What's so scary about "women" and "female"?
Trans activist hysteria over "female" and "woman" reveals how hard they cling to misogynistic ideas.
The last and only time I’ve published an article on Medium it was to take apart a piece by Jude Ellison S. Doyle in which the writer attacked other writers who don’t share Doyle’s views. My article was swiftly deemed hate speech by Medium’s trans/sensitivity language police and kicked off the platform. I republished it on Substack with a bit of style advice on what you can and cannot say if you want to avoid the trans-Medium language police.
Medium’s algorithm keeps sending me its “Daily Digest highlights” that mostly consist of articles about all matters trans, some months old. Today this four month old article by Doyle — “What’s So Scary About “Birthing People? Conservative hysteria over gender-inclusive birth language reveals how hard they cling to outdated, sexist ideas of family.” — was at the top of their highlight list. I am especially annoyed by interest groups’ appropriation of language, so I got suckered into reading it. Medium’s algorithm will no doubt reward me for my trouble.
Doyle and I have radically different ideas about how and what we believe women and men think about family and motherhood, but elaborating on those isn’t worth the time or effort, since much of Doyle’s rhetoric consists of outlandish, prejudiced generalizations. However, what I would like Doyle — or any officer of the trans-inclusive language police department — to explain is their demand that we all twist ourselves into linguistic pretzels to avoid saying “women” and “female.” Why are we seeing “pregnant people,” “birthing parents,” “people who menstruate,” and not “penis owners,” “semen producers,” or “people with a prostate”?
Helen Joyce writes about these odious language assaults in her brilliant, riveting new book “Trans — When Ideology Meets Reality”: “This language carves women up to pieces to be used for sexual and reproductive services. It is reminiscent of porn sites, where visitors are invited to search according to body part and activity of interest, or the surrogacy industry, where children are bought in bits — eggs from an ovary-haver, gestational services from a uterus owner and nutrition from a human milk feeder. Women become orifices, providers of genetic material, vessels for growing offspring and milch cows.”
It is worth noting that France has taken action to protect the French language from linguistic mutilations. Last May, the government banned schools from teaching “gender neutral” words, because they are “a threat to the language.” Academie Francais, “which guards the French language, told school teachers to stop using ‘gender neutral’ word spellings in classrooms.” The Academie’s decree did concede to some equality demands but of the sort probably not pleasing to trans activists: it recommended that “certain job titles should change forms when the person holding the role is female. For example, a female president would be referred to as ‘présidente’. Job application forms should also include both male and female titles to encourage more women to apply, the decree added.”
Joyce refers to the website MedicineNet’s entry for “female”: “The traditional definition of female was ‘an individual of the sex that bears young’ or ‘that produces ova or eggs.’ However, things are not so simple today. ‘Female’ can be defined by physical appearance, by chromosome constitution…or by gender identification.”
”Now go to MedicineNet’s entry for “male”: “The sex that produces spermatozoa.”
The Mayo Clinic is also on bended knee before the trans-inclusive language police:
“doctors trained in obstetrics and gynecology…care for people with cervical cancer.”
“Specialists in obstetrics and gynecology at Mayo Clinic have deep experience treating people with a wide range of diseases and conditions of the gynecologic…”
The Mayo doesn’t consider similar linguistic acrobatics to be necessary when talking about males:
“Cancer isn’t the only prostate problem for men.”
“Some studies have suggested that men with a higher frequency of ejaculations may have a slightly lower risk of prostate cancer.”
Transactivists, please explain the trans-inclusive language police’s demand that language be inclusive in one direction only. Is it, as Joyce suggests, because their goal is to remove “all obstacles to using the words ‘woman’ and ‘female’ for any male who wants them”?
Joyce suggests we try “a squawm is anyone who identifies as squawm’ or ‘every lazap is a lazap.’ Now, can you say what a sqawm or a lazap is?”
Thanks for writing candidly and without fear about this terrifying phenomenon. I wanted to comment on your article on Medium entitled "Transactivists are the best messengers for the madness of their own agenda" only really to say I love that idea and agree wholeheartedly, but they've got social media on their side so it's not so easy to make it known when you disagree with them. I'm banned on Medium for example and to tell the truth I find that a blessing, but it does mean you don't get to engage in dialog with these people. Which I suppose is how they want it