The Word is Woman #72

Documenting the erasure of women from language and life

Hello everyone, and here we are again for this Friday’s round up of linguistic atrocities, all in the name of an ideology that asserts that sex is not binary and that indeed, none of us may even know what sex we are, whilst simultaneously arguing that men who say they are women have absolutely 100% moved from one binary to the other and can definitely use the women’s changing rooms.

Yes, this week saw yet more evidence of the cult-like nature of this belief system with the cross examination of Isla Bumba in the Sandy Peggie tribunal. I’ve already written about this extraordinary case before, and how Dr ‘Beth’ Upton’s assertion that he is ‘biologically female’ only serves to demonstrate how completely untethered from reality some people - even medical doctors - have become. (It’s one of the most popular pieces I’ve ever written.)

This week another demonstration of the absolute madness that some people have swallowed hook, line and sinker came when Isla Bumba, the NHS Fife's Equality and Human Rights Lead Officer, stated during a grilling from Naomi Cunningham QC that she could only ‘hazard a guess’ that she is female. "I don’t know my chromosomes. No one knows what they are until they are tested" she said, "I don't know anything about Beth's body - I don't know what my own body is made of biologically. No one knows what their chromosomes are or the hormonal composition."

How interesting that Dr Beth Upton knows he is ‘biologically female’, but Isla Bumba does not know her own sex.

It’s almost as if Dr Upton’s views and beliefs carry more weight than Isla’s?

I wonder why that might be?

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Meanwhile, over at the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath, the Corporation of London has pulled another mysterious linguistic trick.

Challenged over the admission of trans identified males to the single sex women only bathing area, they have now made the mind-boggling claim that it’s not actually a single sex space at all, because they admit trans women. So - no problem!

The potential for this argument is limited - surely anyone can see that this is akin to a restaurant saying that they’ve been putting beef in their Vegetarian Lasagne for years and that therefore you can now call a Lasagne vegetarian no matter how much meat it contains.

But then again, we are living in a world where a man can say he’s a woman, and a woman can say she doesn’t know what sex she is.

If you want to support the Sex Matters crowdfund to challenge this, here’s the link.

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The phenomenon we witness in both of these stories is, at its most basic, the prioritisation of men’s feelings over women’s. Upton must get changed where he feels most affirmed, regardless of the impact on Peggie and the other nurses. Trans identifying males must be free to swim in the women only pond, regardless of how women feel about this. To push this male centric agenda forward, women must be conceptually decoupled from the typical actions of their female bodies, and whilst you can’t do this literally, you can most certainly do it linguistically. The posts we share here on The Word Is Woman each week, whilst they are sometimes laughable, have the very serious agenda of furthering the aims of Upton et al by insisting, again and again, that ‘woman’ and ‘female biology’ don’t necessarily go together.

So you don’t need to have female biology to be a woman, or even, as Upton claims, to be ‘biologically female’.

Here’s a few examples I’ve been sent recently…

First up, these infographics from the British Medical Journal (shared in this post from First Steps Nutrition Trust), are all about pregnancy, but erase women completely.

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Another reader sent in this post from Facebook. “Quite an effort to avoid the word girl here”, they commented.

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Another reader nominated this website about cervical screening options from Health New Zealand. “It’s absurd”, she wrote. “The only clue it's for women is in the pictures. All just vague talk about people.”

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This post from the ironically named World of Women takes the irony further by bemoaning the lack of attention, research and action around endometriosis.

“For too long, conditions like endometriosis and adenomyosis have been dismissed, misunderstood, or hidden in silence”, they write.

Why might that be I wonder?

And do they think that erasing the category of people who have experienced this discrimination is somehow going to help?

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That’s all from me this week. And next week I will be taking a much needed holiday, but don’t worry, you will still get some treats delivered to you in the app or in your inbox! Think of me, under a palm tree, laughing into my pina colada.

Oh, and as this clip from Germaine is doing the rounds again, and I don’t need any excuse to share it, here goes.

“Would you ever consider saying something more ameliorating?”

“No”

I’ve written four books, would you like one?

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I’ve got a new Substack all about a life less processed, do come and join me over there if this interests you…

For the rest of July, you can get a year’s sub to Unprocess for just £17.50…