The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature

I'm not trans or any of that sort - I'm generally uncomfortable around people. What I don't understand is, why impose upon others? To me, that's my cross to bear.

For example, there are many more people who experience severe social anxiety than would identify as trans. Those people can have literal panic attacks and experience terrible fear and we aren’t considering redesigning society or language to accommodate them. Nor should we.

I'm not against gender neutral spaces. There's often no need to segregate by gender, and it makes no sense to do so if there is no need. What I don't understand is why you feel excluded.

I don't feel an affinity to a gender either, but I understand that bathrooms labelled "mens" are generally intended to apply to people with penises, and bathrooms labelled "womens" a generally intended to apply to people with vaginas. That has nothing to do with any feelings I might or might not have about gender, and it's literally just a room. Why does it matter which one I/you use?

> I don't think changing the language is bullying, shaming, or pushing an agenda

It doesn't have to be but it is. Look at the three-year long hate mob attacking Maya Forstater and JK Rowling because they objected to losing sex-based language. They both receive many credible death threats. That's bullying to push an agenda.

Even when this is sugar coated it's a poison pill. Accepting that males could be "trans women" immediately requires you to accept that they should use the women's washroom despite being the wrong sex and that sex being the large dangerous one. (Females in male spaces isn't a safety issue so I'm ignoring it for now.)

> people making changes that are logically consistent with how they experience the world. Again: if trans men exist, then pregnancy must occur in men and women.

Occam's razor would suggest that if a person is pregnant they probably aren't a man. Being that man basically means "the people who don't get pregnant". That is the difference between sexes.

> The reason you hear people react strongly is because they believe they have a simple logic, and people come in and say, "I deny that trans men exist, or I deny trans men are men." That's a pretty strong thing to say and a pretty strong thing to hear.

You say that as if your trans man friend will vanish in a puff of logic. Nobody is denying that they exist or threatening to make it happen and it's emotional blackmail to exaggerate like that.

There's a middle ground we could shoot for. These people would probably agree your TM friend was Masc (/Femme), because as a newly created word it doesn't have an existing meaning and isn't used to gate access to single-sex spaces like prisons.

You use words like "comfort", "support", "included" and say that you feel uncomfortable entering "gendered" spaces.

I submit that women are not supported, not included, are uncomfortable, and actually are unsafe when men enter women's spaces.

It's easily witnessed in their forums, for example the 'MtF' subreddit, there are countless posts of men asking if it's normal to be sexually aroused while cross-dressing, fetishising their own breasts, talking about their longing to be a 'hot woman', and so on.

That only really makes sense on an individual basis. The OP article (which I can't read due to a paywall), appears to be talking about pregnancy literature, and your solution can't really apply to literature. If you have group of 1000 people, where 999 want to be called "pregnant women" and 1 who wants to be called a "person experiencing pregnancy," what term do you use in your literature to refer to the group? If you defer to the one, you fail to defer to the 999.

Lots of women don’t want to be called menstrators, a tiny number of transmen do. To whom should we defer?

It certainly seems to me, that rather than be a more effeminate male, instead they want to be in the gender roles and be the “role” of a woman (or vice versa).

I couldn't disagree more, and this is precisely what i am arguing. The argument that the biological and social categories of men and women are different is fundamentally predicated on the existence of the social category, otherwise known as gender. This is regressive, and we should absolutely not accomodate it.

It's growing up being told that men play with trucks and women play with dolls, and instead of casting this obvious bullshit aside, you acquiesce and now argue that men who play with dolls are women, and that's ok.

This is an extremely misguided attempt at constructing justice fron the premises of religious fundamentalism.

Serious question: do you suppose that that trans men have different needs than cis women (in a medical sense) with regard to pregnancy?

That same logic should apply to people who claim to be the opposite gender from what they were born.

"Women" as a term is incredibly useful and descriptive when referring to females. It's strongly correlated with multiple important traits. When its definition is changed to mean any one who assigns the word 'woman' to themselves, the word conveys no meaningful information.

A more adaptive definition of gender might be more suitable: social gender, body gender and biological gender.

E.g. bisexual trans women.

Big claim, little justification

It's also wildly unpopular among many Latinos, because there are hundreds of millions of them and they don't all have the same opinions. On the whole it seems to be a flop. But let's at least credit Latinos as a group with the agency to come up with their own ideas, good or bad, hey?

You didn't do this though. You just said that your ex-girlfriend worked in a psychiatric ward and there were lots of people with cluster B and lots of trans kids. It was honestly just a mess of associations.

Psychiatric comorbidities in transgender people are reasonably well studied so you don't have to guess here. There are a number of small studies involving presentations to psychiatrists, but this is no longer the way that most trans people seek care, so the results are biased to complicated cases. Here is a large study comparing gender-minority coded files in a group of 53M patients:

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/trgh.2019.0029

As you'd expect, depression and anxiety are extremely common. Cluster B personality disorders are at a prevalence of 3.4%, though again, attention must be paid to the limitations of the study which fails to capture transgender people seeking care outside of this system. While it's certainly elevated of the general population, please internalize the fact that 96-97% of transgender people do not have a cluster B personality disorder.

As I've pointed out above, minorities are medicine's business. We absolutely write things in a way to include everyone, because we definitely want to get the most at-risk people out there. I don't care what you think about transgender men, you should want them to seek reproductive care if they are pregnant, because there is potentially another person involved or not, depending on what they choose to do.

Like I said above. There are about 40,000 people living with cystic fibrosis in the USA, about 1/3200 live births. It's really expensive to keep these people alive, with replacement enzymes, biologics, very, very frequent hospital admissions to the point where pediatrics calls them "CF tune-ups" and eventually lung or possibly multi-organ transplants. They do, however, have intrinsic human value, so we like to keep them alive. I don't think changing literature is a huge ask here, especially given that in a care context we still say "pregnant woman" when it's specifically a woman that I'm talking about, even though we say "pregnant people" in the abstract.

If we had to limit ourselves to that entirely unclear definition we'd be giving up a lot, including the ability to recognize anyone as either man or woman (or even male or female) in cases where they aren't able to communicate to us whatever they've decided using made up attributes they (entirely on their own) deem sufficient to place them in one group or another.

This would include every single non-living person and anyone whose physical or mental limitations prevent them from communicating or inventing that list of arbitrary attributes and then classifying each one themselves according to some unspecified process in order to determine which term should apply to them.

Even just changing the definition from something that was nearly always entirely clear, easy to define objectively, and immutable, to something that is not defined, where the determining criteria can differ from one person to the next, and where the classification for a single person can change from one moment to the next is a major concession that has wide ranging implications.

So, as a consequence of this, we now have men in women's prisons, men in women's sports, men in women's shelters, and so on. Is this really a beneficial concession to be made?

I can not be a baseball player without playing baseball. I can not be German without being born in Germany. I can not be of color without the needed heritage or a certain amount of melanin in my skin. I can not choose to be tall. I can not choose to be male without being male.

It just doesn‘t make sense. If the category is that loose, then why have it at all?

Oh, my mistake. I thought we were trying to exchange arguments in good faith to better understand other people's perspective, but we were actually playing the "my argument destroys yours with facts and logic" game.

Here, let me adjust.

> Because men can’t get pregnant, for one.

Except trans men can get pregnant, so your point is moot, and hence the rest of your argumentation based on it.

It is not like cis women would ever had boobs on any other place.

I don't think anyone should be asking bars in Ohio, or anywhere, about this. No more than I would ask a bar in Ohio what they think of climate change. Or a group of theologians in the 16th century about how they felt about astronomy. Or computer science majors about the ethics of vegetarianism. This is just a crass appeal to common sense, where common sense is defined by what mostly white low-education blue collar workers supposedly think.

> you'll finally understand that women have penises and men have vaginas

No, you misunderstood. (First of all, that's not even the correct claim, you should have said some of them do.) But even with that, you misunderstood. The point isn't that you have to accept that transgender people exist. It's that inserting concepts like "adult biological woman" does not show that transgender people do not exist. Nothing interesting whatever can be shown with this distinction. The "biological" part of it doesn't hang together in the way you want it to. More generally, the problem is that critiques of concepts around transgenderism tend not to be well thought out at all (that includes both sides); if you want a proper critique you need to be reading people who have been trained to think consistently about difficult topics around gender, sex, social behavior, etc.

But my interest here is more that we're now up to 634 comments on an article that makes no real argument whatsoever. The author is just here to complain that transgender people have stolen her vocabulary word. Is there really any plausible explanation for why so many people have gathered here other than that a bunch of anti-trans people smelled blood in the water?

I can "acknowledge" something, but I don't have to change anything.

Biology did that. Society is recognizing it, and only recently at that, by giving women sex-based rights.

> by declaring that society should be organized around the majority, rather than attempting to accommodate as many people as possible?

The needs of X vs the needs of Y.

Females need single-sex spaces to avoid violence and rape. Males do not need to be in female single-sex spaces. Needs trump wants.

> zero-sum war of

Many things are zero sum. A single-sex space is only useful if it remains single-sex. A single male rapist can traumatize and attack an entire rape shelter of female victims.

Women's rights don't matter if "woman" means whatever anyone else wants.

I'm 6'3" and I wish plane seats were designed with me in mind, but they aren't. My short wife wishes countertops were usually built higher, but they aren't.

I think children are treated very poorly in our society and I've homeschooled my children to allow them to exert more agency over their lives. I'm fortunate to live in the US where this is legal, but in most of the world it isn't. Other cultures believe that they should dictate that children's time be spent according to adults' wishes. How can both be accommodated?

Changing common language for the sole purpose of being an “ally” to some ultra small minority only serves to confuse. Quite a dumb thing to do when the best possible effect is sparing a few hurt feelings.

99% of the people who support this nonsense aren’t in the affected group and are simply trying to earn “cool points” via virtue signaling.

This doesn't seem to be anything new. Go back 100 years, or more, there were manly women and effeminate men.

[0]: The Machineries of Empire series

So now we're policing people's gender based on their habits? "If you wear pants you're not a REAL woman"?

I thought the male/female dichotomy was the one meant to be separated from matters of identity, and simply be a biology based designation. I understand identifying as man or woman or neither is a self determined social designation; but how can someone claim that they are not female if they have two X chromosomes?

I come from a culture that is thousands of years old, and don't wish to change the definition of "Mom" just yet without good reason.

> Woman (and man) as terms are evolving in their use to mean "the roles we expect people to fill based on their sex".

It is for example by no means universal that we do expect people of a certain sex to fulfil a certain role. And many people explicitly reject that definition of gender for themselves because they have no intention of fulfilling the role. For these people to then be told that it is the definitional meaning of their gender identity seems... no better than telling trans people they aren't the gender they identify as.

Having to use translation/dictionary for my native language means it failed in a big way.

And all languages are rooted on some level in reality.

But here it's a small minority of exceptionally aggressive people with nothing better to do, trying to change language by forceful tactics. They need to receive strong pushback and possibly exclusion. Words exist purely to communicate, they have no other purpose. Once bored over-educated people are allowed to start redefining the language it's open season and they won't ever stop. See: newspeak, inspired by the Soviet Union. Given your username you should know all about that.

This verbal game-playing has already caused immense damage with the effort to redefine words like racism to mean "discrimination based on skin color that's bad unless it's against white people", an effort that now means accusations of racism no longer carry any weight. Ditto for the attempt to redefine fascism to mean "anything that isn't far left". Words have meanings and people may not simply try to blow their way through to a new meaning by viciously attacking everyone who uses the normal definition until they concede through exhaustion. It's anti-social behavior to do that regardless of whether you like the idea or not. Come up with new words if you care so much.

Very true, but what was claimed in the comment you replied to is the current scientific position, has been for some time, and hasn't changed. The idea that mammalian zoology will suddenly find a third sex at any point in the future also seems fanciful, regardless of any theoretical possibility that it could change.

You're allowed to disagree but you've already asserted that my view is hateful and ignorant which was my original complaint.

it does not imply there are no woman who can't give birth.

But it’s not different. All of the same arguments apply. One could argue that “father” has a deep-rooted, unambiguous, biological meaning. One could argue that the use of “father” to describe an adoptive guardian is distorting this fundamental biological truth. One could assert their right to never refer to your adoptive guardian as your “father” because it’s just untrue.

But nobody does that because obviously that would be extremely hurtful and rude to adopted children and adoptive parents.

I have never once seen a screed like “Their birth certificate might say you’re their father, and you might play catch with them and celebrate Father’s Day, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t change the fact that at the genetic level, this child is simply not yours. They are someone else’s.”

Few people will see an adoptive mother at a class for new mothers and say “This is really uncomfortable for me. Why is she here? She did not give birth to this child. She’s not even lactating at all. What made her choose to spend her time hanging around us real mothers? I’d rather be with a group of only birth-giving mothers. I would feel safer sharing my experiences.”

Again, those are edge cases of the category, which does not mean the category does not exist.

> But I don't think it's asking too much to address an individual in the way they prefer.

That is only a part of what is being asked. The real ask is to actually believe in this whole theory of self-identification, and if ANY objections are raised it's punished with shame.

You can't self-identify yourself as being of a certain profession because you first have to do it. I cannot declare "I am a nuclear scientist now, and you must address me as doctor", and then expect people to actually do it without questioning the veracity of the claim. Self-identifying as a species doesn't work because of DNA, self-ID as a sex doesn't work because of DNA, and self-ID of a profession doesn't work because it's based on knowledge, skill, and credentials (etc).

As for internet articles somehow not being in a medical context, she literally talks about going to them to try to figure out if she has a life threatening condition or a fart. If that's not "medical" I don't know what is.

Because human being often desire to reproduce.

"At least for the time they are pregnant and giving I will consider them to be women."

Regardless of what you consider, trans men consider themselves men. Their circumstances and medical needs aren't the same since they typically take testosterone and look like average men.

Another reason I don't think your wording works is that the majority consider the concepts of "man" and "woman" to be permanent things.

So you’re asking why bringing up that he used to be perceived as and treated as a woman which gave him gender dysphoria — a feeling so bad that it causes 80% of trans people to seriously consider taking their own like and 40% of people to actually try — horrible?

You being up a good point about memories. But memories are mutable, first person, and we’re really bad at remembering how our bodies felt at different times so most of his memories probably feature him as he is now.

If I draw a person you assume to be a woman based on their appearance and you’re attracted to them I can’t be like “haha he was actually a man your gay now.” That’s stupid and applies exactly the same to real life people.

If you’re attracted to someone because you thought they were kind and it turns out they were actually mean people don’t go, “see what you’re really attracted to is mean people.” No you were just attracted to the person you thought they were.

Though you could start calling a particularily comfortable spot "yours to sit on", a kind of proto-chair, perhaps even a throne.

Also, humans have been putting a type of chair on horses for some 2700 years, called a saddle, and sitting on that.

HOWEVER, you can easily tell trans folks on github because their avatar will be an anime picrew.

(Starbucks has famously good trans healthcare.)

Man/Woman does. As do Male/Female. Disorders of Sexual Development are disorders, not new sexes. A woman without breasts or with an extra X chromosome is a much a woman as a man without arms or with an extra toe is still a man.

> are you willing to write off the [people] that doesn't cover

Those are weird made-up scare words. Nobody is writing them off. What does what even mean? We just don't recognize their identity or their identity terminology as being meaningful, in the same way an atheist feels about their religion.

They're just as welcome, or not, as they were without it.

“Man” and “woman” are names for those nodes in the bimodal distribution of traits, as correlated with sex. Same as “cow” and “bull”, or “hen” and “cock”, or “doe” and “stag”, or “female” and “male”.

I’d rather my language be able to discuss the experience of the 99%+ than become incapable of discussing basic facts (like apes being sexually dimorphic) because reality might offend outliers.

Cursory search: https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20190503/study-abo...

If you start screwing over the 99.9%ile case to slightly improve the remaining 0.1%, you are not approximating an optimal encoding.

I've noticed that in the debate around 'binary' (on Twitter, I confess), some people claim that no human has ever been observed who didn't produce either sperm or ova (and never both). I'd like to know whether that's true. If it's true, then the GP's claim covers 100% of cases, not 99%.

"Disorders of sex development, or DSD (previously called intersex), includes a range of conditions that lead to abnormal development of the sex organs and atypical genitalia ..."

https://www.ucsfbenioffchildrens.org/conditions/disorders-of...

People 'typically' have two arms?

Well they 'typically' also have two legs, a sense of smell, sight, hearing, a heart, two lungs, the ability to speak.

What exactly can we expect all 'humans' to have? And how can we refer to them without making any assumptions whatsoever about their state of being so as to be 'inclusive' as you say?

It's a Monty Python sketch of absurdity and will end up with people slapping others in the face with fish.

Aside from probably using 'they' or 'them' in some cases in which we didn't tend to before, language as we use it is perfectly fine in almost all cases. It never will perfectly encompass everyone and that's fine, it doesn't have to.

What's it called? What's an example of a person of that gender?

What gametes do they have? What chromosomes?

Gender isn't sex.

But do they hold more weight to rename how the 99.9% of the population is referred to?

it’s the latter that frustrates people IMO. I think if people focused on simple acceptance of themselves instead of trying to rewrite the social fabric, it would help.

Also, even though Hydrogen and Helium are by far the most common elements, oxygen is still a different element.

Bill Gates is, for example, not particularly manly, but he's absolutely male.

I find it useful to separate the concepts, and others do too. You might not find that useful, but you should be aware language is evolving towards those definitions recently.

I'm not sure that's a contradiction so much as it's trying to weave through people's own synonymizing of the two terms where a distinction is being made. I hear your point though.

It's on the birth certificate, so it is assigned. There are some efforts to remove it, so perhaps that will change.

There are lots of kids born with ambiguous & differing genitals where parents & doctors make an assignment for that kid outside the womb.

also ignores a lot of different chromosomal and hormonal differences outside the norm.

That is a good argument for not trying so hard to overload the same terms.

and there are plenty of ways to build a family outside of cis-het sex.

and who hides such an important part of their identity from their partner? This isn't som Nip/Tuck tv drama