“We want gas and air to be available for women and….”

[AnyFucker]

You guessed it… “birthing people”

Morning telly, right there 🤢

Wonder. FFS bloody fat fingers.

If you're too traumatised to hear the word 'woman' then how are you going to manage giving birth to a baby from your vagina, your breasts engorging and leaking, your whole female body recovering from birth? You're going to be the 'mother' on the birth certificate. There's no other experience that proves so utterly and conclusively your femalehood.

I agree Arabella. If you can't even hear the word "woman" or "mother", you're in no way equipped for what lies ahead in terms of giving birth and looking after an infant. This pandering needs to stop. Reminder of the data:

This strained, clumsy, impractical lexicon is meant to cater instead to the tiny number of natal females who transition to male socially but not medically and give birth. As of 2017, the UK had two such people. To coin a phrase, the policy is not for the many, but the few. Women don’t matter; people who have renounced being women do.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d1157740-6d57-11eb-ba86-e516f9df6e0a?shareToken=eb006a8cab50ab4c58ae1462da87e067

What would be wrong with “want gas and air available for anyone giving birth”?

Because we want our stuff back. The words 'woman' and 'mother' matter. They are factual descriptions.

I'm done with pandering. People have all sorts of odd mental hang ups. They can often be handled with sensitivity, but they do not and should not affect the enormous majority of others.

It's akin to someone with an extreme aversion to the word 'strawberry' meaning that every supermarket in the UK stops stocking strawberries and rebrands them as 'red soft fruit'.

Furthermore I don't think this is healthy or helpful for the people it's supposedly trying to appease.

That. It's nice to be nice, but at this point the damage to women is stacking up at a really scary rate and we can see the long term mounting harm.

I can't, really.
Sure, women is in the sentence but it's immediately diluted by "and all the others". There are no others.
If someone insisting they're not a woman is going to get pregnant and rock up to the maternity ward - they can surely accept that they're accessing services for women.

Slippery slope?

I know they have now got male mice to produce an egg, but they still need the female mouse for the womb.
Pretty sure only women can give birth. If you are giving birth you are a woman. The term 'a birthing person' is so derogatory, It dehumanises that which is uniquely female.

Only women give birth. It's not open to "anyone", just women.

Any phrasing that is deliberately aimed at avoiding using the word woman is creating problems because it suggests that there is something wrong with using the word woman to describe the female sex - it is damaging to women as a class (including those who don't want to be referred to as women) if we pretend there are no words to describe the two sexes, make it taboo to use them or make people worry that it might not be acceptable to use them. We need to keep use of sex based language firmly within in the centre of the Overton window so that people can use this accurate language without a second thought. In my view the only time it is acceptable to actively avoid the use of the word woman is when talking to a trans individual or writing guidance aimed at trans people.

It’s not open to all women, only those who are giving birth. All of whom are in fact people, human beings.

I realise you haven’t said this, but how others can claim that referring to women as people is dehumanising is beyond me.

Yes. This is hugely confusing for a generation growing up being taught that the sexes are meaningless terms, that sex is fluid and interchangeable.

It's a regressive step. We used to despair at children thinking you could get avoid pregnancy if you had sex standing up - now they're being taught that men can get pregnant and give birth? How the hell are we to teach sex ed properly when the very basic fundamentals are so blurred?

Could you tell me how you'd explain to a teenager how reproduction works?

Yes, obviously only the women who actually need it in the delivery suite...
And women are indeed people, but we can still use the word woman when we're talking about something exclusive to women.

I’m hoping you mean younger child, in this day and age I’d very much hope the vast majority of teenagers already know!

Reproduction - when a sperm fertilises an egg, implants in the uterus lining and - in the absence of miscarriage or abortion - over the course of around about nine months develops into a fully formed foetus.

It’s ridiculous.

When I had gas and air it was because I was a woman giving birth, because of my sexed body, not my non-existent gender identity, which didn’t come into it.

I’m pregnant atm and have to say the trust I’m under is incredibly wedded to what now looks like old school language about women, mothers and breasts. I haven’t seen a single bit of daft word salad pandering and it’s been lovely.

Indeed - or that now they are a "man" they can't get pregnant.

In a woman's body, not a man's. Right?

In the body of a person with a uterus, who almost certainly has XX chromosomes, and who can identify as a woman, man or other.

And how do we know who has sperm and who has a uterus?

Yep. How many girls will think that if they 'identify' as male or non-binary they are no longer at risk of pregnancy?

How do we know if we are a person with a uterus?