The NHS responded to my query about erasing women from their website

[pink85]

Been a lurker here for a while and saw the thread about the NHS erasing the word woman from biological women's cancers. This was the response email. What does everyone think? (also sorry if I do anything wrong, not posted here before but love the gender discussions which are always honest and fair as I believe in sex based reality and am on the side of JK)

Thank you for contacting the NHS Website service desk.
The NHS Website provides information for everyone. We aim to use language that is inclusive, respectful, and relevant to the people reading it.
We are working to improve content across the NHS website to make it clearer, easier to understand and more accessible. This includes improving the structure of the pages, writing in plain English, and improving the inclusivity of the language we use to ensure people get the correct clinical information.
As part of this work, we recently updated a number of our cancer topics. As a result of our user research, we made significant changes to how the information was originally structured.
We have not removed the word women from any of our cancer topics, we use it on the causes page when speaking about who is at risk. On topics like ovarian and cervical cancers, where we previously only mentioned "women" we now say "women, trans men, non-binary and intersex people with ovaries". This ensures anyone who could get these cancers can understand the information is relevant to them.
There are 1000s of pages of content on the website and doing this work takes time. Some cancers (such as ovarian, penile and anal cancer) have been updated already, whereas some still need to be updated (such as vulval and testicular cancer). This can lead to some differences in our content. We are working towards being clear and consistent across the website.
^You can find out more about our approach to inclusive content and writing about sex and gender here: service-manual.nhs.uk/content/inclusive-content/sex-gender-and-sexuality.^

(funny how the results on testicular cancer on the first page state men yet for cervical cancer it lists a whole load of people)

You might wish to revisit your understanding of DSDs. There are two sexes, DSDs are a variation, a genetic miscoding, of those two sexes. There is no third or fourth sex.

I agree with this.

I don’t like the way they put non-binary as a separate category that can get penile cancer. I know lots of school-aged girls who identify as non-binary. Do you think they ought to go to the GP to check?

Maybe they need to clarify ‘non-binary and were previously known as male on your birth certificate’. That’s catchy.

I think there is a bit of information missing here. It depends how much of the whole "trans debate" you have been involved in, what you have seen and heard online and in real life..

Many of the more active TRAs claim that the word woman includes transwomen, because transwomen are women. That left women with the word female... which some TRAs are also gunning for, as transwomen are no different from any other woman they must also be female.

It all sounds ludicrous but, and I am with OP here, any embroidering around the terms woman and female allows two things to happen:*

• People with low literacy or for who English is not their first language get confused by the additional terms. Health care is supposed to present itself in the simplest way possible. A transman is always aware that he is a transman, born female. Someone who decides they are non binary knows which sex they were born, no matter that they reject the stereotypes. So in healthcare inclusivity can be harmful (see the many extant cases discussed this forum)

• TRAs can muscle into single sex female spaces, because they are women. Any spaces. This too has happened across the UK causing harm to women and to transwomen, transmen, in the process. Some do it because of the 'thing we cannot mention', others for more nefarious reasons. None do it because they are confused about their actual sex, they know their sex even as they reject it.

So, whilst it sounds mad, and you feel tht it is ludicrous and nothing to get het up over, it is that reliance on logic that allowed so many organisations to sleepwalk into this gender madness, Stonewall Law in the first place. Because it sounds fucking ridiculous anyone trying to explain why it needs to be reversed also sounds like a fuckwit, because it is utterly bobbins!

That's what happens when people bastardise the language in order to achieve something that is illogical!

*and do remember that this rarely happens to the words men and male. Those concepts are, until very recently in some places, not challenged at all!

If that's true why are you so threatened by the NHS including people who step outside of stereotypes?

We are not. We are deeply concerned about a denial of biological reality.

"women, trans men, non-binary and intersex people with ovaries". This ensures anyone who could get these cancers can understand the information is relevant to them.
There are 1000s of pages of content on the website and doing this work takes time.

Perhaps they should stop wasting time and stop spending resource on adding irrelevant and fictional terms. Don't they have a labor shortage too? How can they afford to waste time on this crap?

Interestingly, no confusing language in the NHS advice on Monkeypox, the latest version of which was released yesterday
www.nhs.uk/conditions/monkeypox/

Peter Tatchell and a sexual health doctor, speaking on Radio 4 Today programme this morning, also were very clear
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0017swp From 1:40:55

twitter.com/fairplaywomen/status/1530134328381956097?s=20&t=zZZOD-y-9O30GQV5l0KY_Q

Interesting possibility of an IPSO pushback... could change things.

Now that the word woman has been appropriated by biological men, you will get some idiot trans women believing that they are affected by female only cancers. India Willoughby claimed that “she” has a cervix. Some people are so deluded that their brains fall out.

Interesting that they now appear to think that 'inclusive' means 'the way TQ+ lobbies demand'.

Nine characteristics. Not just one. And responsibility to all groups in the communities they serve who struggle to access, which include people who speak EAL and people with literacy and learning difficulties, who will vastly vastly outnumber those who would be indignant about not seeing their preferred language signalled at.

Not inclusive at all. In the way the word actually means, as opposed to the beggared about version SW try to push.

Badqueen is bringing a great deal of ill temper to the debate, but few comprehension skills.
once you state “women plus trans men, non binary etc etc” is is obvious that you are using the word woman to mean something other than biologically female person - thus excluding all those who consider themselves to be women by virtue of their sex, no extra identity required. Which is most of us.
I don’t know how much clearer I can make it, really

Just because you're not willing to read what I'm saying because it actually makes sense, doesn't mean I'm bad tempered or that i lack comprehension.

The fact you resort to insults says it all really.

Also - i could report your thinly veiled attempt at a personal attack, but I won't, because it'll be nice for people who are visiting from elsewhere on MN to see what response one gets when they don't toe the party line in this subforum.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, after all.

So report that poster. Personal attacks are indeed uncalled for.

Then could you come back to me, discuss my posts?

Because it is also nice for lurkers, who read but don't post, as well as those monitors you reference, to see how discussions pan out.

If you don’t have the comprehension skills to read woman, trans men and non binary people with a cervix and realise it includes you I’m not sure it’s the PP who has the issues here. Your views are pretty clear, they’re just illogical

Yes!!! The authors of this paper describe just what your outlined, shifting the word 'women' from a sexed term to a gendered one means that it includes males and the really significant impact on those will low literacy of using confusing language (and lets face it, even for those with good literacy some of the contortions that are used to avoid referencing sex make text very difficult to understand!) www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2022.818856/full

And, by the same light, if you, as a transman or non binary person, don't recognise your female body and it's continued needs for female health services...

And you conveniently dismiss those women whose literacy levels are low, EAFL etc.

How inclusive is that?

Illogical indeed.

Oh, and @LemonPalmTree how do you explain away the Scottish university teaching midwives that some of their expectant mothers may still retain their male sex appendages and that care should be taken to learn how to accommodate the differences during childbirth. Like catheterising a penis?

No misunderstanding on my party, the course information was corrected for one instance of error, which made the male bodiedness of some expectant mothers more clear.

Yes, a university is teaching midwives that men, males, can give birth and that midwives need to know how to treat them.

That's the fuckwittery I am responding to.

I'm aware of all that. I used to be one of you, bouncing around in the echo chamber. Then i saw a bit too much intolerance of gender non conforming people who are just trying to live their lives (a thread about parkrun, a thread about a maternity poster, the one about the fisherman and a long running one a while back about birthrights for four examples) and realised that gender critical on Mumsnet doesn't mean critical of gender stereotypes and how they constrain both sexes but instead you want to force people back in their box. You want women to agree they're women, and then, only then, are they worthy of support. But even then, the fisherman thread shows that a woman can still be a woman and identify as such but she will still be posted about here for not being womanly enough. Whoever posted that thread did so knowing their audience was here.

The threads i refer to showed that there is very very little interest on this board for offering any respect or support to females who don't present as stereotypical women. Look at the language in this thread. Words like immature, stupid, having mental health problems, irrelevant and fictional. So respectful.

If they removed the word woman, you'd have a point. But they didn't.

Oh look, more aggression.

One of you?

Oh! We are a hive mind, Borg again are we?

I've seen similar threads, posts and often it's someone exploring their thoughts or being angry about a specific thing. And yes, sometimes it is an unreasonable poster. I can accept that I won't agree or like every other poster. That's life.

But I wouldn't tar every GC poster with the same brush.

Yes, but not from a GC poster bit someone who agrees with you!

I’d want to know why they aren’t doing the same with prostate cancer, they are still men on there.

Cos they haven't got round to the men's health sections yet.

As in any emergency - women and children first!

I'm livid about this. Will someone please organize a campaign to get this reversed?

Women/biologically female adults - what could be clearer?

Why deliberately confuse people? So many, and not just those with poor comprehension skills or not fluent in English will struggle with the gobbledygook of the current phrasing.