The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature
quillette.com
quillette.com
However having large majorities(95%+ of the population) make concessions in order to accommodate a small group imposes a cost (however small) born by many to the benefit of a few. My questions is how do you decide where to make that trade off? What’s the cost benefit analysis? At some point where do people say the cost of accommodating this 1/100k/1m people by another 300m+ people is not a worthwhile use of societal resources?
Online communities are extremely disproportionally composed of people who fall into the Cluster B/emotionally dysregulated/CPTSD spectrum.
Internet addiction or "Internet Use Disorder" is nearly entirely composed of people in this camp. Same goes for trans people - this isn't an insult but an objective observation that these people need mental health help. To drive the point home - my ex-girlfriend worked at a mental institution for children and the majority all of them were trans and/or had BPD/Cluster B/CPTSD etc etc. At one point, all 5 children in their unit were trans!
Leadership should not use Internet communities as the north star for guiding the culture shifts of wider society, it will obviously lead to (to use a British understatement) social friction. We risk crumbling the institution of science and higher education due to catering to the wants of Cluster B, all just so these people can move on to the next subject to split into good and evil parts.
The focus should be on providing help to Cluster B, NOT about letting them take control of society and crumble all of our institutions to pieces over dissociative morality plays, making everyone's health worse in the process.
What exactly are you saying here? That all the trans kids had cluster B personality disorders? You said and/or but the rest of you post seems to be implying that all trans people have cluster B personality disorders. There are lots of other reasons to be a psychiatric inpatient that are not cluster B personality disorders, and CPTSD is also not a personality disorder of any type.
It's not particularly suprising that trans kids end up as inpatients in psychiatric wards. My experience with them is that they know that the vast majority of the world absolutely hates them. I mean, I heard about this one internet comment that implied that they all have cluster B personality disorders. Absolutely shocking.
Your whole thesis reads weird. There are estimated to be about a million trans people in the US. You really think that many are "extremely online?" Do they all have cluster B personality disorders? Are none of them living quiet lives?
Do you do this with all minorities?
No judgement, I don't judge people on mental health. Unless someone is calling to make institutional changes that undermine the public's trust in it, then I will exert my right to judge these people's character.
I for one am not so sure this so-called "leadership" cares for family, as a social unit. Accordingly, there is (for me at least) the possibility that this "leadership" is using a pretext to achieve related but orthogonal goals, since purely on rational, moral, and ethical basis, causing this much social division and disruption over this niche issue does not make any sense.
"Oh, this is what minorities want. Ok, I'm a good person, I want to respect their wishes."
What you may not realize is that many gay and trans people strongly disagree with gender ideology and do not want this.
Indeed, they don't all have the same opinion!
The loud, aggressive, too online activists do not speak for everyone.
I’m involved with several gay organizations - one professional and one centered around gay athletics.
In both cases there are a small group of activists that are trying to erase gay and lesbian identity, and all mentions of gender, from the org to be more trans- and non-binary-inclusive.
In one case a trans board member didn’t feel represented by the organization name (which includes “gay”) because they now identify as straight with their new gender identity. And for this they demanded the org with thousands of gay members should be renamed.
People were afraid to push back out of fear of being labeled transphobic.
An adoptive parent is a parent. We don't specify "adoptive" all the time, and it'd be rude to refuse to refer to adoptive parents as parents because they aren't biologically related to their children in the same way.
We have done exactly this kind of language change in schools over that issue too, teachers often prefer "guardians" to "parents" in some contexts these days because some children won't live with parents, things like that. To pretend this hurts people is just counter to these examples we see in reality, it's just trying to use the words that apply to everyone, not just the most common case. The cost is so small, the attempts to push back on it seem actively spiteful, because there is no reason to contest it generally. The thing it brings to mind is the "but marriage means a man and a woman" argument from the attempts to stop marriage equality.
They do not want to be called "menstruators", they want to be called women.
Why does their opinion about what they want to be called not matter?
I mean it does, but it doesn't override everyone else's. Consider people with with albinism. A medical text should not refer to people with albinism as albino men, even if some men might prefer to be called "men" instead of albinos. That'd mean calling albino women "men" which they clearly are not.
In the same way, assuming you accept that trans men are men (which the author purports to) calling people who menstruate women is calling these men something that they are not. So you need to use something that actually describes what you are trying to describe. This is also true since not all biological women menstruate, so even there if you use the term "women" instead of "people who menstruate" when discussing something medical that has to do with menstruating, you've now used an inaccurate term that describes a larger group of people than you are discussing.
In many situations, the adoptive parent is considered the parent, if the parent and child are OK with it, so is society in general. But at a doctor appointment, it is imperative to distinguish between biological and civil parenthood.
But apart from that: I (and many others nowadays) are OK with considering male to female trans as women. If you want to be a woman and act like a woman, I'll consider you a woman regardless of your biological sex.
But I'm not OK with referring to people as menstruators and semen donors: I think that's humiliating.
I guess I draw the line there: I respect trans identity, but I don't want that every single text must think about every single minority and accommodate them at all costs.
I have a friend with 1 arm but I wouldn't be outraged if someone said "people have two arms". I wouldn't even think about it, and neither would he: it's generally true, and if it's not said in bad faith, who cares?
Talk about walking on egg shells! Let's drop the thought police act, which some people like way to much, and let's fucking try to live together.
I'm fine to let trans men into male spaces around me because that's my decision, as a man, to waive some of my rights temporarily.
But for us to declare that a man can be a woman is giving away women's rights, and that's not okay.
Thus, it should not be offensive to say things like 'trans women are biologically male, thus have biological male advantages in things like sports'. This is a controversial statement. However, there is a section of the trans community who will insist that trans women are actually literally women like all other women.
Secondly, there is way more friction here than with a term like guardian, which represents a situation that is universal thoughtout humanity, and always has been. The common language only changed because of the need for accuracy and inclusiveness in things like school handbooks, not because it wasn't fully understood and accepted by the population as being an inevitable element of human populations for anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 children.
In contrast the differences between "man" and "woman" are stark and matter in all kinds of contexts.
Even outside of social denigrated groups, medicine is all about accommodating that 10% or 1% or 0.01%. I spent quite a bit of time on lectures about cystic fibrosis patients considering there are only about 40,000 people living with CF in all of the US, about 1/3200 live births. It costs real money to keep these people alive, and nobody seems to have a problem with that. Somehow "pregnant people" is an absolute deal breaker though, where we start talking about "is it worth to accommodate them?"
All of this boils down to people saying "you can't say woman anymore." Except you absolutely can, if you're talking about a pregnant woman, just like you can say "husband and wife" if that applies to a married couple, because those are specific situations. But when medicine speaks, it has to speak to everyone, especially those most at risk.
Basically, if a small percentage of the population is motivated enough and the rest of the population is mainly indifferent to the cause then the minority will get their way.
Most people have other things to do than to expend any energy on this. Plus, the magnification afforded by the internet leads to what we have.
But in an interesting way, the argument has turned into minority view vs minority view. I think we'll be reading about this argument for a very very long time since no single side has an advantage over the other.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
But those zero or low cost mechanisms don't achieve the advocacy goals that some are chasing. For advocacy purposes it needs to be visible, not silently accommodating.
And then you end up with the crude, objectifying and biologically reductive alternatives to "women" like calling them "menstruators" or "breeders".
One doesn't need to abandon politely accommodating to reject being made a tool of someone's disruptive advocacy.
What’s objectifying is deciding that women are defined by fertility.
When I admitted I was gay I didn’t want to still be called a straight male.
My brother was mentally ill his whole life; she is trans now. I showed her this comment and we both agreed.
It’s a good way to put it. We can try and do both, but clearly has to come before feelings.
If someone who's pregnant wants me to address them as "sir" or "them", that's exactly what I'll do, even if the author of TFA may be offended.
We can accept that a very small portion of the population doesn't fit into the definitions we commonly use without having to abandon them. It's obvious with good intentions but it seems like a silly hill to die on.
Why can't we just accept as a community that when you say male/female there will always be a little [*] attached to it for the exceptions?
I don't require everyone to make me comfortable, but I do positively notice when someone does. If I go to my office and there are men's rooms, women's rooms, and all gender rooms, I do feel much less excluded.
Not everyone is like me, but thousands or millions are. I do feel excluded by gendered language, and it does impact my ability to get work done, navigate social situations, etc.
To be clear: I don't think that just means using inclusive language, you may need to specify more to help people understand that language if it isn't in common use, or whatever. I don't think there is a simple one-size-fits-all solution, but I think just assuming gendered language is good enough is clearly sub-optimal, and best terms that clarify the specific group in question are the best starting point.
Most of the comments here never established what's actually being discussed.
Personally I think a big source of contention is that a lot of people don't accept exceptions to words.
You can. This is feelings all the way down. Specifically whose feelings are going to be accommodated.
When men are allowed into women's spaces - washrooms, rape shelters, and prisons - women and children die.
We have single-sex spaces for a lot of very good reasons.
Why does that only apply to trans people and how they want to be addressed? What about cis-women that want to be addressed as women, but now the medical profession is refusing to grant them that basic request for dignity?
I also don't just mean accomodation in terms of words: if trans men have any needs different to cis women, then medical literature on pregancy must include this when in circumstances where it's appropriate.
English has a right to a word that means, "those who can get pregnant". Moreover, that word is women. You seem to want a new word that means, "i want people to treat me the way society treats women/men". This is not a problem with the language, you might argue that its a problem with society, but consider exactly what it is that you're asking for.
Do you really have a right to be treated differently from other people? Its pretty easy to argue that men and women should be treated more equitably, but theres also a fair amount of structure in place to treat men and women differently to further that aim. Do you really think you have a right to opt into the perceived benefits of this attempt?
It sounds like you really value the social divisions between men and women.
Does someone stop being a woman if they have a hysterectomy or go through menopause? If someone is born infertile, can they never be a woman?
> English has a right to a word that means, "those who can get pregnant". Moreover, that word is women.
Yes, but language has to evolve with new information. We discovered and are now socially recognizing the existence of a different kind of human. We now have XX women, XY women, XX men, and XY men. So now XX women, XX men (and in the future potentially XY women) can get pregnant so there’s a desire to adapt to this new information and genericise the term.
> Do you really think you have a right to opt into the perceived benefits of this attempt?
If that’s how it worked that would be a good point but it isn’t. Trans folks didn’t choose to be trans. A trans woman is and always has been a woman and can’t just opt in to being a man. If you’ve ever talked to one you would know most of them try and fail because it destroys their mental health.
And this should be intuitively obvious because if a gay trans woman could just choose to be a straight man they probably would without hesitation. No hormones, expensive surgeries, no extreme difficulty dating, being the political punching bag de jour, don’t have to worry about being hatecrimed or discriminated against.
> It sounds like you really value the social divisions between men and women.
No, in fact it’s the opposite. Trans people are some of the biggest proponents of abolishing gender roles and pointlessly gendered stuff. Trans people are all about breaking down those social divisions.
Wanting to be seen and treated as the gender you are is not the same thing as reinforcing or valuing the divisions between genders. Again, it really comes down to that not being able to choose thing. If people could choose and trans men were really just masculine women then you would have a point.
This also should be intuitive because there are feminine trans men and masculine trans women. If they could choose and it was based on presentation wouldn’t it have been a heck of a lot easier for them to not be trans?
And trying to even argue that men cannot be pregnant is even doing too much. It is as insane as trying to "debate" whether the earth is round.
There is another comment mentioned about ramp. I think it is a good example where serving the extended audience (wheel chair user) is not harming the experience of main audience (non-wheel chair user). On the other hand, OP's article is about using gender neutral term on parenting/pregnancy websites where the main audience should be, well, women women and men men, that the article should lay its focus on.
A related concept is the paradox of tolerance [1]. We demand ourselves to be ever inclusive like the dodo [2]. All the dodos got eaten at last.
“The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority”
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
The same definition applies mutatis mutandis to men.
---
Now what is the concession that's being made?
If I were dictator the first step would be to round up and deport to labor camps all the people who misrepresent "small, diffuse and hard to quantify" as zero. So much BS in modern society in all areas and subject matters is predicated on this fallacy.
Second step would be to go about making an attempt at quantifying the cost.
To pretend it‘s fair for them to partake in sports or to disadvantage women in favor of trans people upsets that equilibrium when it happens to the first woman. Trans people need to be accepted, not advantaged.
I'm not terribly pleased by extremely vague bureaucratic language. But the arguments that try to turn such into an actual harm or cost to those not in the group being protected here are engaging in language that's far more deceptively vague.
Often it is. Simply changing from familiar terms to artificial terms is a cost.
And the cost is a small amount of understandability, yes. But even that isn't necessary paid by those outside the exclude group.
Exactly. Using „woman“ isn‘t a cost to the tiny majority that feels excluded by that word.
The people in favor of a lot of the erasures would want the wheelchair ramps removed, if people with functioning legs were the minority. It should not be entertained.
It's asking for the removal of accommodations for women.
This is a perfect analogy, thanks for it.
Being a trans birth giver is infinitesimally less common.
HN news is discussion about technology, start ups, and creating stupid moral panics to stir up hatred against groups you want to oppress.
In this case I actually have first hand experience of this topic, my wife is currently pregnant. Not once have I seen any price of advice or information that in any way has been less useful because of inclusive language. This whole article is attacking a problem - using inclusive language - that only exists if you hate the people being included and don’t want them included. Which apart from being obviously morally repugnant is also something that seems like an odd discussion to have on a tech website. I guess we’re interested in ethics in game journalism again…
For example, you're not included in my family, not legally, not biologically. If you ask/demand to be in my family simply because you say you feel like you are I'll say no but it will not mean I hate you, you're just not one of my family. My saying you're not is not anti-you or you-phobic. Your saying it wouldn't harm anyone to allow you and/or others to identify as being part of my family is simply nonsense, especially if my family disagree.
Thus, I'd like to see some justification for your claims.
> Why would or should men be included in something they are excluded from by nature, by biology, and by logic?
If we're including "trans men" in the category of "men" (and I think there are good reasons to do so, the same way we accept adoption as real parentage), then there indeed exists an edge case of people in the category of "men" getting pregnant.
I think you made the classic mistake of assuming that terms such as “birthing parent” are a way of including trans women. They aren’t. They’re for the benefit of trans men and non-binary individuals who are able to give birth. This isn’t about including people incapable of giving birth. It’s about including people who ARE.
Transmen can and do get pregnant if they keep their reproductive system intact.
All these angry people haven’t even taken the time to learn about the subject.
The fact is, it works either way as my position adheres to biological reality. Is there some reason I should not speak the truth? Really, I’d like to hear your reasoning for that.
An extremely good point made by another commentator is that the article turns into an attack on trans women with little discussion on trans men.
Also for non native speakers, we have non native websites and youtube channels which provide a lot of material.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous. I am surprised at her skepticism. Are the statistics not clear? One can quibble over causality, but my understanding is that they are a group with massively higher rates of suicide and depression, and so a group that would likely benefit from support.
A bit further down, it becomes clear that the article isn't really about erasure of women in pregnancy literature, it's just another pamphlet against trans people. It begins with a link to a news story to a press release of a university about babies being able to distinguish female faces from male faces, labelled as scientific proof that "polite society has largely submitted to being gaslit on a set of delusions so demonstrably false that even infants can see through them." That's the highest level of scientific rigour demonstrated in the article: a cherry-picked news article that's not completely off-topic. The perspective of people identifying as trans or what scientists have to say on the topic is completely ignored, instead there are simply assertions that any other view is obvious "nonsense".
I'm also not a huge fan of many of the new terms referred to in this article. However, here they are only a pretext for spilling hate against trans people. If the point of the article was to criticize PC language, there would have been no need to insult some random trans-woman. Not even a trans-man, the people who the inclusive birthing language is intended for; no, the author just casually throws in some hate against trans-women because that's what she actually wants to talk about.
Just in case it isn't clear, virtually no one in the literature takes the idea of a "adult biological woman" as a useful distinction, no matter how intuitive it may seem to most engineers. There's no real daylight between claiming that being "gender-critical" is "biologically based" as this author does, and outright rejection of transgender identities, which the author claims not to do. Virtually everyone with any philosophical training or background whatsoever thinks Quillette is a joke of a publication, not because of "ideology" or "social enforcement" but because, well, they publish embarrassing shit like this.
Add that to the fact that there have been almost 600 comments here on this joke of an article that doesn't manage to get past screed and offer a single coherent argument, and the result is frankly pretty infuriating. Half of it is just misdirection, to be clear. Abortion is absolutely a women's rights issue, everyone involved agrees on that I think. It is nonetheless false that everyone who gets an abortion is a woman.
Try this at a bar in rural (red) Ohio. See how it works out. One of the most annoying things about this extremely online debate is the holier than thou attitude that people take about it. If only you've read the right books, and the right essays, and follow the right twitter accounts ... then you'll finally understand that women have penises and men have vaginas.
Your's is the best response in this entire thread.
I can also see how being called a menstrator would feel objectifying (kinda like how in some contexts calling someone a breeder or a bleeder is derogatory)
Oppression isn't something you can even give a clear and unambiguous definition for, let alone measure statistically.
"my understanding is that they are a group with massively higher rates of suicide and depression"
This does not automatically imply they are oppressed. An obvious and common alternative interpretation is that choosing to surgically change your gender is at least sometimes caused by mental illness, which also causes depression and suicide, and/or that people who change gender discover that they don't actually like their new gender (for internal reasons, not due to the attitudes of others).
I see this being asserted all the time, but very rarely with any kind of quantifiable evidence attached.
Why does this woman's personal experience of pregnancy make her so offended by how other people who can give birth think of their gender?
I do agree with the author that the existence of trans people shouldn't mean we can't use the word breastfeeding anymore. But I don't think that's the fault of people who want to say that men can give birth.
Here's an idea - why not have resources with different language for cis women and trans men? Just like pages come with different language versions and you can switch in the nav bar.
This would also be medically helpful, as I'm sure the birthing experience is not identical for the two populations.
- This woman identifies as a woman on the basis of her physical body (giving birth being an example of an experience that she had in part due to the body she was born with)
- For this woman, that's what being a woman is: when she describes herself as a woman then she means someone who has breasts, gives birth, etc.
- If other people use "woman" to mean something different and more abstract/social, then it makes it difficult for this woman to describe herself as a "woman" and have it understood that by saying this she is talking about her body.
- It may even be the case, that if "woman" means what other people want it to mean then this woman would no longer identify as a woman.
In other words, she's offended because her own identity is being challenged.
With bodies and genes and biology, we have a distinction between men and women (and some genetic outliers). This in no way affects if you like barbies or action men, what you wear, and how long your hair is. Excluding disabilities, this also defines your physical characteristics and possibilities, from being able to pee in a urinal (without special tools) to giving birth.
If we define women as "everyone who defines themselves as a woman", what exactly is a woman then?
I agree. If we open things up so widely, then terms like "man" and "woman" become meaningless. Nevertheless, it also doesn't seem right to be to disregard the experiences of trans people.
My preferred way out of this conundrum is to view gender as multi-dimensional. As such, there are multiple kinds of woman (and man). Three important kinds might be:
1. Biological women. Which we can define in different ways: it might include only people who were born women, or it might include people who have altered their physiology either through surgery or hormones. It might include some intersex people, or it might not.
2. People who "feel like" a woman
3. The political class of women: those are identified by others as women, and treated differently on that basis.
If one wants to define "woman", one then has to be clear about what kind of woman they mean. At which point it becomes relatively straightforward. As a linguistic convention, I would suggest:
- "man"/"woman" can be informally used for any of the above categories
- Where possible, or is asked to clarify, people should be specific about which kind of gender they mean.
- Nobody should claim that "man"/"woman" refer only to one kind of gender.
I would eventually like to get to the point where people have separate identities in each category, which is already how I approach my own gender identity. I identify as biologically male. I don't have feelings of gender, so I identify as non-binary or agender in that category. And I am usually but not always treated like a man, so I mostly identify as male in that category, but not entirely.
I feel like this is a lot more useful (and inclusive!) than a binary "are you a man or a woman".
After going through the list that you’ve given, would she be wrong for feeling like that? Or is it just a matter of her feelings [1] being rendered incompatible with the contemporary milieu?
[1]: Which per your list, sound legitimate irrespective of the tone of the article or her writing itself, I’m going to use your takeaways as a model for my questions.
I don't think so (although she might of course express her feelings in a way which is unhelpful/problematic/harmful).
I feel like if people realised that this was actually a consequence of self-identity centric models of gender, then they wouldn't advocate for them in the first place.
We can observe DNA sometimes makes creatures that breath air, sometimes it makes creatures that breath water, others can fly, etc... surely we can group DNA into species EVEN IF some of the "edges" are fuzzy (the categories exist, but the borders blend together smoothly between categories). This classification of DNA is recursive, and can be done within a species. A great number of species consistently produces TWO main categories... the creature with eggs, and the creature with sperm. Again, this doesn't mean the borders are perfectly defined, but the main category is.
I'm illustrating this to show that in fact this duality in types of humans exists, and this duality is the main mechanism to keep the species alive. Maybe we'll soon reproduce in labs; maybe test tube babies will have DNA that is neither man or woman, and maybe we're in the process of transitioning there. Even if that's the case, it doesn't mean that up until now there was no such thing as a man or a woman, and we had it wrong all this time. I would have more respect for this gender movement if it was about transhumanism and moving beyond our evolution, but instead it's trying to shame everyone into believing contradicting ideas (i.e. by changing definition of words and undermining established science).
Sure, but that's not the only thing they're defined by. We might for example like to categorise people by their profession, and doing so is not in conflict with categorising them by their DNA.
I have not considered it on the context of time/ephemeral. I usually think of it as mutable, but your word choice brings up a point about stages of life I think is worth considering.
It could just be rationalisation though. I'd expect people to be fired and/or called transphobic for making that sort of argument.
Can we not just let people be who they are and recognize gender minorities do exist? Acknowledging the existence of trans men doesn't reduce the incredible experiences of any woman who gives birth (or doesn't!)
> Can we not just let people be who they are and recognize gender minorities do exist? Acknowledging the existence of trans men doesn't reduce the incredible experiences of any woman who gives birth (or doesn't!)
I understand both sides of this argument, I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to a different conclusion than you. Being a man or a woman is a brute fact. It has nothing to do with identity. Only women give birth.
What bothers me is not our disagreement but that my view has been labeled "hateful" or "problematic".
I’m lost, could you explain this? Are you referring to birth by those who don’t identify as female and were themselves born biologically female?
Note that this definition of women is either circular or culture specific (depending on which of the two trans inclusive definitions you are using).
A biological definition is more useful in most cases.
This is just silly.
The steep and slippery slope from "not caring about what other women do" to "finding men, calling themselves women, in your space."
https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
It seems presumptuous for males to pressure or shame females for wanting to recognize biology and single-sex rights. They only recently won them after a hard-fought battle and obviously they need them; violent sex crimes are overwhelmingly committed by males, and overwhelmingly against females (women) and children.
> And if being a trans-inclusive feminist means re-embracing classic female self-negation to make biological men happy (didn’t we all agree this was bad decades ago?), then I’ll gladly trade in my feminist card so long as I can stop pretending that Lia Thomas is a feminist hero.
Yet it seems pretty clear it's the opposite. The point of not inherently assuming pregnant people are women is to avoid misgendering trans men who happen to be pregnant and calling them women. Given that she goes out of her way to indicate her support for the trans community, it seems like she'd also agree that trans-men should indeed be called men and not women.
There's plenty I can get behind in the article, plain language is almost always easier to understand than weird synonyms, and I don't think that a trans man is going to struggle with the fact that they will indeed have to give birth through their vagina, but the entire article seems to be railing against a pretense that isn't happening.
That is EXACTLY the purpose of the language.
"The point of not inherently assuming pregnant people are women is to avoid misgendering trans men who happen to be pregnant and calling them women"
We don't need to modify the terminology for 99.99999% of a group to address the needs of the remaining 0.00001%.
Then why are they getting pregnant and having children? At least for the time they are pregnant and giving I will consider them to be women.
Most numbers I have seen are more like 0.1%
I’ll guess it is 99.9:0.01 or greater.
Does that seem a wise basis for which we should reform a language?
Yes actually. Precision in language, especially when talking medical has significant value.
I am male. I have a penis and no breasts. If I were to transition into being a woman, I assume that would involve me having breasts and a vagina (in the final state).
At some point in the process I imagine that I would have some set of physical attributes that don't correspond neatly into being either e.g. a "penis" or a "vagina", unless it's a one and done operation. At that point using either term would be inaccurate, but the terms themselves would not be inaccurate.
At no point in that process would any of the words "penis", "vagina", "chest", "breast" etc cause me offence. They quite obviously are good descriptors, both for myself (past, present and future) and for others.
What am I missing? Why do the terms need to be replaced, what is gained by doing so?
Everyone is too blind in their rage over transwomen existing to realize that.
Similarly here, you omit the names of body parts that could be used to identify the biological sex and therefore infer the gender of the person you refer to. But I'm not convinced it's actually beneficial to the people in question.
There's two things at play here:
1. Some people don't want to be racist, so they over correct. That's OK, but we can also take a step back in some cases eg "actually acknowledging race is not racist, let's stop avoiding it all costs".
2. Some people like to be virtuous and tell others what they can think and say. It's a powerful position. So they spend their time telling others what is OK or not to say, and find reasons to be outraged.
Not that we've solved racism: there's still lots of violence and re-appearance of racist ideologies. But we should fight those, not the "micro-agressions" which just create fights between people who could be OK the same side.
It feels like saying "the colour at the low energy end of the spectrum" instead of "red". Are people offended by the mere utterance of the word "breast"?
Reminds me how Ellen Page the young woman was not in Inception, but Elliot Page the male actor played a woman’s role…
I learned quite awhile ago that none of this was ever supposed to stand up to logical review. That’s the point.
So Elliot Page was born a man but assigned female at birth. Eventually he realized that the pain and wrongness he’d been feeling his whole life was dysphoria. So he changed his name to something that suited him better.
Okay, so why then don’t we say that Elliot Page was in Inception but back then he went by Ellen? Why the rewriting history? We don’t do that for changing last names in marriage. Well because it’s a kindnesses for trans people. A huge number of them have extremely painful and negative associations with their deadname and so we backdate it so they can experience their past in a way that doesn’t bring up trauma. It’s similar to why when taking to a trans person you would probably edit a quotation you’re relaying that misgenders them.
Society really should not have to pretend they were never a woman just to protect a person's feelings. And why is acknowledging that they used to be a woman be so horrible? They have their own memories of their life before transitioning.
Is the experience of being a trans man largely that other people don’t even believe you exist?
10000% yes. Once you look for it you can’t unsee the amount of public discourse that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever if you acknowledge that trans men exist.
I figured the disproportionate representation was because it was easier to "pass" online, and/or easier to find acceptance.
And other people came to just treat them as people.
We also learned, from daily casual conversations, that being trans (like being gay, or other minority) can be really, really rough. Partly because the Real World wasn't nearly as accepting. Whether it's strangers who flip out and try to physically harm them, employers who don't want to hire them, or their own families.
To fix this, I think the Real World will have to swing the pendulum a bit, while everyone figures out how to be accepting and supportive.
I don't know what the answers are, but I assume some mistakes will be made, some of the loudest people will turn out to be mistaken, there will be some miscommunication as everyone gets to the same baseline understanding, some people will try with the best of intentions but do things that they later see as silly and counterproductive, a lot of people will have the rough right ideas and uncertainty but will be drowned out, etc.
Eventually, we'll hit critical masses of understanding, find the right notes and conventions, etc., and we'll collectively have advanced as people.
I suspect that the biggest risk in the figuring-out period in the US is actually politicians promoting news calculated to cause backlash. Consider a political operator/outlet a few years ago that decides to make the public bathroom sex/gender access (and spinning it in an awful way) a big news story right before elections. I could be mistaken, but I thought at the time that an actual trans rights activist would've been making a grave error to pick just before elections to make their big media push -- I didn't see it getting concessions from Democrats looking for the transgender vote nor generating much sympathetic understanding, but I did see it riling up some Republican voters, to get to the polls over "culture war".
We've come so far with accepting people as people, and supporting people how they need. Don't get discouraged from keeping doing that, by learning periods and malicious actors.
The piece its responding to is very clearly centred around pregnancy but here you take it all over the place.
Paraphrasing the thesis of the article "gender inclusive language is harmful and profane in media relating to pregnancy".
Yet, in your comment that's entirely ignored. Which I think is pretty indicative of how this discussion has gone and is going.
I think people aren't going to read that piece and think "let's only consider this one thing, in isolation, and not consider the context in which this is happening".
Actual number: 0.39%.[1]
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/transgender...
1) Some people will decline to publicly identify as trans for safety reasons. The safer it gets to be out as trans, even in pockets of the US, the more people will. (See the infamous graph of left-handedness over time.[1])
2) Many people aren't aware that what they've experienced lines up with trans identity or gender dysphoria until they encounter someone else who's experienced the same thing (whether in person or in the media).
Much as with LGB folks, there's a generational trend where younger folks are more likely to identify as trans and/or nonbinary. In a recent Pew Research survey[1], 5.1% of people from ages 18-29% identify that way; 1.6% of those 30-49; and 0.3% of those 50+.
[1] https://www.truthorfiction.com/the-history-of-left-handednes... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/07/about-5-of-...
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual figure were closer to 1% if being trans carried zero social stigma.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/health/prostate-gay-sex-c...
It baffles me. Do people wish to pay to read stuff like that? I mean, what the point to write a polemic article and severely limit the access to it?
Virtual world easily spread tribalism that could be around most ridiculous things we can think of, because of lack of confrontation with reality. IRL there would be laughing, denial, fear, explanation why those ideas are nonsense... But all of that is not there if you lock yourself in bubble of virtual people that share same ridiculous ideas. Of course they will eventually dominate field where they invest most of their time - internet.
We know from history (or China, Russia, North Korea) what was a purpose of control peoples tongue and what they should think about. We should learn from it. I still believe that this ideology is pushed by small, very loudly screaming group of people. Majority don't care.
I can’t accept something wrong though. Sex is not a social construct, gender is.
Bearing a child is something exclusively reserved to the female sex, no matter what their preferred gender is. Articles related to pregnancy should not talk about « internal gonades » instead of « ovaries » to be more inclusive. You might identify as a a gender other than female, if your sex is female, you have ovaries, period. It doesn’t invalidate the gender in any way. And ironically it becomes a bit more exclusive of 99% of the female population which is not familiar with this newspeak.
If we just learned to communicate with each other and understand intent instead of getting so micro-aggrieved over how language is semantically used, we'd all be better off.
This isn't even a "gender" issue, saying something like "people with a uterus" when it is the most accurate term helps cis women who have had hysterectomies know it isn't relevant to them. Of course, we should always inspect the impact of words: (e.g: maybe some people won't know their biology to know if they have a uterus, so we should clarify for them if that's a potential case), but the goal of being accurate rather than just making assumptions based on gender is obviously reasonable and beneficial as a base idea.
Would you be okay if a new religion came along that started casually referring to non-believers as heathens, pagans, and infidels? And referring to believers as "the saved"? And if such language were enshrined into law, and you could lose your job if you refused to use it?
There is no good faith argument to be had in why a religion would choose "heathen" as a description of a non-believer unless they mean it in a negative way. The message itself is clearly bad and the chosen language reflects it.
That's not the same as me calling a pregnant person a "pregnant woman" or someone else calling them a "uterus having pregnant person". The meaning in both cases is a biological female human who is carrying a baby in pregnancy. You can find people who will get offended by either phrase, but why? I don't get it. Neither phrase is meant to be disparaging or trivializing towards other people. If you hear "pregnant woman" you should assume that "woman" is meant in a biological sense and not a gender sense.
The answer that I have come to is that the term 'woman' is vague, it means different things to different people, and that's ok. Defining a group based on difference like you have makes things needlessly complicated, for example what is chair?:
As we have all come to understand in recent years, CHAIRS can HAVE WHEEL, but CHAIRS can also HAVE LEGS . They can have a BACK, or they can lack them. They can be WELL BUILT or they can be WEAK . They can be strong or they can be weak. They can be short or they can be tall. What does the word CHAIR mean? It seems like a word that doesn't mean anything at all?
A chair is something you perceive as a chair and a woman is someone you perceive as a woman. Thus, to identify as woman means you would like to be perceived as a woman with whatever baggage comes attached with the person's concept of women. To that end you 'do woman'
You sit on it (butt don't take it with you).
Next question, please.
The main reasons I’ve heard thrown around for this are: 1) Autism-spectrum traits correlate to being trans (why? nobody knows) and also correlate to high technical ability, 2) tech is generally fairly accepting of alternative lifestyles and identities, 3) if you were brought up as a boy you probably had more access to computers and were encouraged to go into that field, 4) if you were brought up as a boy but were actually trans, you probably preferred nerdy stuff to sports and computers were a good distraction from hating your body, 5) tech jobs have good healthcare.
Here are some reasons:
- Autists tend to be uncoordinated which makes them feel uncomfortable in their own bodies, which is a feeling used to diagnose transgenderism.
- Autists are often outcasts, which can make men feel less masculine, which they may accidentally equate to being more feminine.
- It’s accepted in the literature that autists tend to be naive as they can’t read social cues properly. Compared to their more socially sensitive neurotypical peers, they are more likely to trust that others will genuinely perceive them as the opposite gender based on cues from social media alone.
- Autists tend to over-rationalize which can lead to thought spirals that cause them to convince themselves of something that a neurotypical person would think is unrealistic.
- Autists tend to lack social sensitivity which includes the absence of the ability to sense the subtle discomfort that people feel in their presence.
This is why trans women who are lesbians are extremely over represented compared to cis women.
There's also the need to be part of a community online, a community which is not physically accessible in most places, so the level of social media engagement is higher, and maybe that leads to tech and tech-adjacent work.
Possibly, or also possibly likely that people are more likely to come out when they feel less constrained to societal expectations (i.e there may be more LGBTQIA+ who are closeted outside of tech because of nonconformity-related fears). Whether it's one or the other (or both), these populations have always gravitated towards tech because tech was always the outcast thing to do.
2. Autistic spectrum is over-represented in tech.
3. There are many more man in tech.
4. There are many more trans-woman than trans-man.
Multiply all these together and you get the phenomenon you observed.
[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/transgender-and-gender-d...
Reading the author's article, I couldn't help but think about this situation as it relates to other minority groups and how it relates to the growth and change of language over the years. I am not a linguist, but I can say that some words that were commonly accepted in my adolescence in the 1980s could now end careers and friendships, and rightfully so. MLK said the long arc of history bends towards justice, and I think our language has moved certain injurious words into the trash bin. I think that certain people react to the language changing as they do to many other aspects of social change: by planting their flag and declaring they won't stand for it. I think such plantings have as little effect as prior plantings have: life is going to change, whether you like it or not.
I think the author's reasoning is suspect in, at the very least, two particular issues. First, she declares outright that she is not bigoted nor a social conservative, and uses as backup support that she's not evicted transgender students from her class (despite the fact that would've opened her up to a lawsuit, most likely), that she almost worked for a transgender woman, and that she's dated trans men. It feels like a list of credentials that lets her exempt herself from examining with self-awareness the actual beliefs she holds for bigotry or social conservatism, especially when she goes on to describe Dylan Mulvaney as "an adult biological man going through a grotesquely stereotypical transgender girlhood."
It's interesting that in the exact essay she references, Orwell cites a "lack of precision" as one of the problems of the English language. Yet she demands that lack of precious, which Orwell rails against! Orwell goes on to note that words must be consciously chosen: "[a]fterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning," saying, moments later, that when choosing that word, above all else, "[b]reak any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
"Politics and the English Language," to me, can be accurately read as a caution not to let legalese and rote phrases enter your head and flow out of your fingers without self-examination. But that essay also, to me at least, is very much for the accuracy of language and for not limiting its growth: "[t]he defence of the English language [...] has nothing to do with [...] the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. [...] What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about."
And look at Orwell's other essay, "The Politics of Newspeak," speaking of how (in a '1984' dystopia) words are eliminated and definitions stripped away from them.
The author's essay, though, seems to be based on a very significant misstep that I'm surprised no one caught before this went to print, unless I'm very much mistaken: she seems to be attacking trans women who were AMAB. (A common abbreviation today is AMAB and AFAB - assigned male/female at birth.)
Perhaps someday, a trans woman will be able to have a uterus implanted and be able to bring a child to term. But the vast majority of the accommodations she complains about, she seems to think is somehow aimed towards accommodating AMAB trans women who, right now, cannot give birth ("making biological men happy", "while almost no one actually believes that men can get pregnant", etc.).
But these accommodations in wording are aimed at AFAB trans men, who can biologically get pregnant. Trans men, depending on the choices they have made up until that time, CAN become pregnant and give birth. But they are men. To call them 'biological women,' or to argue that they must be called biological women and not trans men, is "barbarous" ('characterized by savagery; very cruel'). It is also factually imprecise, in that it does not accurately reflect the gender identity of the individual in question.
I hesitate to get personal, but I feel that her essay is mostly about screaming from a visceral level of her being that this trauma she's experiencing is hers and hers alone. But she uses this trauma to branch off into a very fervent diatribe that demands that AMAB trans women should not be referred to with inaccurate wording, while ignoring the existence of AFAB trans men who could experience the very things she describes as dealing with.
In the very first paragraph of her essay, the author relates the origin of these opinions as coming to her (and perhaps contemporaneously being written?) in the midst of a time where she was experiencing what sounds like very severe physical and emotional trauma with badly weakened access to her support system.
That doesn't excuse anything on her part. Trump had a truly horrifying childhood, but that does not excuse what he's done to other people during his life. Abuse doesn't excuse being an abuser; trauma doesn't excuse becoming one who traumatizes.
people who menstruate
people with uteruses
these people all have commonality, but they have been stripped of a unifying word for themselves
Just because you want to assign the word "cis" to some women doesn't mean that they identify that way
Because typical bureaucratic literature has added one more abstraction?
Health literature and other bureaucratic literature is chock full of abstraction and euphemisms. The entire edifice is aesthetically unpleasant and euphemisms broadly are sometimes used to let bureaucrats get away with terrible thing (see George Orwell talking of "population relocation" in Politics and The English Language). But I don't see the euphemisms targeted here doing any real damage. I mean "not saying things I think should be said" only qualifies as harm if you abuse language far more than these changes do.
I mean, she literally did say that cis women are more oppressed than trans people. That's a pretty impressive claim from someone who was trumpeting her LGBT-friendliness a couple paragraphs earlier.
If we are separating gender and sex, then gender references need to stop using words referring to sex, because the vast and overwhelming majority of English speakers understand words like man/woman in sexual terms.
But oh well.
Typically I hear "male" and "female" used to describe sex, though it would be somewhat awkward to use them as nouns rather than adjectives.
I'm not at all as well versed on it as I should be and I'm working to understand it better as time goes on, but the distinction was made using existing language to avoid overloading, and later generations already understand the distinction pretty intuitively.
I expect this to be promptly removed from the front page. I’m happy to see taboo subjects being spoken of again.
Why is it that those making the most 'biological fact' arguments ignore actual biology.
ffs
That's just not true. Biological sex is defined by the gametes produced, and I'm not aware of conditions where one person produces both male and female gametes.
Even if the consensus is "agreeing to respectably disagree" once everyone is heard.
This. There’s a difference between asking for respect (I’ll use the name you want) versus fighting to call breastfeeding chest feeding.
Seriously, the world has bigger problems than to debate over language.
If the general public cared half as much about world hunger (or child hunger!) as it did about debating the definition about the word “women” the world would be a better place.
The author of this does not seems to understand how iff statements work which is hilarious.