Medical study on sexual pain - you can apply if you have had "a vagina from birth" ??

[Fenlandia]

From Milli Hill's excellent The Word is Woman newsletter, this is a sexual pain study being run from Oxford University. It sounds useful and sensible apart from the fact it dare not name that class of "people" or "individuals" who have had "a vagina from birth".

What a gross phrase, as well as just sounding mad. Did you have one from birth or did you pop one into your shopping basket when you were buying milk one day?

Surely they can't be using this mad newspeak to differentiate women from the results of certain surgeries that some trans-identified men get?

Isn't it sad to see apparently intelligent women too ashamed or unable to use the word woman.
It's either a deeply held personal distaste for women or they're too terrified to use normal factual language about women. Despite being apparently interested in women's health problems.

Sad times.

Ffs

They probably have to say vagina from birth. Otherwise, they'll have India Willoughby trying to take part with his 'neo' vagina.

I don't know why the image I attached is so big but it's readable if it's clicked.

Yes, sad and weird. I am nostalgic for the days when 'woman' was just an ordinary everyday word.

I wouldn’t take part on principle and I doubt I’m the only one. So if they have problems recruiting participants, their own fault.

Some women are born without vaginas, and no I don’t mean trans women.
Look up MRKH syndrome.

This study specifically lists which conditions that cause pain from sex that it wants to look at.

Oddly, it excludes all pain from sex due to vaginal atrophy so I guess women in peri or menopause don’t matter. We must be too old for good sex.

🤦‍♀️

So they don’t want any respondents who struggle with English, nor any with learning disabilities, nor any who are GC, nor any who are too busy rolling their eyes at this latest idiocy.

Their survey population is likely to be restricted to the Oxford dinner party set.

No, they just don't want men who pretend to be women to take part.

Umm, no the study is hella exclusive. It’s not just excluding those born with a penis.

It'd be easier if they could just say that.

I'm not sure if I was born with one ? I mean i think it's always been there. It only says "female" on my birth certificate. But as we all know , males can be female can't they in 2025 ? So, I don't know,I'd have to ask my mother. Although I would imagine she was too busy tending to her own post birth vagina to verify mine ( if it existed of course)

Can someone wake me up when we go back to the normal world we used to live in ?

Who is it excluding?

But how would you know if you’ve not had your chromosomes tested, as per witnesses in the Sandie Peggie Tribunal? It might have crept up on (in) you unawares.

I’d guess it is too terrified to use “normal” language, and desperately keen to make sure they get actual women rather than pretend ones volunteering. It is sad that they need to do it, but they want their sample to be genuine women and in these days where language has become so twisted, that is the only way to be sure you achieve it.

But yes. Sad times indeed.

They can't win. Even if they put 'biological.womem' (apart from the fact they will be criticised for using a transphobic dog whistle 🙄), some particularly deluded transwomen claim to be biologically female, because they think taking hormones has changed their biology. Ordinary words have lost their meaning.

Look, studies like this, especially with visibly female researchers, will get all kinds of fucking weirdo men contacting them (I don’t even mean trans women, I mean literal cis male perverts).

They want to be as clear as possible, without incurring the wrath of even more weirdos. I don’t have any particular issue with that. Yes the wording is clumsy, but I assume they have had pervs emailing them (and likely sending photos) so want to be as clear as it is possible that it’s about body parts to avoid men arguing that they want to be interviewed about sex by the pretty blonde lady too.

No, the language they use does not indicate they ‘just’ want this.

Their intention is make clear they they think sex is divorced from gender identity. So that they don’t cause ‘literal violence’ to trans identified people. That is why they say ‘individuals’. Not women.

To be ‘inclusive’ they could have said ‘women or trans identified people whose sex was recorded as female at birth’.

But they didn’t as that would not have been craven enough for gender ideologues. As it has ‘the old fashioned outdated idea’ that the word woman describes females.

And that linking of woman with being female is what they desperately trying to avoid.

And, unfrotunately, if they put just “women” then they will not get applications from any women who trans-identify as men, whose data they do want to capture.

FFS!! Is Woman now a banned word?

Woman is now a word that men will argue about. Whether or not you had a vagina at birth is a fairly non-emotive fact.

Can’t they put ‘women’ and then decline any male applicants?

And why do women who identify as men have to be included? These kinds of studies are only ever going to be made up of self-selecting participants, which is going to exclude large sections of the population anyway.

I went on a tour to see Oxford University with my son, in the material engineering department.
The entire building was full of Trans posters, flags and 'Allies'.
In the basement we had a lecture about magnets all undertaken by a huge bald man wearing a dress. He was very clever and funny, but obviously a man, and obviously the centre of the Trans storm in the building.

They're trying to exclude trans people and people with DSDs but have gone about it the wrong way: it would have made more sense to omit that bullet point and instead address the issue when collecting the data.

The wording doesn't even exclude registered females with an XY DSD that results in a congenital inguinal sinus, but the researchers would need to know if this applied to a subject.

Trans people and people with DSDs deserve their own research but mixing their data in with data from statistically normal XX women is at best pointless. In fairness, I'm sure the actual researchers are on top of this: but that bullet point just isn't achieving anything useful.

I'm aware of MRKH and as I understand it doesn't cause complete absence of the vagina, so the wording still doesn't make sense. If the study needs to exclude MRKH patients then it should just say so.

I take your point re vaginally atrophy, I bet older women are even more neglected in medical research than women as a whole.