com/doctor_oxford/status/1441519934023114752?s=21[/quote]
Rachel pandering to the folkz.

'People with vaginas' is just as fucking bad.

Also doesn’t bodies with vaginas = cunts?!

I think more people are joining the dots that what JK Rowling said about female erasure was pointing to a problem with gender identity ideology rather than maliciously evil transphobia.

I’m so sick of this doublespeak bullshit

I've emailed the editor. Not sure if I managed to convey how utterly revolting this language is, but I gave it a shot.

I emailed the body with a dick in charge too.

I'm sure that sentence would benefit from some punctuation...

There are some nauseating panderers replying to Rachel Clarke.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

I think more people are joining the dots that what JK Rowling said about female erasure was pointing to a problem with gender identity ideology rather than maliciously evil transphobia.

I've seen a fair few people either paraphrasing or outright quoting her 'Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?' tweet.

This is on a different level to a tweet from Owen Jones or even the ACLU’s recent one. This is The Lancet, for gods sake. I’m so beyond offended at this.

My first thought is to email the editor to complain. But all that will happen is I’ll get a bland non-apology reply in several weeks time when they think the issue has blown over . Like the BBC do. Like the Royal Academy did. Like IPSO did when I complained about JKR articles.

No, this time the editor needs to be sacked for allowing this. Women are being disciplined and sacked for hurting trans feelings. Until people realise that allowing this rubbish has consequences too will things change. Unfortunately, the only way he will be sacked is if the adverse press attention forces it to happen.

I've just read this (my sister is a subscriber, not me, but she sent me the full article). The article's use of terms referring to "the category of people who menstruate" is very muddled:

-"period poverty....can lead to missing school, thus threatening girls' education...
-"Period: End of Sentence...follows a group of young women in an Indian village..."
-"weaving together reclaimed traditions with personal accounts from menstruators across the world..."

• ""One of the questions that we always get at the Vagina Museum is 'what did people do in the past with their periods?'"
• "The physician Bela Schick took an experimental approach to the supposed toxicity of menstrual blood. Participants were given bunches of flowers to handle...."
• "Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas has been neglected--for example in the understanding of endometriosis and the way women's pain has been seen as more likely to have an emotional....cause"
• "[objects]...reveal how people who menstruate have dealt with their periods"
• Schechter told me how...a woman in her mid-30s stepped in to share some of her wisdom" (n.b. it's unclear whether Schechter checked her gender identity or just assumed - the wisdom is about whether a tampon can actually get stuck up a vagina btw)
• "This exhibition is particularly special in its focus on gendered histories, the medical visibility of women's bodies, and..."

So: women/woman, girls, menstruators, people who menstruate, bodies with vaginas, then the deliberately obfuscating "people" and "participants".

Are we supposed to think that all of these things are the same? Is there a reason that the group of young women in an Indian village are all assumed to have the gender identity of "woman" (full disclosure: I've not seen the documentary, maybe they do ask the impoverished Indian girls whether they identify as female)? Or that "bodies with vaginas" living in certain settings with cultures of shame/lack of knowledge about periods are assumed to be "girls" rather than given the opportunity to voice their own "gender identity"? Why did they decide to use "bodies with vaginas" as the pull quote on the cover instead of any of the references to "women" and "girls"?

And that's before any of the obvious wider questions: e.g. why "men" not "people with prostates".

So, is it or isn't it okay (according to the additive/inclusive language brigade) to refer to "bodies with vaginas" as "women" in the same article because I wonder how many of the people praising the inclusivity of the language of this article on Twitter have actually bothered to read it and clocked that - shock! - it actually also uses the supposedly offensive terms women and girls.

@BoastMostFulsomely thank you for this! So they are pretending to be woke but hopefully actually think it is ridiculous and will back pedal shortly.... hope so. They are muddled. How dare they post a cover like that and then be so muddled? They could at least make a bloody effort to be consistent in their misogyny instead of flinging it around willy nilly

Fuck sake. Just winding down to sleep and saw this. I can't believe the main medical journal is jumping on this shitty bandwagon.

When I saw this I had a headspin moment. I thought, in twenty years, is sexual anatomy going to be no more relevant than eye colour or blood type? Might we look back at 'woman' in the biology-based sense and think it's quaintly old-fashioned? But then I thought - no. There have to be words for the female and male sexes. The physical differences and their consequences are too big and important to ignore. Those differences will always be there, and we'll be in a mess if we've lost the names for them.

We're not even people anymore, we no longer even deserve that. Simply a body, with little hooks for our inconvenient parts to hang from.

Bit of feedback for the Editor

@NotTerfNorCis yea I agree. I was listening to Helen Joyce on a gender discussion podcast and she has a good way of Explaining it. She says that as we have had success with increasing the rights of so many minority groups many people are blindly accepting that this is the same and it isn't. It will take a while for people to see but they will see and agree - this is not going to be something that we lose. All this be kind bullshit is scaring people into just reciting this mantra and not thinking.

Biological sex is important and we need to be able to use these words.

Love your user name!!

Omg I cannot live in a world that would describe my daughter as a 'body with a vagina'

What the FUCK

Love your user name!!

Gets the message across!

Genderist language can be so incongruous it catches people's attention. This is one example, another was ACLU censoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg's abortion quote into meaninglessness. It's obvious - we need a word that means adult human female, and not 'anyone who identifies as an adult human female'.

Do we now call it 'Violence against adult and child bodies with vaginas' ??

Oh I thought lil OJ had said something about this!

I was rather surprised.

I see I misunderstood a post!

YY this is

A medical journal. Longstanding and respected

It's not in an article. It's not in a title. It's the whole front page.

And they not only decided to describe us by the body part generally associated with sex- especially to men - and also associated with being penetrated. Commonly thought of by men/ presented in porn etc. I mean it's crap but that's male outlook for you. As the submissive role. So I mean sure that's a fair few steps on. But body with a vagina. Just awful.

And of course that they've gone further than currently being demanded. Currently people with vaginas is acceptable. They decided to go a step further. And not even give us personhood.

I wonder if their article says eh bodies with vaginas have to do X in y country.

Bodies removes the connotations of consciousness, life. If someone says a body was discovered. It means dead.

And that's what they went with?

Either they are a total disgrace or they're making a clever point. I'm sure it's the first.

Bodies with a vagina:
Cow
Doe
Tib
Sow
Bitch
Ewe
Jill
Vixen
Mare
Which of these is the lancet referring to?

It's no surprise that this dehumanising of women is part of a multi pronged attack by men who see us as nothing but objects their to serve them that can be used, abused and sold.

Remove our language.
Remove our reproductive rights.
The push for surrogacy as a 'right'

We are cattle, sex toys, domestic slaves, incubators. Just bodies. Things.