The Naked Scientist podcast - menstruating people

[AllyCatTown]

I really like this podcast but have noticed that whenever there’s a topic on women’s health the male host speaks normally and uses words like female, woman etc “women who had the vaccine noticed a difference in their menstrual cycle etc etc”, but then it’s often a female interviewer who it cuts to for the in-depth story and she delivers a whole segment on menstruation without using such words as women. I wonder if there’s disagreement behind the scenes on this issue.

Also it’s interesting that it seems to be more women who are going along with this nonsense- or at least that’s my perception.

This really gets my goat because the average reading age in the UK is 9 years old. The NHS have a whole tram dedicated to making medical information understandable at that level for anyone with low reading comprehension or who speaks English as a foreign language.

Absolutely this. It doesn’t matter what a tiny minority of privileged people feel, it matters much more that those who experience health inequalities (which is poorer people, those in certain groups such as some ethnic communities) UNDERSTAND very easily the public health message. Particularly if it is asking a group to have a health check, or notice symptoms.

First do no harm is the motto of medicine. Even a few people misunderstanding or ignoring a health message can cause harm.

No, not really, sometimes people do that as well. It's not new.

What's different now is that people are doing it more often, and in more laboured ways that lack clarity. The push is certainly to avoid using a sex designation, but I also suspect because people are hearing it more that is having an unconscious affect on their speech. Rather like the way "they" is popping up in all kinds of places it wouldn't before, even when the person speaking is using him or her for the same person.

Given that it's the announcer on the show using it, it may well be that she is doing it often, and hearing it, as part of a generalized change in standards in broadcasting, where certain usages get mandated all the time. It becomes second nature to speak that way in work environments. It may not reflect anything about a disagreement around ideology among those on the show.

Yes @CherryBlossomAutumn people who flippantly discount the language used in public health campaigns have very blinkered narrow views (some might say bigoted) about how difficult it is to get women and girls from immigrant communities to engage with health services.

And there is a lot of deliberate ignorance about language acquisition and how many people in this country are only functionally literate. The terms uterus, menstruation and cervix are higher level vocabulary not easily accessed by someone with a reading age of six years old (remember the average is 9 years old which means there will be a huge chunk of people with reading ages lower than this). Whereas girl and woman are common nouns and easily accessible to all.

But TRAs only care about themselves. It would be impossible to recognise that women from certain immigrant communities are more vulnerable than them. It’s quite the huge amount of privileged they are using to muscle people less advantaged than them out of safe spaces and specialist services.

It gave me pretty much non-stop mahoosively heavy periods for well over a year. Combined with the associated non-stop PMT... I have minimal tolerance for being described as someone who menstruates.

Another big one for treading so carefully with the offensively non offensive language is This Podcast Will Kill You where their read-out adverts etc talk about bras for "boob-havers" and don't refer to women at ALL.

Thank you for putting this so clearly.