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.
Added to this, we are seeing the word ‘woman’ being liberally applied in press reporting of violent crimes committed by men, all whilst women are discouraged from using it in reference to themselves and their own uniquely female experiences.
The Word is Woman is a place to keep track.
So here is this week’s The Word is Woman for the week ending 29th August 2025.
This newsletter often makes use of humour with the aim of keeping us laughing as we fight back, as well as lampooning the idiocy of the ideologically captured.
However, this week I want to write about the news story of the school shooting in Minneapolis, and so for obvious reasons, I won’t be using any humour today. My heart goes out to the parents and families involved.
Nor do I want to give particular focus to the fact that the male attacker identified as ‘trans’, at least not in the sense of making any attempt to connect this trans identity with their horrific crime. School shootings are almost entirely committed by males.
What I do want to highlight, because it is entirely the brief of this newsletter, is the use of words and language in the press reporting on this unbearably tragic event, and their attribution of this crime to a woman, when it was committed by a male.
Even though people have been objecting to this attribution since the attack was first reported on 27th August, the BBC published this sentence on their website last night, 28th August, at just after 9pm: “She was obsessed with killing children”.
Olga Robinson, a BBC journalist who, without a shade of irony, works for their official fact checking department BBC Verify, has also been busy using female pronouns for the killer.
and this one, which now seems to have been taken down…
The BBC are not the only news outlet to refer to the perpetrator as ‘she’.
Sky News Australia tweeted about a ‘gunman’ before telling us ‘she’ turned the gun on ‘herself’.
NBC News described when ‘she’ was a teen and stated that ‘she’ had no criminal record:
And the Daily Mail tweeted this, again using ‘she’ twice.
And in this Daily Mail article (archived link), the killer is repeatedly referred to as ‘she’.
There are countless other examples. Many are documented by the twitter account SEEN in Journalism, who are campaigning to restore accuracy to media reporting on sex and gender.
To return to the graph I shared earlier in this piece from Statista, it seems that the data shared in it is fairly accurate in terms of the numbers of female mass shooters, and, interestingly, that the number of 4 includes a woman who identified as trans. For clarity: one of the four female shooters identified as male but was included in the stats as female.
I asked ChatGTP, since the graph claimed to include stats up to August 2025, if it included the Minneapolis attacker in the statistics.
No, said my AI friend, and, without prompting, told me that one of the reasons Minneapolis had not yet been added to the stats is ‘transgender identity nuance’:
I then asked ChatGTP:
So, you are saying that a female person who identified as a trans male is included in the statistics as a female, but that the male person who killed two children in Minneapolis might also be included in the statistics as female?
According to the response (and I know that ChatGPT is not the ultimate source of accurate info, but nevertheless, it’s interesting), “Law enforcement and media records at the time are typically the source of ‘shooter gender’”, because, “style guides and public norms push media to respect affirmed gender identity”.
When a trans identified female perpetrated a mass shooting in 2018, they were recorded as female, because this is how early news reports described her.
But in the case of Minneapolis, ChatGPT says there’s a ‘strong chance’ the male perpetrator will be categorised in the stats as female, because he was recognised as female by the media.
It’s only ChatGPT, and it’s only (thankfully) a sample of two, but this does suggest to me a very typical bias: trans identifying males are respected, protected, and indulged, even when they have committed the worst possible crime, whilst trans identifying females are not.
It’s certainly the case that the shooter in Minneapolis continues to have his claimed female identity respected and upheld by major global news outlets, even as two families mourn the loss of their primary aged children at his hands.
And, as many of you reading this will know, he is not an isolated case. Last week on The Word is Woman #74 two others got a mention, and this week, the great Suzanne Moore wrote in the Telegraph about yet another example, the ‘wife’, who according to a BBC report published 21/07/25, killed ‘her’ husband with a Samurai sword.
The BBC article refers to the perpetrator as ‘wife’, ‘woman’, and ‘she’, throughout. Anyone who has eyeballs can presumably see this is a man.
Usually here on The Word is Woman I share example after example of people falling over themselves not to use the word woman, even when referring to specifically female activities like birth, breastfeeding and menstruation.
I remember when one of my tweets became part of the headlines back in 2022, when I called out a BBC article on endometriosis that stated it affected ‘1 in 10 people in the UK’, adding that those people were ‘assigned female at birth’.
Today, I just want to ask my national broadcaster, the BBC, along with many other members of the press, why they are not able to see what they are doing here, or think about how it might be impacting on women, when they are unable to use the word woman in their reporting unless it’s in reference to a male rapist, sex offender or murderer?
How do they think it feels for women to be erased in discussions about their own health?
Worse still, how do they think it feels for women to see the sentence, “She was obsessed with killing children”, in print, or, “A woman killed her husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.”
When we read these things, we feel distress: distress for the victims of these crimes first and foremost, but distress too that as a sex class we are being libelled and defamed.
We know there will be many members of the public who are mis-led by this reporting and wrongly attribute these crimes to women.
We also know that crime statistics may well falsely record these crimes as committed by women, skewing important data.
But these are not women’s crimes.
Isn’t it interesting that this phenomenon is happening just at the same time as more and more women are raising their voices about the problem of male violence? Just at the time in history that women like Gisele Pelicot are stepping forward and saying that ‘shame must change sides’?
In essence, Pelicot was also saying, ‘these are not our crimes’. They are men’s.
For years, decades even, women campaigning to end violence against women have been told, ‘not all men’. They have been told, ‘women commit violent crimes too’, (even though men commit around 93% of violent crime and often, women who commit violent crime do so in very different circumstances to their male counterparts.) They have been discouraged from called it ‘male violence’, and instead made to cloak the problem in softer terms like, ‘women’s safety’, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘abusive relationships’ or ‘violence against women’. At every step, they have been reminded to watch their words and make sure they don’t centre men in their language and paint half the population as a potential problem.
It seems like men just don’t want shame to change sides. They would rather we continued to carry it, because it suits them, just as the whole system - the family courts, criminal justice, policing, the pay gap, childcare, and more - suits them just fine as it is.
Given all of this, it’s a masterstroke on behalf of patriarchy to attribute male violent crime and mass murder to women. How can shame change sides if we don’t know which side is the problem?
Like all patriarchal masterstrokes, we must resist this with all our might. As we do, we will be told we are over-reacting, wrong, being ridiculous, misguided, etc. We will be reminded again and again that women commit violent crime too, or that trans women are women. Again and again the shame and the problem will be handed back to us; again and again we must hand it back again and say: No. Grow up and take some ownership.
This is not our shame. This is not our problem. These are not our crimes.
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Have a great weekend, Milli x
I’ve written four books, would you like one?
Another great post Milli.
The most egregious words I've ever read in a court report are "her penis", about a penis connected to a man who raped women.
Sorry, you’ve already named them.
Great post. Thank you.