Welcome to the Issue #44 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 20th September 2024.
Before we start, a reminder that my monthly online group Writing for Change meets NEXT THURSDAY 26th September at 6.30 - 8.30pm UK time. I’ll be sending out the zoom link early next week. Remember it’s only for paid subscribers, which costs from just £1.05 a week and is a great way to support me to keep writing. For your paid sub, you get to come to the writing group, access to the full archive, a Sunday ‘nosebag’ of everything I’ve been writing, reading and thinking about each week, plus the ability to post and chat in the Mule community on the substack app. It’s a bargain! Hope to see you there!
OK, first up…
Can men breastfeed?
This question gets right to the heart of our purpose here at TWIW - the confusion that arises when you glibly redefine words to suit your own agenda.
If you change ‘men’ to mean an identity not a sex, then a woman who identifies as a man can breastfeed, providing she’s not had her breasts removed. She can say, “I am a breastfeeding man”, as, for example, Trevor Macdonald (no not the newscaster) did when she was pregnant and attended a La Leche League breastfeeding support meeting back in 2012. Macdonald was surprised to be welcomed by the other women at the meeting - perhaps this surprise was because, whilst Macdonald may visualise herself as male, in reality she was a pregnant woman and as such was entirely suited to a female only space. However, Macdonald had had her breasts removed, and, in spite of having had a double mastectomy, tried to breastfeed for four days before her baby’s lack of weight gain meant she had to switch to donor milk.
None of this stopped Macdonald positioning herself as a ‘breastfeeding dad’, and she didn’t stop there: she applied to become a ‘La Leche League Leader’, in spite of the fact that LLL criteria for this post was, at the time, that you are a) a woman / mum, and b) have breastfed your own baby for at least a year. NOT VERY INCLUSIVE! But really, that’s the nature of the beast: breastfeeding groups are exclusive by their nature, and traditionally not the place for men, formula feeders, childless people, over-invested grannies, lactating pets…the list is endless. Macdonald clearly felt this bigotry had to change.
La Leche League Canada (LLLC) initially rejected Trevor’s application, stating, “an LLLC leader is a mother who breastfed a baby, a man cannot become an LLLC leader”. (Reminder, Trevor IS a woman, but identifies as a man). Trevor pushed back, and after a year, the entire LLL policy was changed to say that men could become Leaders. “We recognize that any breastfeeding parent, regardless of whether they self-identify as a mother or father, should be – and is now – welcome to investigate LLL Leadership”, they said. “There are other prerequisites that a potential Leader needs to satisfy, but being a woman isn't one of them.”
Boundary: eroded. Once this precedent had been set, LLL then unsurprisingly struggled to stick to their brief of being an organisation that held women-only spaces in which mothers could get more confidence and support with their breastfeeding. It was inevitable that this new ‘inclusivity’ of ‘men’ would end up meaning inclusion of actual, bepenised men with XY chromosomes and a keen interest in squirty boobies. Hence we end up with the situation reported on back in May in which UK board directors at LLL fell out over a policy to allow XY males who identify as breastfeeding women to attend meetings. This situation came hot on the heels of the BBC and others reporting that ‘trans women’s milk was just as good for babies’, a story for which they have since admitted was ‘misleading and inaccurate’, but which nevertheless remains in the public domain. Now a breastfeeding counsellor in Australia, Jasmine Sussex, is facing a tribunal for stating that male lactation is ‘delusional’. You can read more here, and donate to her crowd fund here, and I’ll be featuring her full story on The Mule in the coming weeks. As I mentioned in last week’s The Word is Woman, I’ve also been pursuing the NHS hospital in Sussex who were the source of the misinformation about ‘male lactation’ that found its way to the Beeb. They were supposed to respond to me by last Monday, but have now asked for more time. Watch this space.
Let’s end that section with the gif that best represents my entire personality.
And let’s go with Martini gifs this week, why not, it’s Friday after all!
Still on La Leche, the new edition of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (the LLL manual) is out on October 16th.
Even among the huge ‘terfy’ groups of breastfeeding and maternity workers that I’m part of, most women are agreed - the old title was a bit…odd. ‘The Womanly Art’. Hmm. So under normal circumstances, I think most would welcome the revision. It’s only against this current backdrop of woman erasure that it stands out as yet another worrying example. So, mixed feelings on this one. However, most are agreed that the inclusion of a bloke on the cover of the US edition is…irritating, again, given the context (see Trevor etc, above). Breastfeeding belongs to women - why are we suddenly finding this ‘unkind’?
I can clearly remember a point when even the ‘captured’ women in the maternity world were claiming that the meaning of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ would never change, even if ‘man’ and ‘woman’ did. Boy oh boy are we a long way past that now. Here’s an academic paper on ‘male’ pregnancy.
The paper, which cites our friend Trevor Macdonald (not the newscaster) amongst others, tells us that, pregnancy is seen as ‘exclusively female’ due to ‘repronormativity’. “Repronormativity manifests through the recognition of the cultural value of women and their bodies, that provides them with reproductive power. Consequently, the pregnant body is subjected to objectification and sexualization.” Ah so that’s why women are infantilised and disrespected in labour and birth! Because we see them as FEMALE! If we’d just start seeing them as ‘people with ovaries’, or better still, MALE, this whole birth trauma thing could end now.
Further evidence that male and female have been completely redefined comes in the form of this mind-boggling article, sent by another despairing reader.
It’s really worth a read as it skeeters towards the complete abandonment of facts and science. That’s not the same as inclusivity or acceptance, is it?
Their final paragraph is: All in all, if a transgender woman was born with a set of XY sex chromosomes, she will still have XY chromosomes after sex reassignment surgery. Having XY chromosomes does not mean that a person is male. It just means they most likely had male body parts at birth.
Having XY chromosomes doesn’t make you male, nor do male body parts, OK?!
The underlying raison d’etre for the whole piece seems to be to make it completely clear that men don’t have to have their 🍆 removed to be a woman, and you’d better remember that! IT’S MA’AM! LET THAT PENETRATE!
A reader has sent me this paper on ‘the lived experience of caesarean birth’ that refers to women as ‘child bearers’ throughout. “I did click through the paper and she indeed employs this tortured, dehumanizing phrasing throughout the whole of the text”, my reader added.
And finally, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (ACOG) have posted about drinking in pregnancy this week.
I’m not sure they can entirely be blamed. See you next week!
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My next book is all about ultra processed food and women. It’s out next February but you can preorder it already!
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