As soon as a girl gets her period, she is never again allowed to forget for more than a few weeks at a time that she is inextricably bound to that biological entity known as the body. Far more than men, women’s relationship to embodiment is intense, unavoidable and introspective. We are sometimes dominated by our bodies and sometimes inconvenienced by them, but sometimes the immense pain and horror they are capable of fuses with an incredible generative force no man will ever know: one manifestation of which is motherhood.
So it really is no surprise that many otherwise entirely non-political women have found the rise of gender-neutral terms in medical settings bewildering, as if there is no such thing as having a woman’s body. All that pain, blood, gore, power, utility and beauty is increasingly squashed below the punishing flatline of woke-speak, which is designed not to reflect reality or experience, but to score strange epistemological points.
Yet as institutions have leapt to adopt the idea that it is ‘unsafe’ to refer to biological sex, or any identity bound up with biological sex, even ante and post-natal care have begun erasing terms like “mother” and “breast”. It is here that women’s bewilderment has morphed into anguished fury and hurt.
Last week, the Royal College of Midwives apologised for replacing the words “women” and “mother” with “postnatal people” in its latest guidance on treatment of sleeping babies. There were many mentions of “parents”, but the paragraph – since removed – that caught the eye was: “Postnatal people in hospital should have easy access to the call bell system, be shown how to use it and ensure it’s working – they should be provided with a bed-side cot for the baby to use while in hospital”.
Post-natal people? Needless to say, women who have actually borne children, breastfed and slept next to them – aka mothers – were gobsmacked that they’d simply been written out of the guidance as a collection of dirty, outdated words.
One woman tweeted: “please do not replace women with so-called ‘postnatal people’. It is highly offensive to many of us women who have given birth. And others.” Another wrote: ‘‘Women are not an abstract concept to be redefined or erased at will. Deconstructing us in language insults our intelligence and dignity.” A strong point, repeated by a 60-something “feminist and mother”, after a panel discussion I participated in last week. “I want to say loud and clear in public that I am not a ‘person’ who has children, but a mother,” she said after the discussion. Her question to us was whether she would be “cancelled” for saying so; I told her, given the power of the new lingo politics, that the answer was “quite possibly”.
One of the most sinister aspects of new linguistic regimes like this, especially in healthcare settings, is that they can be materially dangerous. As Milli Hill, author of Give Birth Like a Feminist, noted: the erasure of “women” from the safe sleeping guidance is at odds with “evidence [that] shows safety differences if baby co-sleeps with breastfeeding mum [or a] non-breastfeeding mum/dad… sex matters in baby sleep info.”
This is not the first time the medical powers that be have suggested “mother” is an offensive term. In February, Brighton NHS introduced “trans-friendly terms” such as “birthing parent”, “chestfeeding” and the extremely off-putting “human milk”. In a society obsessed with not making minorities, no matter how small, feel “excluded”, the sharp and immediate offence to the majority caused by excluding their proper name seems to be of less interest. But whether the ideologues of Brighton NHS Trust cared or not, women around Britain responded to the “inclusive” shake-up in maternity lingo by venting their rage and sense of hurt to each other. A friend texted me the same day, saying how breastfeeding had been the hardest thing she’d ever done, and she couldn’t believe her achievement was being taken away from her, snatched and swaddled by force in a meaningless, dystopian new terminology. Another woman, a senior academic, wrote to me in private, saying how her breasts didn’t look the way they currently did, at 50, because she had “chestfed” two children.
Pushing back against the erasure of “women” and its cognate terms is not, despite what the maddened woke brigade insists, making hospitals “unsafe” for trans people. Nobody is saying that trans people – including biological women who identify as men who give birth, or trans women there as their partners – should not receive quality care like all patients.
What women are saying is that subtracting the “woman” from the baby-creating body, or the “mother” or the “breast” from what it is to be pregnant and give birth, is a blank insult to reality as the vast, vast majority experience it in their deepest fibres. There are those for whom biology and “motherhood” do not go hand-in-hand, and they deserve respect and good care. But to change the reference points of the whole system to reflect their sensibilities, rather than those of the 99.99 per cent (this figure is based on one of very few national studies on how many trans men give birth per year: Medicare Australia said 40 did so in 2017, compared with 301,095 women) – is mad, sad, and hurtful to women.
