Doctors and Health Secretary call for NHS to use the word 'woman'

[Hagiography]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61731994

'Leading doctors say they have concerns about the NHS reducing mentions of the word "women" in ovarian cancer guidance.

They say "it may cause confusion" and create barriers to care.'

This is from The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, with Sajid Javid backing calls for clear language. This is great news.

Handbook on constitution is a pdf, which I think I won't be able to link to, but you can find by googling.

Is this an EHRC matter?

It's a veritable tsunami of woman eradicating nonsense from an organisation with an appalling track record for poor healthcare for women and babies.
Add to this this the dismal number of male HCPs being prosecuted for sexually abusing women patients alongside the NHS trusts with policies that openly seek to place male born sex offenders on women's wards and you know there's something very scary about some of the people working in the NHS.
(disclaimer - I know there are many excellent hcps but while so many predator enablers are employed, no women or girls are safe).

Good news, but as was pointed out already, this needs to be addressed everywhere, not just on ovarian cancer. It's on the NHS landing pages for pregnancy, cervical cancer etc etc. And didn't the draft of the law for maternity leave for government ministers initially omit 'women' and 'mothers' entirely, and only 'mothers' was put back?

The problem is the erasure of the female sex when that sex is the one which has always historically been erased in the sense of full personhood, while the erasure of the male sex only happens when the discrepancy (caused by sexism) is pointed out to those who were supposed to do it for inclusive reasons.

The Guardian article mentions that the NHS defended the asymmetry between erasing women and erasing men on the pages by stating that some sites have been reviewed more recently.

But two days I compared the pages on womb cancer (reviewed on Oct 21, 2021) and prostate cancer (reviewed on Oct 18, 2021). At least two days ago the latter had several mentions of 'men' and at least one of 'male', while the former didn't have either 'women' or 'female.'

So no, the reason is NOT that they just didn't get to the men's pages yet.

I think all this is pure sexism, and creating a new pecking order where men are on top and natal women at the bottom while other groups are in the middle. That fits with what is happening the best, so Occam's razor and all that.

Sheila Jeffrey's sex castes are useful on this. There's a review of SJ's Gender Hurts that is worth reading. (Archive version because the original site no longer exists.)

In this book I have chosen to use the term ‘sex caste’ to describe the political system in which women are subordinated to men on the basis of their biology. Feminists have disagreed over whether women’s condition of subordination is best referred to in terms of ‘caste’ or ‘class’. Those who use the concept of women as a ‘sex class’, such as Kate Millett, are referencing their experience in leftwing politics and see the idea of ‘class’ as offering the possibility of revolution (Millett, 1972). Millett did, however, use the term caste as well, speaking of women’s ‘sexual caste system’ (Millett, 1972: 275). If women are in a subordinate class in relation to men, as the working class is in relation to the bourgeoisie, then women’s revolution can be conceptualised as overthrowing the power of men in such a way that sex class ceases to have meaning and will disappear as a meaningful category (Wittig, 1992). It also implies, as in left theory, that women’s revolution requires the recognition by women of their ‘sex’ class status as the basis for political action. Nonetheless, the term sex class can be problematic because it implies that women could move out of their ‘class’, in the same way that individual working class people could change their class position by becoming embourgeoised. The term ‘caste’, on the other hand, is useful for this book because it encapsulates the way in which women are placed into a subordinate caste status for their lifetime (see Burris, 1973). Women may change their economic class status with upward mobility, but they remain women unless they elect to transgender and claim membership in the superior sex caste. Both of these terms can be useful in articulating the condition of women, but the term ‘caste’ offers a particular advantage in relation to studying transgenderism. The very existence of transgenderism on the part of women demonstrates the stickiness of caste subordination. The marks of caste remain attached to females unless they claim that they are really ‘men’, and only a very significant social transformation will enable change in this respect.

web.archive.org/web/20150918161313/gendertrender.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/exclusive-preview-gender-hurts-by-sheila-jeffreys/

This is the thing, they have deliberately sought to erase 'woman'. Even if it gets amended now, they will be constantly trying to get it changed to their preferred version unless the personnel are changed as you say.

@EmbarrassingHadrosaurus , thanks for that. Yes, 'caste' is a better word than 'class' in this context. It explains some aspects of this much better.

Now I have something to think about which is fun (fitting this into my theories).

the idea of sex castes works well. Also because 'class' doesn't necessarily contain the qualitative meaning of 'social class' - I'd thought of it more as 'category'.

Yes. Several in the NYT comments to an article about 'inclusive' language erasing 'women' suggest that the young today have no problem with the erasure of 'women' as a sex caste (!), so that they will return to the erasure project in a few years and then it will be widely accepted.

But of course there would be no point in having such terms as 'women' and 'men' if they have nothing to do with biological sex. We might as well have terms for introverts and extroverts in that case, but there's no reason to have such terms in general use or in statistical data collection etc., and there would be no point in having terms based on pure gender identity, either. I really don't think the wokerati have done any deep thinking on the issue.