Well we haven’t had the standard intro for a while have we…
Welcome to issue #74 of The Word is Woman, a section of my substack where I document examples of the erasure of women from both language and public life. You can support me to keep doing this, as well as gain access to all my other writing and a monthly writing group, with a paid subscription.
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 22nd August 2025.
Our first example this week was highlighted on twitter by none other than JKR herself.
Sharing the following article, she wrote:
“When this madness ends, which it will, one of the ugliest things to look back on will be how women weren't even allowed the dignity of owning their sex-specific trauma. The misogyny is simply breathtaking.”
This is the story that a leading health chief in South Australia opened her evidence to a parliamentary committee examining the impact of stillbirth on grieving mothers with a clarification on the word ‘woman’.
She reminded everyone that, when she said ‘woman’, this included ‘transgender women’ too - in other words, male people.
It’s very telling, isn’t it, that as she fell over herself to be ‘inclusive’, there was one cohort of people she neglected to mention.
The trans men.
Who are actually female.
And therefore may, in the rare cases they decide to have a baby in spite of transitioning, experience stillbirth.
Unlike trans women, who will never suffer that terrible loss.
Because they’re men.
This Freudian slip on the part of health executive Rebecca Graham says the quiet part out loud: don’t forget the men.
They must not be left out of anything, not even the unimaginable pain of baby loss.
Women, on the other hand - well, you’re free to overlook them. They are much less important.
I believe the word is ‘phallocentric’. Hats off to Ms Graham for managing to centre men in a top level discussion about stillbirth.
In another breathtaking example of the sidelining of women in their discussions about their own lives and experiences this week, this article in The Conversation did something really spectacular.
The words ‘girl’, ‘women’ and ‘female’ are not mentioned - NOT ONCE.
Instead, the article is a masterclass in linguistic acrobatics.
Women and girls are:
‘roughly half the population’
‘teenagers’
‘young people’
‘many’ / ‘others’
‘people’
‘young people’
‘children’
‘participants’
‘those with pain’
‘an average student’
‘those who menstruate’
But never, EVER, is sex-specific language used, in spite of the article being entirely focused on a sex-specific experience, menstruation.
And there’s been another example of this phenomenon this week, from Bridgend Council in Wales, who are offering free period products to ‘individuals’, ‘families’, ‘young people’, ‘residents’ and ‘anyone under the age of 25’.
It’s long been an issue that male criminals who identify as trans are freely described as ‘women’ in media reports and referred to using the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’, even when they have been convicted of violent crimes and rape.
Most recently, it was ‘nappy fetishist’ Abbi Taylor, whose real name is Martin Tarling.
This week, in a move that some have seen as progress, the BBC have updated their report on this news story to include the defendant’s real name, but nevertheless continue to refer to him as ‘she’.
I’ve shared numerous examples of this in The Word is Woman, for example here, and wondered why the word ‘woman’ seems to be so freely and liberally applied to male criminals whilst at the same time birth, breastfeeding, and menstruation organisations seem unable to use it.
Now nobody knows quite what to do because another male criminal, who also happens to be a neo-Nazi, has changed his official gender post conviction and asked to be housed in the female estate in his native Germany. Nevertheless, the BBC is not the only outlet to refer to him as ‘she’/ her’.
The Conversation article on period pain proves that it IS possible to write an entire piece without using ‘woman’ or making any reference to sex.
Maybe its authors could help out a few sub editors in the national press to stop glibly peppering their reportage with ‘she / her’ and ‘woman’?
Ultimately though, all press reports on convicted criminals should be crystal clear on the sex of any perpetrator. As women, we don’t want crimes attributed to us that we did not commit.
Woman is our word, and we’d rather it wasn’t dragged through the nappy bin.
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Have a great weekend, Milli x
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It makes me really angry that something about stillbirth, one of the saddest and most difficult things a woman can experience, can have men being centred right from the beginning. It's just so wrong.
I think the crimes of trans identifying men are attributed to women, not so much to "respect her identity", because it obviously insults the female half of the population to attribute male crimes to us. I think it is done to let the male half of the population off the hook. I think it is done to give credence to the lie that "women do it too", which misogynists love to wrongly assert.
The truth is that we don't commit much violent crime (about 5%) and almost no sexual crime (just over 1%, mostly for luring other women and children into being victims of male sexual crime) and the percentage of women in prison is about 6% of the total and that's mostly for crimes of poverty like stealing from shops or not paying TV licences or fines. Misogynists hate that and just love getting us to take the wrap for their violent and sexual crimes.