Tanis Cortens
Quillette magazine’s podcast released an episode on Oct. 10 entitled “Desexing the Language of Motherhood,” in which maternal and infant health specialist Karleen Gribble joined host Iona Italia to discuss the trend toward gender-neutral terminology in the field of women’s health.
Italia and Gribble talked about Gribble’s article, “The Desexing of Language in Women’s Health Research and Care: A Story of Marginalization of Science, Cultural Imperialism and Abuse of Power,” which she contributed to the book The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak out about Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process. Drawing on Milli Hill’s blog The Word is Woman, the article listed a variety of terms used to replace the word “women” in scientific literature, including “individuals,” “patients,” “people with vaginas,” “menstruators,” “vulva owners,” “womb carriers,” and “those assigned female at birth.”
Gribble traced the origin of this language shift to changes in women’s health care around the middle of last decade: Desexed terms, she said, “were presented at (that) time as…something that we should use on an individual level when we’re caring for or working with the population of female people who have a transgender identification. Usually they were talking then about, this is a trans man. And so, you would want to…avoid terms like ‘women’ and ‘mothers’ and instead use the language that that person preferred.”
She went on to say that though using people’s preferred language is normal in health care, “things went a bit crazy” in 2020, when institutions “start(ed) to use this (desexed) language…for health communication more broadly” rather than simply in one-to-one care. “I think the pandemic was like pouring fuel on the fire of lots of different things, and this was one of them,” she said. “It was also a time when there was a need for a lot of communications.”
Italia criticized a common argument in favour of desexed language: that women who have transitioned and now identify as men may not know they need female-specific care for their internal sexual organs. “If you are too young or have too poor an understanding of your physical body to know whether or not your transition has involved, for example, a hysterectomy—so you don’t know when you transitioned whether or not you still have a uterus, cervix, etc.—then there’s been a failure in a duty of care towards you, and you shouldn’t have been permitted to transition,” she said. “There should be informed consent, and you should therefore have a very, very clear and good understanding of what precisely has happened to your body—or not happened—in the course of the transition.”
Agreeing that many women and girls, especially those who identify as male or non-binary, “have got very poor knowledge about their bodies,” Gribble pointed out another risk of desexed language: “a lot of the population has low reading skills, low language skills, (and) low health literacy,” meaning they do not understand medical terminology. The word “cervix,” for instance, is “a technical term for a part of the body that you can’t see, and that a lot of women just don’t even know. So that’s one of the reasons why having health promotion—say, for cervical cancer screening—that says, ‘If you have a cervix, you should have a cervical cancer screen’ is not effective communication, because a lot of women who are the targets for the communication will not understand that this applies to them.”
This risk is amplified outside of the West, as Gribble and several others wrote in a June study: “English is utilized in many countries where gender identity is not culturally salient and where an understanding of the transgender or gender-diverse experience is, therefore, unusual. In these situations, terms such as ‘birthing people’ may not be understood and cannot be accurately translated into local languages.”
The study’s authors concluded, among other things, that “language must be clear, understood, and accepted for effective communication.” Nevertheless, examples of desexed language abound in the world of medical literature and research. The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) lists “woman” and “mother” as “stigmatizing terms to avoid,” a designation Italia described as “absolutely extraordinary.” The NIAID suggests replacing “woman” with “cisgender woman” or “assigned female at birth,” and “mother” with “birth parent,” “gestational parent,” or “pregnant person/individual.”
Planned Parenthood’s web page on ovarian cancer says, “About 1 in 75 people who have ovaries will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer at some point in their lifetime.” An October article in The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynaecology, & Women’s Health discusses drug safety in pregnancy without once using the words “women,” “girls,” or “females” to describe study participants. Another article from the same month and journal, entitled “Confronting the systematic invisibility of women’s health,” refers to “conditions that disproportionately affect women, such as menopause, endometriosis, premenstrual syndrome, and polycystic ovary syndrome.”
The blog The Word is Woman exists to document instances of this erasure — sentences like “For most individuals, exercise during pregnancy is completely safe.” Other examples include the statistics-skewing “Endometriosis affects 1 in 9 people in Australia,” the scientifically inaccurate “All bodies can birth,” and the questionable “Abortion: not just for the ladies.”
Another gender-critical blog, Bodies get in the way… by Lucy Leader, tells the story of Griffin Sivret, a woman from Massachusetts who died on July 23, 2024. The 24-year-old’s death was due to complications from her gender reassignment procedures, which went from puberty blockers and testosterone to a double mastectomy, a hysterectomy, and a phalloplasty, all over the course of eight years. Among other things, she suffered from drug addiction, a heart attack, and the failure of multiple organs. “I really want you to consider,” wrote Leader on Sept. 26, 2024, “that at the start of her ‘transgender journey’, she was a healthy 13-year-old girl, who with the assistance of multiple hospitals, doctors and clinics and either parental or ‘informed’ consent, was made increasingly unwell to the point that her body could no longer cope with the continual assaults from her ‘gender affirming care’.”
In a Sept. 27, 2022 blog post entitled “First, Do No Harm,” Leader wrote, “Because mammals can’t change their sex and only biological women can conceive, gestate, labour and feed babies from their own bodies, postmodernism presents a danger to mothers and babies through the denial of the objective truth of biology. How are caregivers able to assist women and children if they are not allowed to use biological terms when discussing the human body? To state that any sex can give birth or breastfeed is prioritizing feelings (gender identity) over facts: that breastfeeding and birth are…sexed activities, exclusively available to females of every mammalian species.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.