The Word is Woman #65
Documenting the erasure of women from language and life.
For the past four 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 21st March 2025.
It’s Friday, and that can only mean one thing! It’s The Word is Woman time!
Well everyone’s been in touch this week about Aldi and their Facebook post about ‘people who menstruate’.
So I wrote a whole piece about Cuthbert the Cake and Stackers and Nutoka, and Aldi’s obvious need to believe that if you change the packaging, the special inner essence of the product changes too. Read it here:
It’s worth a mention that there’s an obvious paper trail from Aldi back to Bloody Good Period, who have been covered several times in The Word is Woman. They clearly influenced the wording of Aldi’s post - you only need to look at their website home page to see this.
They seem to have left instagram, but their facebook page is also filled with example of erasure. Sigh.
By the way, if you are menstruating person and want to make the most of the lovely free tampons at Aldi, do keep an eye out for Chloe.
She’s been in the gents at the Aldi in Middlesbrough with ‘her phone’, secretly recording ‘men’, although how the journalist who wrote this report about Chloe’s activities can be sure they were male, or indeed in the gents, is a question that can’t be answered.
Surrey Police have also been on the lookout for another one of these naughty women. Very important when searching for wanted person, to get the description just right, isn’t it.
After an outcry, they have updated their description to ‘transgender woman’, but as usual we have to ask WHY DID IT TAKE AN OUTCRY?
Feels like every week we women have to find the energy for a new outcry?
Here’s a good one from Plus Size Birth…
Newsflash!
Make sure you start a new stigma around the word woman, though, won’t you?!
This seems to be a post about USA women leaving their homes and moving to places without abortion bans, but it’s impossible to tell from the wording if it’s even a women’s issue at all.
But there is some good news this week, and we’ll end with that. Many of you will have seen the new government commissioned review from Professor Alice Sullivan into data recording, statistics and research, sex and gender.
Alice Sullivan points out the importance of the meaning and the use of words. “The meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”, she says.
Recording ‘gender’ (how a person identifies) instead of ‘sex’ (biological and immutable), says Sullivan, can lead to important data being missed, for example in NHS records or in crime statistics. In the past, ‘gender’ was a word we all used to recognise as synonymous with ‘sex’ - perhaps it just felt like a politer way to say it, but this has now changed and gender has come to mean an inner ‘identity’. It’s vital that we now make the distinction between gender and sex - and record both.
A very significant gain amidst the madness. See you next time, Milli x
If you want to make sure you get The Word is Woman or anything else I write, delivered direct to your inbox or the Substack app, then please consider becoming a subscriber. You can subscribe for free, but if you can afford to bung the price of a coffee each month my way, you get full access to the archive, a monthly online writing group, the use of The Mule chat area in the app, the ability to comment on posts, my weekly round-up The Nosebag, and basically you become part of a lovely little community here on substack, filled with like-minded women. And it means you are supporting me to keep writing in this space where there is no censorship or advertising. A win all round.
If you want to check out my books, here are the links (these are to Amazon but you can find them in any good bookshop.)
If you want to, you can also buy me a ‘coffee’.
I think the Sullivan report is a MAJOR event….it really helps those of us arguing for clarity in public facing health comms, for a start. It was good to see a quick, positive response from the govt front bench, too. 👏👏👍👍
Interestingly Aldi seems to have deleted all of its tweets up to 10th February (I'd used their valentine's tweets as an example in a marketing presentation which have now disappeared!)
What still baffles me is people trying to make sense of this word jumble and defend it!