So in this piece the Guardian does appear to know what a woman is

[theDudesmummy]

That has to be welcomed. It reads like medical normality from the old days I think. Although it's a bit muddled by their own standard (not by mine), talking about sex and then gender ("gender gap") as the same thing?

www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/07/concerning-lack-of-female-only-medical-trials-in-uk-say-health-experts?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Bump

It’s not that hard to get is it - if you can’t see sex, then how do you know, let alone address, when women are being disadvantaged and oppressed on the basis of their sex?

It's just such a sensible article i actually had to check it was really on the Guardian site!

Glad to see that sex is now real according to the Guardian

It’s how gender used to be used before it meant including men in female stuff, as the social elements of being a woman.

It's great that they are able to cope with the idea that sex is a real phenomenon in this context - though they are still referring to gender disparity. However, it should always be the case that there are more men-only trials than there are women-only and mixed-sex trials because any drug that could affect the reproductive system of a fertile female person needs to be fully tested in the male human body first before going on to a second stage trial that includes women because the science of how the drug works needs to be sufficiently understood to be sure that the drug trial isn't going to create the next thalidomide-style disaster. There will obviously be many drugs that can be tested in a mixed-sex testing group, but there will always be some drugs where the testing needs to be rolledout more cautiously to women than to men, so there will always be some disparity.

pregnant women taking part in medical trials? Of course they don’t chose to.

But a review of the data by the Guardian found that women were significantly under-represented. Both sexes were included in most trials (90%), but male-only trials (6.1%) were nearly twice as common as female-only studies (3.7%). Pregnant and breastfeeding women were especially under-represented – involved in just 1.1% and 0.6% of trials respectively.

Glad they are dipping their toe in the water but I’ll never subscribe again unless they do a full apology thing and ask bavk the women they hounded out. Why don’t they report on their own rampant sexism?

Ofc they know. Just ask any heterosexual male Guardian contributors if they’d have sex with a “trans” woman.

The Guardian can write articles about women's health

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/feb/10/urogynecologist-childbirth-interview

"People think of the postpartum period as the six weeks after you deliver, but really postpartum is the rest of your life once you’ve had a delivery."

"For example, if they have [pelvic] prolapse, a lot of times they think they have cancer or something unfixable or they’ve never heard of prolapse. They’re blindsided, which makes me really angry for them because it’s so common. It happens to 50% of women in their lifetime, and yet it’s so taboo that they’ve never heard about it."

"The female body is amazing, and a lot of women do really well. But I would challenge you to find any woman who tells you that after birth, things feel or function the same way. They just don’t. It’s a fantasy to think that you’re going to shove a person out of a tiny hole – and through a container of muscle that has your bladder, bowel, uterus, vagina and all the muscles and nerves that run down your legs and connect your pubic bone and back – and nothing is going to be different."

What the Guardian can't quite do is bring itself to connect the dots and relate women's health issues to wider policy and legislation that considers women as a group distinct from men.

The article is only 3 months old yet we still have this piece of nonsense in it:

of people assigned female at birth

i.e. WOMEN - if you stupid males at the Guardian have forgotten the word.
That is a Guardian introduced piece of nonsense. The doctor herself refers to women throughout.

I stopped buying the Guardian because of their TWAW nonsense.

Or who to hire as a surrogate for a purchased baby.

Despite the fact that Dr Fitzgerald uses the words woman and women throughout the interview.

And the American Urogynecology Society, of which she is a member, uses the words female and women on those parts of its website I've looked at.

I edited my post to point out that the Dr used the word woman herself.

It's baffling.

The implication is that it's rude to try to identify the people who need to know these things about their bodies.

I am expecting to see this sort of back-and-forth stepping over the next year or so. The Guardian expanded into the US and most of the worst bullshit they’ve served up has been driven by trying to keep the NYC office happy.

I live in hope that the U.K. Guardian will continue to be slowly pulled back to reality, even if some of the staff will kick and scream about it. (Honestly, can we get Suzanne and Haley back and chuck Eva and Zoe?)

On this topic, if you have not read this book, read it:

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline Criado Pérez

I read it years ago and thought to myself, ah, so we know about this huge data gap now, it will be sorted soon..... I get her newsletter and it is not getting sorted. The info on medical trial and trials of medication is shocking.
And if you own or use a car, read up about the data on the safety of seatbelts.

Well, aside from the male=default angle (which is significant), I think it’s pretty obvious that it has been profoundly difficult for researchers to accurately and confidently determine that their sample includes only biological women when most universities and hospitals have been Stonewalled into thinking they would be acting unlawfully by excluding transwomen or asking them their biological sex.

Hopefully now the law has bern clarified, research institutions will feel more confident in being able to exclude biological males from their studies where this is necessary.

I don’t read this article as refreshing at all - I think this kind of hypocrisy is typical of the Guardian and others like it - they are happy to wring their hands about women’s needs when the issue can be framed as “women vs men” rather than “women vs transwomen”.

There have always been articles like this from the same publications that say TWAW, as they tend to wilfully ignore the glaringly obvious sex-based needs of women when it suits them, but are simultaneously very happy to showcase their apparent concern for women’s rights when non-trans stories like this one come up.

Well, it’s pretty standard for most political tribes to have feet of clay when it comes to women’s rights. Look at the Telegraph and Spiked suddenly discovering an interest in the rights of women & girls after decades of smugly misinterpreting feminists’ point about not being able to discern which men are intending to rape you, as “all men are rapists.” Who could forget being made to feel like your reasonable caution was just misandry? I sure haven’t, and I wonder just how long they‘ll remember this clarity they’ve achieved when they can’t use it as a stick to go after their political opponents.

Virtue-signalling is currently associated with the progressive left, but it hasn’t always been! And I can see the pendulum starting its return swing already.

This is what it's like in Australia, they will chatter away about women's healthcare in relation to pap smears and endo, but then in a different article/conversation be adamant that its bigoted to think being a woman is anything to do with biology.

Ok this sounds promising but I'm not clicking on the link.
I haven't clicked onto a Guardian article since 2017.

Could have been written based on a press release by normal medical researchers who have been in their research bubble and not noticed the language shifts? I saw a fascinating panel talk from a new 'Sex and Gender' Research centre - half the researchers were medical researchers discussing their research on sex differences in very specific health conditions / cellular level stuff, and the others were TRAs who were chastising them for their binary notions of male and female.

Yes, exactly - they’re happy to acknowledge women’s problems, but they know they can’t actually fix anything without first addressing the elephant in the room who identifies as a woman.

So everything about women’s bodies is just met with a shrug and an acknowledgment that it’s rubbish for women and an “oh well”.

Remember Nicola Sturgeon and her feminist to her fingertips/always fought for women's rights shtick?

And the endless companies announcing menopause initiatives?

This is the Graun's version. "Of course we care about women".

You're not fooling anyone, Katharine and co.