Brighton midwives told to say “front hole”

[tabbycatstripy]

Daily Mail reports that a care guide for transgender patients pregnant or giving birth suggests midwives should use ‘alternative’ anatomical terminology, so, instead of calling a vagina a vagina, they could use “genital opening” or “front hole”.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10727051/Midwives-urged-avoid-using-proper-words-anatomy-avoid-upsetting-trans-patients.html

Aside from the issues of linguistic misunderstanding that might arise when patients are allowed to choose what medical professionals name anatomical parts, isn’t “front hole” simply degrading language? Isn’t it pornified and dehumanising?

‘ I don’t think during labour is the time to question or explore someone’s preferences. I would only use medical terminology between colleagues.’

So would you call my breasts my wank pillows? I’m not being argumentative, I really want to know.

‘They're trying to make a labouring woman with dysphorphia feel more comfortable. Whatever. If it helps it helps.’

Whatever? So if I ‘needed’ a medical professional to call my vagina my c**t, you say “whatever. If it helps”?

Or are there limits to what we can ask medical professionals to say when the language is offensive to them?

No I wouldn’t use any obscene terms and I’d explain that but no one is going to ask me to are they?

Good, I’m glad to hear it. I find “front hole” obscene. I would not say it.

Birth canal, I’d say.

I think the limit is language they understand that is not offensive. There’s a big jump from vagina to cunt, I’m sure we could agree middle ground there.

Yes, and for me there’s a jump from vagina to front hole. I find it genuinely offensive. I’m not saying that rhetorically.

@thelowcarbsweats

They're trying to make a labouring woman with dysphorphia feel more comfortable. Whatever. If it helps it helps.

It’s the great enigma isn’t it. Women with such significant dysphoria about their female bodies they’ve chosen to “live as a man”, then done the most woman thing possible, get pregnant and have a baby, but it’s the language that is the problem, the word vagina is triggering, so everyone else has to change how they talk to fix the problem.

Sure .

@Blushtassel

No I wouldn’t use any obscene terms and I’d explain that but no one is going to ask me to are they?

I'd hope not. I'm sometimes surprised that people write to the NHS website to complete about the use of the terms 'pee' and 'poo.' The complaints are about offence, slang, or infantilising language.

I dislike "front hole" because I'm genuinely taken aback by the number of people who think that we menstruate, give birth and pass urine from the same orifice. This is despite years of biology lessons, PHSE, and, in some cases having actually given birth.

I like plain language, I don't support misleading language. If somebody fills out the preference sheet and there's a clear example to illustrate their understanding of what is meant by their preferred terms, that is up to them and to be negotiated between them and their HCPs.

Seriously, I don't think anybody is saying that if a woman in labour is asked something about her vagina and she says, oh please don't call it that, I find the word really triggering, and midwife says, I'm sorry love tough luck, then that's okay.

It's about rewriting an NHS Policy, that offends 99.9% of women, about their own anatomy. Even if it's not them who are being referred to.

In a face-to-face situation, one would expect healthcare professionals to tailor the way they talk, to accommodate the person to whom they're talking. Within reason obviously.

But front hole, to 99.9% of women, is not a reasonable description of their anatomy. Even if it's only used to describe a subset of women.

I'm struggling to think of the equivalent for men. Most men seem to have a completely different relationship with their anatomy than women do with theirs.

Things like, say, 'mighty todger', which you can imagine a subset of men liking, may not be offensive to a vast number of other men.

But what about 'small bit of dangly flesh'? It's accurate, it's perfectly descriptive, it's reasonably gender neutral.

I wonder how 99.9% of men would feel if a subset of their cohort wanted it written into NHS Policy, that it be referred to in that way because the word penis is so triggering and awful.

This is what came up from Google. There may be a supporting document. www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/My-Language-Preferences.pdf

I find this amazing. They're allowing individual patients to specify their preferred term for cervix, vulva, labia etc. How on earth is a midwife going to remember that for each individual patient? Who has the time? And what if they're talking to another midwife while the patient is present? Do they use the patient's preferred term or the correct anatomical term? Recipe for disaster.

@EmbarrassingHadrosaurus

Thanks for that link. I would really hope that no one was encouraging the use of 'front hole' as a term to go on that document.

I do understand wanting to make women comfortable when giving birth, but if a medical professional is dealing with a 2nd/3rd/4th degree tear, are they really going to go flicking back through paper work to see if the female in question is comfortable with the term 'perinium' or is insisting on 'gooch' instead?

@thelowcarbsweats

They're trying to make a labouring woman with dysphorphia feel more comfortable. Whatever. If it helps it helps.

Sadly no. That's just the fig leaf you're looking at.

It's trying to cover a whole lot more that is dodgy in profound and multiple ways. Not least the wasting of time, energy and money on something that is actually and exclusively benefitting male people.

I also think in a country where you might wait hours and hours for someone to come to you if you've had a stroke, or if you've got an elderly relative on the ground dehydrating and going hypothermic with a broken hip, who'll then spend a couple of shifts in an ambulance bay and three days on a trolley in A&E waiting for a bed?

You're probably able to accept someone calling your vagina a vagina when they're telling you that you've got a massive tear in it that needs sewing up.

I cannot get my head around using your body to do literally the most female thing possible (pregnancy and childbirth), and that is not a problem AT ALL, but hearing the words “mother” and “vagina” are unbearably triggering.

Colour me skeptical, but it seems to me just another way of controlling people

I'm getting the 'document not found' when I click on the BSUH language preference link.

They're trying to make a labouring woman with dysphorphia feel more comfortable. Whatever. If it helps it helps.

So you admit she's a woman. Not a "man". Good. We're getting somewhere.

@BobbinHood

I’m not convinced people who struggle so much with words like “vagina” to the extent this kind of guidance has to be introduced are stable enough to be having children.

Absolutely.

If you are pregnant then surely you are identifying as female since a male mammal cannot gestate young in a uterus?
I'm baffled.....

Why the fuck is it okay to offend the majority of women (I’m sure most women find that terminology offensive) purely to appease a very tiny number of trans people who treat being offended as their hobby. I also would think any decent trans person would not be offended by medical terminology, it’s just a few weirdos who are!!

Given the recent publicity re. the scandal of maternity services and the risk to mothers and babies, you would think that the maternity services would be more concerned with the safety of all women and infants and not reducing them to slabs of meat perforated by holes.

@MiladyBerserko

Given the recent publicity re. the scandal of maternity services and the risk to mothers and babies, you would think that the maternity services would be more concerned with the safety of all women and infants and not reducing them to slabs of meat perforated by holes.

^^This!!

My friends who are medics working in Covid wards don’t pretend it’s just a cold to make their Covid-denying patients feel more “comfortable”.

Patient safety and comfort is paramount, yes; but medicine is a science, and shouldn’t be in the business of denying reality and obscuring correct anatomical terminology just because that suits a tiny proportion of patients’ personal delusions.

How does this work with writing medical notes? How does this work with two HCPs talking to each other within earshot of the patient?

Writing this into policy surely sets a precedence for children and teens to be taught incorrect anatomical terms in case it triggers them.

It might just be that that NHS Trust that adopts it for the present because that policy has been available for a year, iirc. At the very least, they should run a trial of the impact on the understanding of the service users.

Not directly linked to the topic, but it looks very much as if gender dysphoria is mostly a problem for FTM transitioners and not to MTF transitioners. I have not seen anyone from the latter group ask for different names for penises or testicles. Even the 'girldick' label does not erase the 'dick' part at all.

Even more generally, I have never seen someone who is biologically male talk about their hatred of their body; just their desire to have the other body. But most biologically female transitioners do mention loathing of their female bodies, including one who says they are non-binary (but had to have an abortion and now wants only language erasing 'female' from all writing and talk about abortions).

And that specific sex-linked dysphoria is what seems to be happening here.

I believe that providers should accommodate the linguistic requests of their patient and clients when it doesn't do medical damage, but I am strongly opposed to the idea that a small group should be allowed to change the definition of the language that is used in the public sphere.

In particular, they cannot dictate gender identities on the vast majorities who don't have them (I believe most people are not 'cis' as that requires having an abstract identity not based on the biological sex of one's body but just accidentally happening to correlate with it) but define themselves as women or as men on the basis of their biological sex.