BBC change phrase "AFAB" to "Women" after backlash

[Circumferences]

..... Sorry does anyone have a share token for a Times article that claims that the BBC removed the phrase "assigned female at birth" in an article about endomitosis and changed it to "women" after being flooded by complaints?

It popped up in my feed but I can only read the first few lines as I don't pay for The Times.

It's good news if properly true!

(Or it's bad news that they used in it in the first place...)

Here it is on the Twitter feed of Milli Hill (who brought it to my attention and many others', causing the backlash) . Before and after screenshots.

twitter.com/millihill/status/1507942260939309056?s=20&t=71YYuNC80w_8dnQXkIy-Rg

And here's the actual BBC link now. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-60738948

FFS.

Correction Sunday 27 March: This article has been amended to make it more clear for audiences.

...well, that's one way of putting it. But yes, making sure womens health information is clear is very important.

That is a good change, but should not have been necessary in the first place.

I'm so fed up with the BBC. We 100% should have an impartial national broadcaster. Sadly we don't currently have one.

I'd love to be able to pay my licence fee without thinking 'you bunch of overpaid wankers' every time.

@FemaleAndLearning

That is a good change, but should not have been necessary in the first place.

Indeed, but here we are. And at least they did it.

@FemaleAndLearning

That is a good change, but should not have been necessary in the first place.

It shouldn't but I'm so pleased they changed it back

It was very sloppily written in general, as well as the female erasure it said originally that heavy periods and infertility are the "causes" of endometriosis and this has now been changed to "symptoms".

If you look at the original it is really clunky. I wonder if it originally said women and someone changed it to AFAB before it was published.

The Twitter comments are just shocking. A pile on of people attacking the use of the word women. Justifying it by saying it is terfism to want the word women used and that trans people will commit suicide or die because of this. Saying that using AFAB is the better, more inclusive and more scientifically accurate term. That being gender critical is a cult and that using the word woman in a discussion about endometriosis is selfish and wrong.

Wow. Just wow.

[quote DameHelena]Here it is on the Twitter feed of Milli Hill (who brought it to my attention and many others', causing the backlash) . Before and after screenshots.

twitter.com/millihill/status/1507942260939309056?s=20&t=71YYuNC80w_8dnQXkIy-Rg[/quote]
This is a brilliant point made in that Tweet thread:

‘In summation: Women who do not like their identity as women, and attempt to modify that with testosterone, are included here. They are not being forgotten, they are self-excluding from a group they belong to and treating that as other people excluding them.’

@BertieBotts

If you look at the original it is really clunky. I wonder if it originally said women and someone changed it to AFAB before it was published.

I think so.

@CarbonelCat

The Twitter comments are just shocking. A pile on of people attacking the use of the word women. Justifying it by saying it is terfism to want the word women used and that trans people will commit suicide or die because of this. Saying that using AFAB is the better, more inclusive and more scientifically accurate term. That being gender critical is a cult and that using the word woman in a discussion about endometriosis is selfish and wrong.

Wow. Just wow.

This is because for the trans activists 'woman' is a term having NOTHING to do with bio sex. You are a woman if you state you are one, and you are not a woman if you state you are not one.

'Man,' however, is still left alone and allowed to be a largely biological sex term.

Every single person who believes that she is a woman BECAUSE she lives with a female body is then accused of bigotry, as defining 'woman' that way breaks the argument that people can opt out of the female body by renaming it something gender-neutral or by using insulting terms about one body part or one body function in the place of terms such as female or woman.

So the real fight in that Twitter thread is about whether we should erase the biological meaning of 'women and girls' or not.

AFAB and AFAM are weird terms if we are talking about 'assigning' biological sex as that is determined at conception and only observed at birth.

What their actual meaning is a belief that someone (doctors? parents?) assigns a newborn a social gender (by sticking a bow on the head of a girl, say). This might in some ways be a usage with actual meaning, but it is NOT used that way.

It is used as a replacement term for biological sex which then starts looking something one can select or change or assign. That cannot be achieved.

Behind the AFAB and AFAM as social gender signifiers is the frightening fact that they are really about picking sexist gender stereotypes for infants, and the transgender activists don't critique that, only argue that the wrong set of stereotypes was chosen for some individual.

I see AFAB and my first thought is vegan meringue. It's a minor, usually, quibble over all this TRA jargon and acronyms. Reading something and doing screeching mental stops on what you've just read or heard or said. I read very fluently and am reasonably versed in the nonsense, sometimes not 100% sure I've correctly followed someone's labels. As has been pointed out many times people with learning, literacy or language problems must struggle.

I can't punctuate for toffee.

An additional but truly horrible problem is that we currently have no trans-acceptable word for the female sex. If such a word existed, then that could be used in articles about sex-linked health disorders, but no such word is allowed to exist.

It's infuriating. Every time I've been on Twitter in the last week I've been bombarded with promoted ads/tweets about MEN and their experiences of prostate cancer.

More than happy that awareness raising is going on about prostate cancer but every single word was about MEN and aimed at MEN very clearly.

This is on Twitter where women can be banned for talking about their biology yet not a peep about this campaign being exclusionary and clearly Twitter HQ don't think so either otherwise they wouldn't have promoted it without demanding inclusive language be used.

It's so hideously blatant.

@OvaHere

It's infuriating. Every time I've been on Twitter in the last week I've been bombarded with promoted ads/tweets about MEN and their experiences of prostate cancer.

More than happy that awareness raising is going on about prostate cancer but every single word was about MEN and aimed at MEN very clearly.

This is on Twitter where women can be banned for talking about their biology yet not a peep about this campaign being exclusionary and clearly Twitter HQ don't think so either otherwise they wouldn't have promoted it without demanding inclusive language be used.

It's so hideously blatant.

It is the clearest sign I have seen for a long time about the way sexism and misogyny are mainstreamed so that women are told to shut up and not have any boundaries while men are left alone.

And that is driven by the hatred of the female body. Trans women hate the female body because if it couldn't be mentioned they think they would be completely validated as women, trans men hate the female body because if they didn't have it they would be completely validated as men.

I think nonbinary female-bodied people (now calling themselves sometimes nonbinary women !!! which makes it clear that all other women are binary women now) don't want their bodies to be called female but do want all the gains from feminist activism to accrue to them while all the negatives of sexism and misogyny should be aimed at those binary women who love being treated with it.

Sorry, got carried away with my rage.

Yeah the original article was really poor.
Well done to everyone who complained, and thanks for replies above! Twitter is an absolute bin isn't it

@CarbonelCat

The Twitter comments are just shocking. A pile on of people attacking the use of the word women. Justifying it by saying it is terfism to want the word women used and that trans people will commit suicide or die because of this. Saying that using AFAB is the better, more inclusive and more scientifically accurate term. That being gender critical is a cult and that using the word woman in a discussion about endometriosis is selfish and wrong.

Wow. Just wow.

And shows what a pile of shit the 'of course the word woman isn't being erased, you're all being paranoid and hysterical!' comments we've seen so often from the MRAs here were.

Men's language isn't being erased. Gender ideology is misogynistic to its core.

@IcakethereforeIam

I see AFAB and my first thought is vegan meringue. It's a minor, usually, quibble over all this TRA jargon and acronyms. Reading something and doing screeching mental stops on what you've just read or heard or said. I read very fluently and am reasonably versed in the nonsense, sometimes not 100% sure I've correctly followed someone's labels. As has been pointed out many times people with learning, literacy or language problems must struggle.

I can't punctuate for toffee.

I tend to read ABFAB.

I read similar nonsense on the Metro about a non-binary woman moaning that it's not just women that get endomitosis, but non-binary people too. She didn't like it that doctors referred to her as a woman and not as her made up identity.

Assigned female/male at birth is a term co opted from intersex conditions, when genetalia are ambiguous, sometimes it is not possible to ascertain the sex with tests or possibly it would be but the tests are not done for whatever reason, so medical staff will in that case assign a gender (sex) to the child so that they can be registered since in most countries it is not possible to register a birth without this information. I find it quite offensive that the trans movement is using it in this way TBH.