The Word is Woman #50
Let's celebrate with a Top 10!
Fifty seems a significant birthday. I may or may not have a similar number looming for myself in 2025, and let me tell you it takes some doing to get to the big five-O. So, given the effort put in to rack up such a rounded and solid numeral, I thought we’d depart from the usual format this week and celebrate 50 issues of The Word is Woman with a Top Ten of the worst examples of erasure so far recorded.
Turns out this was a crowded field - well, I guess I wouldn’t have been able to fill 50 issues of TWIW with about 20 plus examples each week, if it wasn’t! But a Top Ten we must have, so let’s get the countdown started…
At number 10, it’s It’s Yoppie, with ‘bleeders’.
This one reminded me of another, from 2022 (before I started writing The Word is Woman), which I’m going to tie in 10th place: bleeding bodies.
In at 9, La Leche League of Western PA bring us ‘human milk’ and ‘bodyfeeding’.
This is the same La Leche League, of course, who just gave their classic text The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding a little update.
At number 8, we’ve got Verso Books who in June 2022 referred to ‘Native womb carriers’.
At 7 in our chart it’s ‘owners’. Ovary owners…
Vulva owners…
Vagina owners… (yes it’s Healthline again!)
Remember, if something is ‘owned’, it can also be bought, rented and sold.
At 6, remember how this one made us laugh: ‘people who bleed across Wales’.
So many period companies and organisations claim to be ‘breaking taboos’ without noticing the irony of having a new word they’re ashamed to say. WOMAN.
In at 5, here’s a curveball that might need a biologist: “participants with internal gonads”.
This was criteria for a workshop run by the School for Ethical Touch in Oxford. “If you’ve not got internal gonads, you’re not getting in”.
At 4, it’s the highly offensive ‘black birthing bodies’
In at 3, it’s a cracker, ‘the partner with eggs’.
This one is from 2022, but it’s been going viral on twitter this week, prompting the incredible Mole at the Door to update a few album covers (shared with permission).
At 2 in our chart, it’s people having their own words changed without their consent, most notable, the ACLU erasing the word woman from an iconic quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The same thing happened to another well-known woman (albeit not quite as high profile as Ginsburg) Barbara Katz Rothman.
Original:
Updated:
And they even did it to me! You can read about that here:
And what’s our Number 1 in the Erasure Chart?! Well it has to be that 2021 Lancet cover!!
What could be more perfect in the same week we celebrate Halloween than a front cover of a medical journal making women sound like they’ve just been dug up in the graveyard by the local necrophile! Thanks Lancet!
And thanks to all of you, my readers and subscribers, for supporting me to keep doing this for FIFTY issues. I do believe it’s important to keep documenting this madness. I started doing it because people would deny that such erasure was happening, and now it just feels important to keep going - until, as we all hope, it eventually stops happening. Even then, I hope this section of my substack will remain online for a long time, so that people can look back on this temporary blip of unreason in human history and see that there were many of us who noticed and protested.
Here at the Word is Woman we often also note the irony that whilst women are reduced to ‘bleeding bodies’ or the ‘partner with eggs’, there is a special class of human that still gets to be called ‘women’. MEN!
But women won’t be erased. We are not menstruators, bleeders, vulva owners, pregnant people, uterus havers, the parent with the breasts, abortion seekers, milk expressers, chestfeeders or bodies with vaginas. We are WOMEN.
The word is WOMAN!
See you next week. x
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The Lancet
That Eddie Izzard gif 🤣
Thank you Milli! Shall I scream in frustration or cry hysterically. Could we start referring to people who ejaculate????