The Word is Woman #28
Documenting the erasure of women from language and life.
Welcome to the Issue #28 of The Word is Woman, a weekly section of my substack where I document examples of the erasure of women from both language and public life.
For the past three years, ever since I spoke out about language changes in maternity such as ‘birthing people’, I have been sent hundreds of examples of convolutions of language in which the word woman is erased and replaced in the name of so-called ‘inclusivity’. Uterus owners, menstruators, non-men, bleeders, birthers, and even bodies with vaginas…the list of names we have been called and continue to be called is a seemingly endless catalogue of offence.
At the same time, we are seeing male people taking the place of women on sporting podiums and in public roles, and also being applauded as the ‘first woman’ to achieve a certain award or accomplishment, or the ‘best female’ or ‘woman of the year’ in their field.
The Word is Woman is a place to keep track.
So here is this week’s The Word is Woman for the week ending 15th March 2024.
Last week The Word is Woman was solely dedicated to recording the predictable incidents when males were platformed and celebrated on International Women’s Day. There were one or two examples that came in too late to be included, for example, someone sent me this calendar from St Francis Xavier University in Canada.
In case it’s too small for you to see on your phone, IWD on March 8th gets a rebrand.
There were a few other incidents, but I’m not going to give them any more airtime (yes I’m looking at you Lady Gaga!), and anyway, there are a shed ton of the usual common-or-garden erasure examples to get through this week, so let’s get started!
First up, ideological language and erasure are literally vomiting uncontrollably all over this report from the BBC on how Great Western Hospital’s maternity system has been downgraded.
Just to give you a flavour:
Scores for the article are as follows. Women - 3, People - 10 (includes two references to ‘birthing people’). Pretty sickening when you think this entire article is about how women have been utterly utterly failed on one of the most important days of their lives.
Neglectful, disrespectful maternity care and obstetric violence are sex based - they happen to women because they are women. How do we then challenge these sex based injustices if we do not acknowledge the reality of sex? Retired ObGyn Kirsten Small illustrates this well on her website, where she claims to be ‘seeing ways to challenge mainstream patriarchal views of women and birthing bodies’.
But you couldn’t get much more of a ‘patriarchal view’ than seeing a woman as a ‘birthing body’.
NB - this now seems to have been updated to take out the word ‘bodies’. In any other environment we could assume it was a typo, but…we’ve heard the phrase ‘birthing bodies’, a few times too many to give the benefit of the doubt, unfortunately.
Period companies often claim to want to ‘break the stigma’ of periods whilst at the same time creating a taboo around the mention of ‘women’ or ‘girls’ in their literature. Chat with Flo, an initiative from Monmouthshire council in Wales, illustrates this well.
Everyone gets to be listed - except women and girls.
Actress Jessica Biel does the same when she announces her new book for ‘kids’ about ‘menstruating bodies’.
In her reel about it she says she hopes it ‘normalises’ and ‘destigmatises’ this thing that ‘half the population experiences’.
Destigmatising.
Are you a passionate person? Would you like to help other parents? Milk Mentors are looking for people to join their team and support people to feed their babies.
I swore I’d cut down on the gifs this week but…
The charity Ask Eve say that ‘the amount of people contacting [them] has doubled’. I wonder how many of those people are Adams.
The Daily Mail reported this week on an NHS menopause policy that states that ‘not everyone who experiences menopause is a woman’.
This is only true if you change the definition of woman.
The Maternity and Midwifery Forum ran a curious article about surrogacy this week.
The article word score was: woman - 0, women - 1, person - 12 (including birthing person - 6). This resulted in some incredible word salad, including the definition of traditional surrogacy as ‘birthing a person’s eggs and the couple’s partner’s sperm’. I’d like mine sunny side up, please.
South Australia Health posted this week about water birth and managed to completely avoid the W word.
There’s a new campaign called Maternal Health Matters from the For Baby’s Sake Trust. But whilst it seems to be a campaign about women’s health and wellbeing, they don’t seem able to name us. Here’s a recent tweet of a campaign tile.
Ever the optimist, I watched their campaign video too. “We believe maternal health matters”, it starts. “Maternal mortality rates are at a two decade high”, as the inspirational music plays. But then, “Now, more than ever, every parent should feel safe, heard and supported through pregnancy, birth, and beyond.” For the rest of the film, women are not mentioned.
As someone who has put a great deal of time and energy into rewriting the narrative of childbirth with women at the centre, and as someone who has witnessed again and again how women’s voices are sidelined and ignored in maternity care, this kind of erasure saddens me more than I can say. And makes me angry too. Shame on every idiot who goes along with this. Like this crew…(link here)
This is a funny little article that one of you lovely readers sent me, see if you can work out who they’re talking about.
Someone’s going to get breast cancer, anyway, is the takeaway.
Here’s a whole post for Endometriosis Awareness Month that doesn’t mention the W word.
A birth trauma account called women ‘Birthers’ this week. I’ve added a handy arrow to the ‘Non Birther' the post is about, too. Although, of course, he’s described multiple times in the post and the hashtags as a ‘man’ and a ‘dad’.
When not being birthers we were ‘the average menstruator’ in this reel from period cup company Nixit.
And in a survey from the NHS Start for Life, we were ‘the person pregnant’.
So much confusion when you change the established definitions of words. Here’s a good example of that from the UK government online form - this one is for the renewal of a disabled parking permit but presumably the same question is asked elsewhere. So ‘man’ and ‘woman’ here are descriptions of ‘gender’ (and I’m assuming there is not another question asking ‘what is your sex?’), and there is the option to have another ‘identity’.
To be honest this is probably less than 50% of the examples I’ve been sent this week but I’m aware that at some point we all reach saturation and that sometimes, less is more. I’ll forever be glad that I started this project last August though, it means I now have a quick answer when people say, ‘Oh that’s just a silly moral panic made up by the Daily Mail’, or when they challenge me to prove my point on twitter.
Err…just a few.
I guess you want me to keep doing this, right? Only one thing left to say.
See you next time xx
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I for one love the gifs 🤣
Thank you for keeping this record Milli - so important that the evidence is kept visible x