For my money, no one laid out the stakes on abortion rights better than Ruth Bader Ginsburg* did during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings prior to her confirmation to the Supreme Court. Reading RBG’s testimony today, I’m struck by how crabbed and degraded the confirmation process has become over the past 30 years, almost entirely thanks to Republican radicalism on abortion.
Anyhoo, here’s what Ginsburg said in 1993:
The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.
The Alito draft deliberately consigns us egg-bearers to the status of “less than a fully adult human.” That’s because putting women back in their place is one of the chief aims of the modern conservative movement, not just in the United States but around the world.
Women aren’t the only group under attack, of course. The possible fall of Roe is happening in a larger context where reactionary forces are also trying to stuff LGBTQ people back in the closet and subjugate racial, ethnic and religious minorities — from North America to Eastern Europe to India and elsewhere.
The Alito draft conversations this week raised questions I’m still pondering about inclusive language when discussing topics that have been described as “women’s issues” for decades. I don’t have any answers, but I think the conversation is worth having, and I’m interested in hearing y’all’s thoughts on it.
During one of this week’s discussions about the latest salvo in the “war on women,” someone suggested calling it the “war on people with uteruses” to include trans men and nonbinary people who can become pregnant. Some women said they felt erased by that language. I’m all for inclusivity, but I felt not only erased but reduced to an internal organ.
I don’t think anyone who was discussing this in good faith here wants to erase women or reduce them to reproductive organs on the one side — or exclude trans men and nonbinary people when we talk about the Republicans’ fundamental assault on bodily autonomy on the other. But some of us do see it as primarily an assault on women’s rights and denial of women’s full humanity.
I think there are two aspects to this — one that has to do with political/social realities, and the other a question of identity. The political/social part is ugly, but it’s real, so let’s start with that.
I think if we liberals start generally asking folks to replace the word “women” with “people with uteruses” and/or terms like “pregnant women” with “pregnant people,” etc., we’ll embody every dumb stereotype conservatives believe about liberals. It won’t be solely wingnuts and TERFs who see it that way because insisting on that language at all times is, quite literally, erasing women from the conversation. And that brings us to the identity issue.
Speaking for myself, being a woman is a core part of my identity. The word is significant to me, and it has evocative associations, including the generations-long and still ongoing struggle to be recognized as “a fully adult human.” At the same time “woman” doesn’t just include people who were born with female reproductive organs and the typical chromosome assortment.
As far as I am concerned, trans women are women. And while the number of people who do not identify as women but are subject to personal physical harm from laws designed to strip women of bodily autonomy is small, I do think it’s important to include them and acknowledge their presence in these conversations.
I think there’s got to be a way to speak of women’s issues without erasing women AND without excluding people who deserve the same protections women deserve, which is everyone who needs them. But how?
Newspaper articles that are giving factual information on reproductive health, etc., are starting to replace “pregnant women” with “pregnant people.” This recent Tampa Bay Times article on Florida’s new restrictions on abortion is an example. I confess I find it a bit jarring still, but I’m an old fart, and I will get over it. It’s factual information in the public interest, which argues for maximum inclusiveness.
What of other types of writing/speech that touch on what have long been considered “women’s issues,” such as newspaper columns, blog posts, tweets, comments, speeches, etc., that are meant to persuade, protest, excoriate, motivate, commiserate, rabble rouse, etc.? This form tends to touch on the identity aspects of “women’s issues,” so it’s imperative not to erase women from the conversation.
Writers I admire not only for their prose and insights but commitment to equality seem to be using a combination of gendered and non-gendered language in columns about the latest assault on women’s rights. It’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it because they’re mostly framing it the way I just did, i.e., as an assault on women’s rights.
But the use of nongendered language also implicitly acknowledges that the issues don’t affect only people who identify as women. Examples include Michelle Goldberg and Roxane Gay in recent NYT columns about the end of Roe (links here and here). Is that inclusive enough? I don’t know, but I’m going to try to follow their example.
Anyhoo, I am interested in what y’all think about this issue. I don’t think it’s trivial. I’m also pretty sure someone somewhere has already addressed it in a way that is miles more creative, compassionate and coherent than I just did. Maybe someone will link to that in comments.
Open thread-ish.
*The day the Alito draft leaked, I tweeted a preemptive “go fuck yourself” to anyone who would pick that day to dunk on RBG for not retiring during Obama’s term. I’d like to extend that indefinitely. I mean, go ahead, knock yourself out if you want to piss on a beloved feminist icon’s grave, but please know that you’re not making an original point and that most of the people you hope to rile up with your comments even agree with you; we just think you’re being a dick about it.
CaseyL
My first reaction to seeing “pregnant people” or “persons who are pregnant” was actually kind of positive – for the same reason I try to use “they” and “their” pronouns even when the people I’m referencing aren’t transpeople or genderqueer in any way.
Reason: My ideal is to de-gender speech as much as possible. I actually started doing this decades ago, with “firefighters,” “mailcarriers,” and so on, rather than “fireman” or “mailman.” Degendering speech does indeed degender thought. Well, it did with me, but I wanted it to – no idea when/if that would work with anyone resistant to the whole idea.
I agree that using terminology like “pregnant persons” is tricky in that it seems to erase women as a distinct, and distinctly vulnerable, class. But in some ways I think that might be a good thing, in that we should maybe stop doing so anyway. By which I mean, broaden and universalize who fits into that vulnerable class, to eliminate getting pigeonholed into “women’s issues.”
Why? Because “women’s issues” are people issues. Women are people. Women are Persons.
stinger
I agree with all your points, including the footnote. I have no insights, and look forward to reading the discussion.
Roger Moore
The thing I keep coming back to is that this ruling is basically Dread Scott all over again. It’s a declaration that if certain rights didn’t exist when the 14th Amendment was ratified, it doesn’t protect them at all. But at that time women had basically no rights whatsoever, so it’s basically denying that women have any constitutionally protected rights at all.
Cervantes
Using “dick” as an insult would seem to be contrary to the spirit of this post. Being a man isn’t necessarily a bad thing either.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
The other thing – and this is a part of my bugaboo about 50 years of demonstrably failed language framing by NARAL and the ACLU that raised a lot of money but accomplished fuck-all in protecting the right – but at its core, this is really about a narrow view of extreme theology written into law, and it has major effects outside of the thin slice of space that NARAL and the ACLU decided to occupy on it by calling it “reproductive rights”.
It is an Establishment Clause case.
I note that NARAL’s social media channels are fundraising off of the same stale frame, and getting precious little return written engagement. I also note that there are no “blue check” activists or pundits talking about Alito’s abominable opinion as a religious rights issue (as in “the freedom to be left alone and not have religious doctrine be written into secular law”). They seem to just be saying “just shout ‘my body, my choice’ louder, surely someone will listen”.
How about saying “we’re not going to take our legal cues from theology. Americans come from all walks of conscience, some believe, some strongly believe, some participate out of expedience, some are from differing faith structures altogether, and some don’t come from a position of theistic faith at all. Our shared first amendment recognizes that and protects us from living by rules of a religious sect, particularly those which we may disagree with. If your religion has rules, feel free to live them, but don’t require those who don’t believe as you to do so as well.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Amanda Marcotte, years ago when she took over Little Ezra’s Pandagon blog, always said that the forced birthers weren’t about zygote protection, it was all about keeping the wimmenfolk in their place. I wish I could find her original piece because my memory of it is that it was the most succinct statement about the real goals of the modern GQP.
Also too, totally agree on the wankers who continue to flog the “RBG Should Have Retired, therefore, Our Current Travails Are Partially Her Fault” theme. I’m talking about said wankers at LGM who shriek this and other crap that makes me wonder why I still go there.
Soprano2
This, 1,000,000,000%. We now have an issue where the vast majority of people are on our side in some way or other. If we immediately start trying to use language like this instead of the common word “women”, which people immediately understand and know what you’re talking about, we will be laughed at and derided and lose all of our advantage on this issue. It’s like trying to replace the word “mother” with some stupid phrase – it just doesn’t work for about 98% of the people you are trying to win over. Just my $0.02. Why do we have to make these things so fucking hard for ourselves????
Another Scott
Excellent piece.
My view is that accurate language is important, but somehow demanding that only certain kinds of language be used and every topic has to be treated as part of some greater narrative that has to include every justified concern just shuts down conversation and understanding.
Everyone has a fundamental right to reproductive and health care autonomy, but roughly 1/2 of the population does the work and takes on the personal risk of bearing children. They have different issues and concerns and needs than the rest. There are lots and lots of Venn circles that overlap to varying degrees – we can’t pretend that there should be 100% overlap.
I don’t know the answer, but I think we need to keep having conversations and not letting monsters drive the narrative and public policy. We should not let concerns about the words we use get in the way of doing so, even while working to find better language.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dee Lurker
This is a good discussion to have because we need all the allies and all the truth we can muster. The problem is that these new terms are largely academic and come from the top-down. The English language has a structure that presupposes and enforces gender and heteronormativity. It took a long time for “African-American” to become the standard term. Terms like non-binary and people with uteruses indeed correctly defines the actual human landscape but lacks the cultural affectivity of native English. It does not roll trippingly from the tongue.
Women’s rights and the “war on women” carry a level of affectivity that is galvanizing and filled with meaning. There is history there, a transcendent set of meanings that are understood. Unfortunately, it is exclusive by virtue of our archaic language that defines “normal” through erasure of the novel and actual in sex and gender. This can feel like being punched in the gut. You have these meaningful terms watered down into academic terminology that has had no time to steep in the culture and mimetically invent value.
In my cishet woefully male opinion, we should continue using the galvanizing terms while also allowing non-binary and trans narratives to enter into the discussion. Paolo Fieri advocated for this in education. We only recognize humanity in others when we integrate their stories into our own. We need their stories, ideas and narratives… and from this the language will adapt and these terms will acquire cultural value. The best and easiest way to avoid erasure is to allow narrative variety to flourish.
I know I want to hear stories of non-binary and trans life so I can find authentic common ground and shared experience, while also recognizing and loving our differences. If I was allowed to express my gender more fluidly in my younger days without persecution I may identify differently because I struggle every day with a sense of masculinity that is out of step with what is normative.
Condensed TL;DR: make trans and non-binary family planning experiences a part of the narrative and this inclusion will change the language, not vice-versa.
eversor
The language over people with uteruses vs women, or pregnant people vs pregnant women is damned if you do damned if you don’t. You’re either excluding people or walking straight into a trap. The thing is why does it have to be framed that way at all?
Abortion is strictly a religious issue. The medical community does not consider it murder at all. They don’t consider it killing in almost all cases either and in that tiny fraction of cases where they would it’s either a non viable fetus or the life of the mother comes into play. So again, this is strictly religious.
Thing is, it’s really only a Christian issue. Jewish religion does have any holds on it really nor does Shinto. Buddhists either don’t care one whit or view it as a negative thing but completely acceptable for the life of the mother. And that leaves out those of us who are not religious at all! And then you have the mockuligions like The Great Noodly One or Church of Satan who are entirely pro choice. Not even all Christians agree on this though a majority are against it.
So rather than get into the issue with what’s a woman and people who are pregnant why not just attack at as “you can’t impose your religious values on us by judicial fiat”? This line of reasoning also covers the entire LGBTQ+ issues as well along with birth control and interracial marriage. And if you think this assault isn’t going to end up going after really silly issues like porn or the type of content you can put in movies you’re wrong.
I keep harping on this but at some point we are going to have to address the elephant (Bible) in the room driving all this.
Alison Rose ???
For me, I don’t see why we have to cling to using the “war on blank” phrase, but if one must, couldn’t it be “war on reproductive freedom” or something? And in almost every other statement on this topic, it is exceedingly easy to say “people” or “patients” instead of women. “People should have access to abortion care” – “Planned Parenthood has helped [x number] of people obtain medical care” – “The decision to terminate is between a patient and their doctor” and so on. It really is not that difficult to make the language inclusive, and in many cases, one could say “women and others who can get pregnant” or “women and others who seek abortions” or whatever.
Yes, the GOP is very explicit about making this about cis women. But that is because they barely even accept that trans and nonbinary people exist. Why are we so willing to cede that argument to them? Trans and enby folks are already so marginalized and demonized and ignored–they deserve to be remembered by those who are ostensibly on their side. True, they make up a small portion of the people who get abortions, but why should that mean they get shunted out of the conversation entirely just so we can have cleverer soundbites?
To me, this is similar to the discussion around the wage gap. If you only talk about it as being between men and women, and you do not bring race into the discussion, you are doing it wrong. And women of color have every right to say so and demand that they be remembered in that conversation.
I get that “war on women” makes for good memes and signs, but personally, I care much less about that than I do about making sure my trans and enby friends know I’m putting my money where my mouth is when it comes to allyship.
Soprano2
@CaseyL: I degender speech like that quite a bit too, saying “mail carrier” or “police officer”. I still think English needs a neutral singular pronoun, because using “they” and “them” to refer to one person grates on my ears something fierce. However, I don’t know how you can degender an issue that is about 100% of women and an extremely small percentage of people who don’t identify as women without that becoming the issue instead of the Radical 5 trying to turn pregnant women into nothing but incubators
I think it’s bad form to start fighting with each other about how to talk about what they’re doing. It diverts attention from what the issue really is.
Betty Cracker
@CaseyL: Interesting perspective, and as an old fart who doesn’t claim to understand her Zoomer kids, I think erasing categories as a way to break through the millennia-old conflict might be what the younger folks are trying to do. I admire that. On the other hand, I worry we might be jettisoning something precious.
Steve in the ATL
@Soprano2: similarly, “LatinX”, which Latino politicians have told us not to use if we want Latinos and Latinas to listen to us
eversor
@Cervantes:
I have never seen a guy get upset by calling them a dick, asshole, shit wipe, or any other bodily part or function. I have however seen right wingers get overly upset at being mocked for being men or thinking something silly was manly.
Which is something that always cracks me up. Get some thicker skin if you are going to parade around and talk smack!
WaterGirl
@john (not mccain): Your comment gets you banned for 3 days, possibly forever. The details will be up to John.
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
Degendering of speech is one of those more subtle things that makes the world very different from when I was growing up. The ones that really get me are the disappearance of words like “actress” and “waitress”, which were very common and standard until quite recently. I guess it’s slightly different because we’ve just adopted the word that used to be for the male version as an ungendered form rather than finding some new, gender-neutral term.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Seems simple to me: the reactionaries want to reduce women to property and reduce trans people to non-existence. That’s evil and wrong on both counts and we’re not going to stand for it. We may stumble on language, but we’re not trying to enslave and/or destroy about half of the nation’s population.
Betty Cracker
Yep, I trashed and banned a motherfucker, and I almost NEVER do that. Anyone who wishes rape on someone else in one of my threads is getting immediately trashed and banned.
brantl
The thing for me is, as soon as you call these “women’s issues”, you’ve missed the point; every reproductive right you take away from somone, you take away from their legal spouse, their significant other, their parents and their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles AD INFINITUM. These are People’s Issues, Husband’s Issues, Spouses’ Issues, AD INFINITUM. How do you best say that? I don’t know. But we need to put the hammer down on this, and we need to humanize it and show specific cases of some poor 13 year old girl being made to have her bastard father’s or uncle’s or rapist’s baby, or a woman killed by an ectopic pregnancy, or on and on and on. They need to have to own each and every tragedy that their Pollyanna outlook is going to cause. Period. Full Charge, on this, until we get them to realize it ain’t always sunny in Philadelphia.
Betty Cracker
@WaterGirl: Double-banned!
Roger Moore
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
What I find interesting is the response based on opposite religious views. There’s a fairly strong Rabbinical response, because access to abortion is considered to be a necessity by many rabbis. Standard interpretation of Jewish law says that the mother takes precedence over an unborn child, so that an abortion may be not just allowed but actually required to protect the mother’s life and health. Something tells me the right wing Catholics on the Court won’t be willing to accept that argument, no matter how well grounded it is in long-standing religious traditions.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Soprano2:
Yeah, pretty much this. I look at the original post and thought this semantic exercise is not unlike “Defund the Police”. I get what that meant because I’m a liberal, political, policy geek that’s into nuance but in terms of a broadly appealing mantra, still an unfortunate one.
Ohio Mom
All the questions Betty raises are the ones I have. I don’t know.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
The religious liberty issue is one part of this. The other is bodily autonomy. The government should not be allowed to force me to undergo birth (at risk of death or damage) or to force me to live or eat a certain way, in order to save a zygote. Even if you believe that zygote is a human being, we can’t force people to donate blood or organs to save a life. ONLY I should have control over my own body.
Sure Lurkalot
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I tend to weigh the right to abortion as more of a religious issue too, while also acknowledging it as an access to necessary medical care issue and “woman’s” rights issue too.
I don’t engage with many right to lifers but the ones I know, their conviction is a religious one…their cocksuredness as to life beginning at conception, even if not supported by the good book.
The Alito draft, however, is dripping with abject misogyny such that there’s no way for me to see his view as anything other than putting women in a subservient place and separate from his likely view that LBGQTIA should not exist. That he may come to these views from his religious belief seems beside the point.
Doc Sardonic
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: This. While not a lawyer or expert on Constitutional matters, I agree that this is and always has been an Establishment Clause issue. This may be a simplified view of the whole thing but with the exception of the 2nd and maybe a couple other amendments most of the Bill of Rights grants a second side of the freedom coin, in addition to the freedom of(heads) you have the corresponding freedom from(tails). I think this simple interpretation is what the Framers intended given the overall education levels of the intended audience. Just my 2¢.
Betty Cracker
@brantl: I agree about the political framing. For example, I don’t want to hear one fucking political ad parsing policy. I want to see Republicans asked why they want a 12-year-old child to bear her rapist’s baby. I want them asked why they want a husband widowed and children left motherless because doctors let a mom bleed out instead of terminating a wanted pregnancy that went wrong for fear of running afoul of the theocrats. Etc.
That said, it IS a “women’s issue” in that it’s also about acknowledging that we’re fully adult humans. It’s not just about the consequences — it’s about the equality.
Medicine Man
Just use war on “women” and acknowledge that some people who don’t identify that way nevertheless share the issue through the unfortunate magic of intersectionality.
Benw
@Alison Rose ???: my cousin is a trans man, and feels both attacked by the right-wing on reproductive freedom AND erased as a LGBTQ person. So I like your framing here and use similar language.
One line I’ve drawn is that I don’t correct other’s language, especially those who are obviously allies. Nobody’s perfect.
Dee Lurker
@eversor: How do you propose to address it? Before, you were so awful about it, that somehow we should each and every one dissociate from Christianity.
The problem with current Christian dogma is that it is political first and religious second. The pulpit proof-texts its congregation to death with little poison pill snippets of scripture followed by political speechifying. Exegesis is a dying skill.
In my opinion, the way to change this is to study scripture and share the experience with others.
For example, in the book of Acts, an Ethiopian eunuch is baptized by a deacon. The eunuch specifically asks: “is there anything preventing me from being baptized” and the answer is no. For me, a clear reading is that the body and sexuality are not important to salvation in the new covenant. The Book of Acts has tons of this if you pay attention. But attention isn’t paid… because the leaven of Herod and the Pharisees is in the loaf (politics and power).
I hate hate hate that the Bible has historically been weaponized to kill and oppress and preserve patriarchal hegemony over western civilization. However, for me, the gospel and the new covenant are of such value that we must seize its message from the fascists… people like Boenhoffer, MLK, etc. who speak truth to power.
Roger Moore
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Yes. It’s weird that there is so little discussion of the 13th Amendment implications of forcing women to carry their pregnancy to term. I would say it seems like a winning legal argument, but it’s clear this isn’t about legal arguments anymore. The people arguing against abortion have a religious belief about it, and everything else is just pseudo-legal babble to justify why their religious belief should win.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Good to know WordPress didn’t freak out when one of us tried to ban a comment that was already gone!
glory b
@Soprano2: I’ve heard the same about the term “Latinx.” I understand it’s greeted by eyerolls and sighs by actual Latinos, and it is pointed out that there is a difference between Latinos and Hispanics also.
NotoriousJRT
I just can’t help thinking this is a political battle for a particular civil/human right being waged now – not years from now. Therefore, I would go with language that is going to mobilize the greatest number of allies as fast as possible. If hearing Cecile Richards use the term “people who can become pregnant” trips me up and diverts my attention to anything from “Huh, that’s new” to “WTF?” and away from her messages of what can and should be done in the fight, it’s not helpful, IMO. It has a bit of a “deck chairs on the Titanic” vibe to me.
StarfishTwinkles
I have commented here sporadically for over 10 years but I’m posting under a fake name for this one.
Of course it’s stupid to refer to pregnant people instead of women. Most people in America would never even think to be “gender inclusive” when referring to pregnant people. It’s dumb to even worry about this given the other fish to fry.
The left’s reflexive need to demonstrate moral purity and solidarity sometimes has disastrous results. Case 1: womens’ athletics. You have to be a real fucking simpleton to believe that its fair for some person to have 20 years of male development, transition, and then fairly compete with “persons who were assigned female at birth” a/k/a women. The fact that people don’t see this a continuation of male privilege is telling. Funny how you don’t read many stories about women to men transsexuals demanding to compete in sporting events against men.
You use the slur TERF. Believing that women have rights and should be able to fairly compete with one another is not “radical” Hell, its barely even feminist, it’s just common sense and fairness.
“if you want to piss on a beloved feminist icon’s grave, but please know that you’re not making an original point and that most of the people you hope to rile up with your comments even agree with you”
This preemptive attempt at gatekeeping just underlines the fact that you’re posting bullshit. I don’t think I have seen a single goddamned person here who used to run with RBG’s posse say “Gee, in retrospect, that was a mistake and Ginsburg should have retired.” Why don’t you be the first to start?
What do you think there were – maybe five or then thousand posts here jabbering on about RBG and her posse and her dissent jablots and accusing anyone who suggested that RBG was being a selfish asshole was just not really a proper feminist? The fact that people, like you, refuse to reckon with RBGs role in destroying women’s reproductive rights in this country is just a symptom of how much work the left needs to do to unfuck itself.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s more than that. Consider this hypothetical, it’s Gilead so the husband is head of the family, wife does as she is told. The husband still can’t order/give permission to the wife to get abortion under Alito’s draft. Even men shall do as their betters say under Alito’s world view. Alito’s hero Witch Hunter General Sir Matthew Hale flat out says everyone who isn’t a rich white male is a drunk luzer.
eachother
Open thread-ish
An idea for a poster for the Women’s March, May 14th.
‘Forced Mother’s Day’
cain
Honestly, I would be focusing on the privacy issues – there are a lot of conservatives who care about whether the govt is spying of them. WItness the myriad of conspiracy theories of tracking – if you want to get a broader base then it’s important to include this in the messaging.
Conservatives have no life experience to really react to messaging about women or trans. They live in their bottled lives – but they’ve always been taught to distrust the govt and that’s where our in is.
We have a right to be able to be able to do things without the govt prying into our lives. This opens the door to everything – including watching pornography.
eversor
@Roger Moore:
A lot of that is old world language. Like if you go to France garcon (male gender) is more typical for a waiter. In the US now it’s servers and bartenders, but the support staff are still commonly called bus boys and the front end staff are still hostesses.
But the gender issue confuses a lot of people. I’ve seen people who thought nurse was female and went around saying murse to people, which other people thought meant man purse. Which I didn’t know existed! To me there are bags, backpacks, packs, and luggage.
Getting into all of that or scolding someone for saying waitress or bus boy might be doing the right thing and changing languages. But even in ultra liberal DC it mostly just confuses the fuck out of people as to what the hell you are going on about.
Peale
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Yeah. Was thinking about that Louisiana Law where they struck “Implantation” out of the bill to make the woman liable for murder of the zygote. That woman isn’t even pregnant. And just having a fertilized egg doesn’t mean it will just automatically go attach itself in some kind of cozy place and develop. So the rights of the “child” in under this law not only take precedence over the rights of the mother, but also that supremacy precedes pregnancy. So in my lifetimes we’ve gone from a 2nd trimester to 16 weeks to 6 weeks to negative 5 days as to where the right wing thinks the state has the right to take over the decision. Yet “my body my choice” is still considered “extreme feminism”.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: I think it’s always fun (for want of a better word) to look at the history of these divisive topics and see how the current monsters twist it to make their current opinions look like some Universal Law of Gravitation that is everlasting and unchanging.
PubMed:
“Seamless garment”?? Is that like a wet suit?? //
:-/
These dictates are human constructs, even in the guise of religion. Our Constitution and laws say that religion cannot be imposed upon us, so (insert The-Dude-That’s-Just-Your-Opinion-Man.gif) for those who do not accept that faith.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@StarfishTwinkles: Hilarious that you think the fake name hides who you are.
debbie
I salute your footnote!
CarolPW
Washington State is beefing up it’s current statutes to further protect our abortion rights. As part of that they dis-gendered the language so that no pregnant person, even one who is legally male, will be excluded from protection. Because of the legal issues I have no problems with the use of pregnant person. That also takes care of covering pregnant kids who are not fully adult humans.
Dee Lurker
@StarfishTwinkles: I would argue that professional athletics exists to sell beer, so who gives a fuck who plays what and why? Unless people are deliberately transitioning in order to have a competitive advantage… which is ABSURD, then I don’t get the importance. It is a scare issue to freak out suburban moms who don’t want their little John or Jane exposed to icky trans.
StarfishTwinkles
@Betty Cracker:
As women’s reproductive rights are being destroyed, a smart person would pause and reflect about whether they have done anything to contributing to the loss.
What you are doing is not hilarious at all.
Raven
Ya’ll hash it out and me know cuz, as sure as the sea is deep blue, it will change.
Cacti
@Roger Moore: Your assessment is on the mark.
Sam Alito ignores that the purpose of the Constitution was to form a “more perfect union” and states that the Disparagement clause does not apply to women (i.e. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.)
NotoriousJRT
@CarolPW: I think this sort of language is entirely appropriate for drafting legislation. I am unconvinced of its importance in mobilizing public political support for abortion rights. But, I’m old.
Tenar Arha
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: It may not be in all their social media yet, but according to Ian Haney Lopez on Twitter a couple of days ago, summarizing a NARAL report
Anyway…what exactly people mean by freedom, whether it stands for religious freedom of conscience or for something else, fundamentally the injustices of the court should not be taking away women’s freedom, or liberty.
I like the sound of “Freedom is for Everybody,” emphasis on the EVERY-BODY for inclusiveness when sloganeering. And it also makes sense to point out that it’s “women’s liberty” at stake.
Ex. If their work requires travel, women’s liberty to live and work in some states will be restricted as soon as Roe ends, and/or pregnant people’s liberty is already suppressed/restricted/undermined in Texas.
UncleEbeneezer
@Alison Rose ???: This. All of this! Twisting efforts at inclusion into the threat of Erasure is some majorly privileged thinking and the kind of thing we (cis/het white men) love to do. It’s never a good look.
Transgender and Non-Binary people have been left out FOREVER! We are finally getting to the point where we are starting to listen to them and crafting our language to include them and that is a good thing. People like Imani Gandy literally write about this stuff for a living every day and yet she seems to have no problem with using inclusive language. While phrases like “Women’s Rights” have historic importance but it’s important to remember that they are phrased the way they are BECAUSE OF the fact that they excluded Trans/Non-Binary people. Insisting on maintaining them, at this moment when the GOP is not only pushing policies to kill them but also using them as a scapegoat to drive turnout and stoke the flames of hatred, seems rather disrespectful. The solidarity and strengthening of our coalition at a crucial time, seems far more important than any slogan, imo.
eversor
@Dee Lurker:
We can’t go about it without tackling the religion full on. That’s the thing about it. As long as it’s allowed a special place, or respectability in our broader culture they will be able to hide behind it and point out “but there are some good ones”. Just as there are good Republicans and good conservatives, hell some people at places like the American Enterprise Institute are good. Some of the Koch charities do good things as well. But we don’t have any problem condeming Republicans, conservatives, or Koch non-profits!
But that’s not what this, not yet really. The thing is simply to keep pounding in “you can’t impose your religion on us” because that covers everything and doesn’t get into gender pronouns and stuff that confuses people. That works.
The other thing is the younger generations are not religious. And as time goes on the numbers of the non religious grow and the number of the non religious that become outright hostile to religion grows as well. And this is happening over all the demographics. So the writing is on the wall for the place of religion in society and it’s stupid stuff like the supreme courts obvious attempts to force their religion through law that is driving it.
Tackle this from “you can’t force you religion on me” because that covers all bases, religion is already on it’s way out, and it’s THE TRUTH!
Cacti
@CarolPW: That’s a good step, but all of the blue states need to take things a step further.
Codify both of the following into law:
No warrant shall issue in the State for the arrest of any person fleeing an anti-abortion statute from a caveman state, and no State resources or assistance will be given in their apprehension.
Or if they really wanted to push the envelope, criminalize the attempted arrest or apprehension of a person fleeing an anti-abortion statute under the laws for kidnapping and false imprisonment.
pajaro
@Roger Moore:
Yes, Jewish law is clear that in case of danger to the mother, abortion is necessary, because preservation of life is the paramount value in the religion. Or, you could say it is pro-life, as opposed to the indifferent-to-life or pro-death position of certain corners of Christianity.
Then there’s sharia law. I doesn’t deal with abortion prior to “ensoulment” of the fetus (apparently there’s dispute about when that occurs, but it’s well after conception). So, if the stuff I read this week is accurate, the faction of Christianity that is driving this is more indifferent to the life and health of women than sharia law.
Dee Lurker
@Another Scott: The “seamless garment” is a reference to the gospel of John. That’s what Jesus was wearing before he was crucified. I actually agree with the seamless garment to a degree. One of principal arguments with my fellow churchies is that we shouldn’t even think about legislating away female autonomy. There is no guarantee of child welfare. We need universal healthcare, a living wage, equitable nutrition globally… Because a positive ethic of life demands basic opportunity otherwise women are being punished for the crime of existence…. which is hardly moral. Even then, it is an issue of agency and autonomy and no law is going to somehow make GOD happen.
JAFD
Meself, have been around for seventy-one years. My first year in the workforce, boss criticized me for starting letter ‘Dear Ms. Jones …’ “Nobody in The Real World follows that ‘ms’ fad …” Times changed… What started out as ‘tribal-signifier-language’ becomes part of general idiom.
So, If we are writing to persuade general audience (and it Ye Age Of Ye Intertubes, anything can end up forward to the world), sometimes best to stick to the speech of hoi polloi (am leaving out definite article, as ‘hoi’ is Greek for ‘the’, thus signalling my membership in tribe of former Classics majors ;-) )
Gretchen
@StarfishTwinkles: what you are doing is stirring shit among allies, not figuring out a way forward. Very not helpful.
Jager
My daughter was a senior in high school in March of 86, national honor society, good kid, she found herself pregnant. The boy involved took no responsibility, and his parents didn’t either. I was separated from my wife, who completely fell apart at the news. My kid and I had some long conversations about what to do, she made the decision to get an abortion. I went with her. The safe conduct law wasn’t in effect in 86. When we arrived for her appointment, our car was swarmed by “Pro-Life” protestors. When I helped my daughter out of the car, a guy with a plastic doll, splashed with red paint and nailed to a cross tried to push me aside and get in my kid’s face. I pushed away from her and told him I’d shove the cross up his ass if he didn’t get back. It was a nightmare. When we got into the clinic, I noticed I was the only man in the room. There were young, really young, girls with their mothers. 20 somethings with a friend or alone, there was a woman with two little kids with her. After my daughter’s procedure, we left to have to push our way through the god damn Lambs of God to get to the car. They were shouting at my daughter something about being condemned to hell. My kid didn’t flinch and looked straight ahead. Once we got on the road again, she broke down, She cried all the way to her grandmother’s house. She became a teacher, and a high school counselor. She just finished her 2nd master’s and Is now a practicing Family Therapist. All of that and she has raised 3 great kids. I’ve always been proud of her, but never more than I was on the day we ran the gauntlet of assholes outside the Planned Parenthood Clinic.
Starfish
@StarfishTwinkles: I want to point out that I am not the TERF jerkwad stomping on my nym in the comment above.
Republicans are intentionally trying to get people into this conversation right now. Watch Boebert do it right here.
The reason that it feels wrong is that you are unaccustomed to it, and the norms are changing.
“People with uteruses” is wrong because not all people with uteruses are impacted. “Child-bearing people” is probably the correct term for this. It is more specific than “women” because well, some of us have uteruses that are shriveled and dead. Some of us have no uteruses, and on and on.
When people start discussing “childbearing bodies” that dehumanizes humans, and I don’t like that at all.
However, a lot of the language around reproduction is changing to be pregnant people because that is the inclusive language to use now.
Enough stuff is being done to harm trans-people, that you should stand far, far away from the people who mean to do them harm. You are falling into the trap Boebert is trying to set in the video above.
mike t
Feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong, but it seems to me that this discussion is conflating sex with gender. They are distinct.
If you have a uterus you are a woman. It doesn’t matter if you were born with one or not, that is your sex. Your gender may be female, or something else.
scav
@pajaro: Well, clearly, not all religions are as worthy and free as others, just as not all peoples’ lives are as important. Women rank below potential humans while males, especially white male policemen, can kill without consequence if they even feel threatened. Laws are apparently to based on the cruelest of the crucixion-affiliated options.
UncleEbeneezer
@cain: Agreed. This is really just one front in a greater War on Privacy. I think framing it more broadly makes alot of sense because that’s what they really want. They want to take away everyone’s right to make intimate decisions without government interference. These are personal decisions about who we are, who we love, and how we treat our own bodies. Framings like “My Body, My Choice” and “Healthcare for EVERY Body” and “No Forced Birth” work perfectly well without excluding anyone, which is why Planned Parenthood uses them all the time. They also can include things like gender-affirming care, which is just as much under assault as abortion.
Raven
@Jager: And salute to you for not busting someone in the fucking mouth, Gunga Dihn.
RSA
On language, I think this issue is analogous to “Black Lives Matter” versus “All Lives Matter”. The point being that all lives do matter, but black lives are not treated that way, so it’s important to highlight that. I can’t think of any good solutions for this case.
On a different language issue, I try to respect people’s preferences for pronouns; I use gendered pronouns for myself. If someone who knows that were to refer to me as “they/them” I’d view it as something like a micro-aggression, not a serious problem, but signifying a lack of respect.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Erasing categories is a fine thing, but not for abortion. Women have been fighting this for too long. Let women wage and win this war (and it is a war), and when it’s won, let women pivot to help other groups. This is no time to be losing focus.
Betty Cracker
@Jager: Damn! You are a father who is worthy of such a terrific daughter!
Lobo
My two cents:
Separate the political story from the social story. The political story needs to be short and simple. And in abortion I will take the lead from women, just like I will take the lead from the LGBTQIA+ community on the “Don’t say Gay” laws, and minorities on the “CRT” laws.
Focus on what’s happening. It’s a
War on Women: Abortion
War on the LGBTQIA+ community: Don’t Say Gay Laws
War on minorities: “CRT” Laws
It’s a war on us all. These are all “Know Your Place” laws:
The home
The closest
The Back of the Bus, etc.
Let’s win the war first acknowledging our imperfect framing. Win first and get it right after. If we lose it doesn’t matter.
eversor
@Dee Lurker:
That won’t get you anywhere really though. Go read up on what the gand pumbas of the movement are saying. They openly admit that while the life of the child is the most important issue, it will also reduce promiscuity, promote chastity, restore the natural order (church then father, everyone beneth that), and bring back traditional gender roles.
The extreme ones even admit that they don’t want the government to do it because they want the money to go to the Church and the churches to do it. That way the church can force people to live by traditional christian sexual morality because that’s the requirement for charity. That’s the reason government help is evil, because it prevents the Church from imposing sexual morality on people.
It’s also why they hate healthcare, the Church should do it. Because for example the Catholic Church will take over all hospitals in an area. Then of course there is no abortion, no contraception, and all the other horrors. There are swaths of the US where this is the case it’s not just other countries. And if you’re donating to the Catholic Church and you’re attending then you are actively supporting this both financially and by engagement.
It’s not just the courts they want it’s everything. They aren’t hiding it either they write articles about it and publish magazines!
Tenar Arha
@mike t: This is not a valid definition, because we don’t define sex or gender by who has certain internal organs. We don’t define men by whoever still has a prostate. It’s quite important to think about why using whether one has a uterus might be a bad way to define a woman.
Based on 2015 data from the National Women’s Health Network:
ETA typo & added emphasis with italics
Raven
@Betty Cracker: That’s what I meant!
laura
I’d offer up Rewire News Group as a great resource for all things reproductive rights including inclusive language. So far, I’ve seen no mention of intersex people in the larger conversation around gender politics- and would be happy to be proven wrong. I’m a just an older woman, childless due to endometriosis who found out the hard way when an ovarian cyst almost killed me in my first year of marriage and beginning of second year of law school. While we were grateful that it was a cyst and not the suspected ovarian cancer, it broke me and almost broke my marriage to be told if I didnt get pregnant immediately or would never happen. Every hemoragic, clot filled period was a reminder of my failure. Life went on and I have children I love in my life, I find that waves of profound sadness wash over me on holidays, beginning and ending of the school year and the like. As such, I try to bring as much empathy and kindness to the subject as I am capable of doing including adopting inclusive language. But my bitterness and rage at the Federalist Court knows no bounds, and at it’s heart is religious bigotry and misogyny and othering. I don’t want to be party to othering, I want to ally. YMMV.
Edmund Dantes
@pajaro: even Catholicism/Christianity used to have the idea of the “quickening” to distinguish when the soul entered the body and the baby gained it’s own existence
And it was pretty far into a pregnancy. Even further than where most abortion bans sat before they started pushing them down from the 24-26 weeks.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Jager:
Thank you for sharing. One of the most moving comments I’ve ever read here.
debbie
@Jager:
What a horrible, horrible thing to go through, for both you and your daughter. I’m glad she’s found the kind of life she wanted. You’re a great dad!
Spanky
I’m going to keep using the word “women” and not “people with uteruses”, but I’m perfectly fine with calling members of the GOP “dicks”.
CliosFanBoy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I just skip those posts on LGM.
Amir Khalid
Deleted.
Matt McIrvin
We’re all trying to find our way. I remember thinking I was seeing progress when I first encountered a disposal bin for “feminine hygiene products” in a men’s restroom… and then seeing them change the phrasing of the sign to something that made more sense in that context a little while later.
Not all cis women are capable of bearing children, even aside from trans issues, so the main thing is to at least sometimes acknowledge that these issues affect some trans men too.
@mike t: the whole point is that “woman” is in practice about gender, not about anatomical sex.
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: Maybe an Aunt Ebeneezer could explain to you that women actually have loads of experience with and good reason to fear erasure. I found Alison’s comments valuable too, and I am in favor of finding a balance here because trans and non-binary people are erased and threatened and disregarded more than either of us will ever experience, and they need and deserve our support. But to my ear, your comments lack a crucial perspective. It’s not as simple as you think it is.
Matt McIrvin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg fans” is turning into that blog’s “cringey wine moms”.
Jager
@Raven:
The protesters were part of Randall Terry’s collection of assholes.
TonyG
Nobody asked me, but, as far as I’m concerned, people who are biologically capable of getting pregnant and giving birth are women. Period. Calling those women “pregnant people” or “birthing people” is about as silly as calling non-white people BIPOC people. Academic leftists need to learn that most people do not respond well to this kid of stupid jargon. Feel free to hate me for saying this.
laura
@TonyG: Stand Tall Proud whatever!
louc
@StarfishTwinkles:
That’s because a lot of these laws waive the rule for trans men and boys. Case in point: District apologies to trans student rejected from boys’ soccer team. Utah governor in his decision to veto his state’s transgender sports law noted that only one athlete was trans girl. The other three were trans boys.
And, by the way, most trans women and girls take hormones that sap any advantage testosterone would give. Or they take puberty blockers that also block secondary sex characteristics. Yet, while these asshole politicians complain about the “advantage” trans women or girls would have in sports, at the same time, they want to encourage the sex characteristics that would give such an advantage by preventing the trans kids from taking puberty blockers. Curious, no?
Geeno
I personally liked the “women’s rights are human rights” approach. I wish there were a way to get rid of “Women’s Issues” as a thing. Women’s issues are everyone’s issues. Access to abortion is a health care issue everyone should be concerned about.
I wish we could get more people to see it that way.
I guess this is a de facto endorsement of @Alison Rose ???
eversor
In other news…
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/esper-trump-wanted-to-activate-retired-four-stars-to-court-martial-them-for-disloyalty
According to a copy of ex-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s memoir, A Sacred Oath, obtained by TPM, Trump demanded that former Gen. Stan McChrystal and former Navy Admiral William H. McRaven be recalled into active duty so that they could be court-martialed for criticizing the President.
J.
So here’s what I don’t understand: The same (White, Christian) Republicans screaming about abortion also scream about welfare moms and Black and Hispanic people. So wouldn’t they want these so-called undesirables not to breed? That was at least part of the reason why Goldwater and other Republicans were pro-abortion back in the day. Though they didn’t want the government to pay for it. Still, it seems the Brain Trust that is today’s Republican Party (yes, that is irony) doesn’t seem to have thought this one through.
Also, I am a woman without a uterus. (I had a hysterectomy.) Does that mean I’m not a woman?
Elizabelle
@TonyG: I feel the same way. Thank you for saying it so clearly.
artem1s
sorry, arguing about language and terminology is just another tool used by the right to fracture the argument. It allows humans who think they are safe from worrying about reproductive care issues to ignore the broader argument – human beings that are viewed as female have always been set aside as not worthy of the same protections as those who are deemed male.
We have to stop pretending this isn’t about the way our society views female persons. Women are historically means tested out of major civil rights decisions and laws because of this reality. Time to quit apologizing that you support equal rights for women – either you do or you don’t. I believe this argument has been settled for some time by the Email lady – Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights. WHF to you think the right spent so much time and energy keeping her out of the WH? If WWC idiots ever came to understand this simple concept, they might stop voting against their own interest.
Giving agency to one group DOES NOT TAKE AWAY THE AGENCY OF ANOTHER GROUP. People who identify as LGBTQ aren’t excluded from benefiting if women’s and/or reproductive rights are protected. African Americans and sames sex couples didn’t lose any agency or civil rights when same sex marriage became protected under Obergefell. Recognizing that Black Lives Matters doesn’t mean they are the only lives that matter.
Protecting the civil rights of one class is likely to result in broader protection for all classes. Planned Parenthood has never deemed male persons as not needing reproductive care. They have never been solely in the business of terminating pregnancies. They are not man haters and dragging women off the street to kill their babies. They have, in fact, been in the forefront of fighting for LGBTQ reproductive care.
The GQP’s does this every time we attempt to break down a barrier of exclusion. You’d think we’d know better than to engage in this tired old argument again – but here we are.
Ksmiami
I’m actually starting a guerilla advertising campaign against the Republican Party—- this is an attack on Democracy, an attack on Families and an attack on Freedom. The asshats in the GOP want to send us back to the 50s… the 1850s
mike t
@Tenar Arha: Well I was being brief, since the topic was about how to refer to people who are pregnant. Obviously anyone who’s had a hysterectomy won’t be getting pregnant.
Regardless, my main point is that the words woman or man refer to a person’s sex while the words female, male, nonbinary or trans refer to a person’s gender. When we are talking about someone who is pregnant we are talking about someone who has a uterus, and that person’s sex is woman.
Elizabelle
@laura: please hate on me too.
It’s so useful to do that with others who are allies (on 95% of other issues).
zhena gogolia
Sigh. This feels like an insoluble problem.
Tenar Arha
@TonyG: Again, using biological capabilities or organs to define someone’s gender or even their sex isn’t even a good way to talk about this. Do you realize that you just implied that any of your relatives who had their tubes tied, or had to have hysterectomies aren’t women?
zhena gogolia
@artem1s: Excellent comment.
Matt McIrvin
@Elizabelle: I guess we have to throw the trans guys under the bus then. It’s always somebody.
Elizabelle
@Tenar Arha: oh come on. Are or were is the implied language here.
cmorenc
It’s frankly very counterproductive to get hung up on pronoun usage in discussing abortion, or to conflate abortion with Trans issues. Abortion prohibitions are inherently directed at biological females, i.e. people physiologically equipped to become pregnant. That excludes any trans people, with the potential exception of female=>male trans people who have not yet undergone removal of female-specific organs requisite for pregnancy, in which case for purposes of abortion, they are still biologically female.
True, Alito and radical conservatives ALSO want to undermine and eviscerate the constitutional basis for gay marriage or prohibitions against discrimination against gay and trans people by seeking to uproot the common foundations of abortion rights and gay/trans equality and nondiscrimination – the right to privacy in Griswold. Reversal of which would also restore state ability to tightly regulate and limit allowable methods of contraception, because extreme anti-abortion advocates regard anything that inhibits successful implantation of a fertilized egg to be a form of abortion, including IUDs! But unless a biological female is involved, see above functional definition for abortion purposes – contraception and abortion are simply not Trans issues, and focusing on pronoun issues with abortion is PC-ism gone amok.
sab
@artem1s: As a post-menopausal happily married woman with a trans niece, thank you for articulating my thoughts so well.
Elizabelle
@Matt McIrvin: We don’t have to throw the trans guys under the bus, one bit. But since they make up such a small percentage, the word women works for me. Women’s health is an issue. It is different from men’s health. If we are all people, why don’t we all just be men? You know that the default mode. Problem solved. We all have rights. Ps. On my iPhone. Not sure why that 1. is there.
trollhattan
@Jager: Damn. And that’s the experience in a nation at a time abortion is legal. Now imagine six months hence.
I’d like those “pro life” folks to do the same at every gun shop and NRA convention.
Elizabelle
@artem1s: Thank you.
Another Scott
@pajaro: nycsouthpaw made the point that IVF and similar fertility treatments are going to necessarily be criminalized if they define personhood at fertilization following Alito’s “reasoning”:
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Dee Lurker: Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Elizabelle
@Another Scott: the Miami Herald had an article on that very topic. Haven’t read it yet.
delk
I’m a 60 year old off-white gay man so I have no business trying to frame this issue. However, Roe is under attack and I strongly believe that abortion should be legal. No matter what it is called, as an ally I know I am included.
Ivan X
Thanks for this super conversation starter, Betty. This topic, and ones like it, I think about a lot, and I think there are no easy answers. I also think it’s difficult to even talk about, because, like racism, feelings run hot about it, for good reason, and it’s easy to stumble into an ill-chosen linguistic thicket. I’ll nervously state my perspective, very fully aware that it comes from the position of comfort that I hold as someone for whom these issues do not directly apply. If anyone disagrees with me, I ask that you please know that I am trying my best, and I do not wish to marginalize anyone at all.
My feeling is that, as we often point out here, words mean stuff, and it’s not at all easy to change them or replace them, particularly when they define fundamental aspects of our lives. I consider the widespread adoption of “Ms.” to be one of the signature victories of the feminist movement, and it’s one of the very, very few successful linguistic improvements I can think of. And even so, to this day, I know feminist women who will still use “Mrs.” when there’s a context that requires or invites it.
I’m a language snob. I like it to be correct. I love the New Yorker. Awareness of what identity is and means is changing at a dizzying pace, and language cannot keep up, and I consider that to be ok. Language *shouldn’t* morph and change at a dizzying pace, because then words stop meaning stuff. But it comes at the price of being exclusionist.
The English language, as it was written when it was taught to me in school only 40+ years ago, is exclusionist. “Woman/Female” is a modification of “man/male,” not their own things. I’m aware of it very often when I say it. “Man” means humankind. “He/his” means “one/one’s” when writing in whatever grammatical mode refers to the general. There have been attempts at inclusivity — I’m vaguely remembering an expanation at the beginning of “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” in which Robbins explains why he’s writing with “they/theirs” instead of “he/his” — but I personally always find them awkward and hard to swallow. When I was in college, I intentionally varied “his” and “hers” when speaking generally, as I felt it was more grammatically correct, and my dad was bewildered by it when he read my papers.
Most people outside of the South are going to say “girl” as an analogue to “guy.” I say “women” but I sometimes choke a little on the relative formality of it, and it no longer bothers me as it once did when people instead choose the more casual, demeaning original term. It’s the wrong term, but it’s a useful term, and I don’t think most people I know are actually demeaning women when they use it. (It does always ring a little painfully for me, though.)
We are now thinking about issues of identity that, except for those out on the front lines, most people were not even aware of only a decade ago, and certainly two decades ago. Everyone has — and I know I’m stepping into potentially problematic territory here (I’m trying to avoid “minefield” given when it happening in Ukraine) — a certain set of biological equipment we have traditionally used to categorize them into “men” or “women,” an identity as a man/woman/nonbinary, a sexual orientation, an outward gender presentation, and perhaps more, that describes who they are.
This means we no longer have neat words to describe the most fundamental thing we need to describe — a person. (I realize that there are all the letters that follow LGBTQ+; perhaps we need to adopt the specific combination of letters that says who we are, but I haven’t seen that done.)
That poses a challenge when writing, or speaking, inclusively. I remember in school in the early 90’s there were attempts at adding less secondary-to-men versions of the same words, like “womon/womyn,” but that was always a bridge too far to me. And even now, I haven’t stopped saying “sir” or “ma’am” or “gentlemen” even though it means I might be guessing wrong based on appearances. If someone tells me they’d like to be called something else, then sure, I’ll call them what they want to be called, because that’s the respectful thing to do. But I’m not prepared to preëmptively spare someone’s feelings because I made a reasonable assumption based upon majority categories in established language. We need categories, and we need words to predictably describe those categories.
So, my attitude about this is a potentially unpopular one: when you’re in a minority position in society, you have a greater burden to bear in the grinding game of life, because life isn’t fair, and one of the ways it isn’t, if you’re margnizalized, is that language is stacked against you. Slowly, it will change, if someone comes up with a modification that’s immediately salient enough for a majority of people to swallow, but it’s an uphill fight.
I remember someone wrote that piece all those years ago about how it’s not that life isn’t a hard game if you’re white, straight, and male, it’s that it’s just that much harder if you’re not, and that’s what the privileged need to understand when they’re whining about not getting enough respect for their own life efforts. But I think the other side of the truth being spoken there is that frankly, if you’re born a straight cis woman, it’s a shittier deal than if you’re born a straight cis man, and if you’re trans, then it’s a shittier deal than if you were born a straight cis woman, and so on. Some people get born on harder levels, and their feelings are going to be hurt more, and more often, just because of that shitty deal. It’s unfair, and it’s absolutely their prerogative to fight for acceptance and understanding, and it’s the obligation of those on the easier levels to work to accept and understand.
But I, personally think that asking society at large to quickly accept entirely new categories of humanity and identity and gender that they were previously unaware of, and expect that language should change to spare any possible hurt feelings among the marginalized minorities who the language wasn’t written for, is a big ask, and a lot of people aren’t going to join the cause very quickly if they don’t share the active passion about it that many of us, for example, have here.
I know I am saying this from my comfortable, non-marginalized position in society. I’m also saying it as a language snob, which is its own kind of classism. The closest I get to having the authentic insight of someone who is actually in a marginalized position is being Jewish; I’ve experienced my share, not large but not nothing, of exclusion and unthinking prejudice. But, unlike some of my co-religionists, I’ve always just seen that as my problem to negotiate as a minority in a majority culture. I absolutely expect respect and dignity as a human, but the rest is my problem. If someone says “Merry Christmas” to me it doesn’t rankle me if I feel like they would instead say “Happy Hanukkah” if they knew me — that is, if they’re treating me with respect as a human and that respect would be there regardless of my religion. (I sidestep the whole thing by saying “happy new year,” but I digress.)
So to address your question, I think a tension fundamentally exists between the need to include people who don’t fit into language’s words, and the need for words to remain consistent in their meaning. I don’t think that *answers* your question, but I personally have decided that I’m sticking with “men” and “women” in the biological sense because the vast majority of people are cis, which makes those words useful, important categories. No one is writing about Ukraine in inclusive language, because, unfortuately, it slows down the immediacy and shifts the focus away from what’s important there. Not everybody is properly represented by our language, and I’m fully aware that this can hurt the feelings of trans people and others. And I do not want anyone’s feelings to be hurt. But I also don’t think everyone’s feelings can be spared all the time when our language is as exclusionist as it is, because words need to mean stuff.
If I have hurt anyone in how I have chosen my language here, or for my ideas themselves, I very sincerely apologize, as I genuinely think about these things, I really want to be fair, and do not want to exclude or hurt. I am more than open to hearing how I might instead have written something, or how I might instead think about something, to be more inclusive. (Depending on what it is, I might or might not agree, but I am absolutely open to change if it’s change that makes sense and expands my understanding.) I do ask in your response that you consider that I’m trying to sort out difficult feelings honestly and in good faith and without intent to hurt or exclude, and that I do realize that I’m writing from a privileged position without true understanding of the experience of those who are directly affected by exclusionist language. I am always going to be a work in progress, and always want to be become better. And I do think it sucks that our language only properly represents the majority of people, and it’s shitty if you’re not one of the minorities not adequately included by it. But I think it’s very, very, very hard to change language that describes fundamental human categories, even within myself, much less in society at large.
Another Scott
@Jager: Thank you. Telling real-life experiences like that is important.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
“The embryo freezer broke over the weekend.”
“I’m placing you under arrest and charging you with [checks 3-ring binder on desk] eleventy-hundred counts of manslaughter.”
CaseyL
It does occur to me that emphasizing the Establishment Clause, and noting that reversing Roe establishes fundamentalist Christianity as the official state religion, is not only accurate, but also elides the issue of whether and how to refer to pregnant people.
JoyceH
I also don’t like the term ‘pregnant people’, but wonder if we could, not go back to ‘pregnant women’, but forward with ‘pregnant women and girls’. Because a) I have trouble considering a raped twelve year old a woman because she wound up pregnant, and b) it underscores the fact that these lunatics are targeting, among others, KIDS.
Eduardo
They are fucking up with a fundamental right for 100+ million people so firstly, secondly, and thirdly, we need to win. Does anybody think that “pregnant people” or “people with uterus” are more effective emotionally than “women”?
eversor
@Another Scott:
A lot of them don’t like those either.
laura
@Elizabelle: ya busted me. And you’ve run me out of here, so give yourself a couple of pats on the back.
Starfish
@TonyG: That is intentionally misgendering people. Trans-men are men. They are not women. Non-binary people are non-binary people. They are not men or women.
Did you see that story about the man who was arrested for threatening the dictionary for their definition of “female”?
Elizabelle
@JoyceH: Yes. Pregnant women and girls.
And: If we are all people, who needs the Equal Rights Amendment?? Another problem solved.
Starfish
@artem1s: Agreed.
Elizabelle
@laura: I think it would be wise to understand that jackals have different views on a lot of topics, and respect that. It is going to be all hands on deck to protect the rights of uterus containers, or whatever this ridiculous semantic exercise leads us to.
Jager
I’d like to put up billboards that say “XYZ Church says NO FUCKING for FUN”
debbie
@artem1s:
Nicely stated. We have to stop shooting ourselves in the collective foot.
RinaX
@artem1s:
A little late to the party, but another thanks for articulating my thoughts so well. I can’t think of a quicker way to lose on this issue than to get hung up on pronouns
And yes, this is primarily about attacking women. To me, trying to remove that term seems to give in to the argument that things that affect us overwhelmingly aren’t as important.
sab
Just musing here. I am in my late 60s. When I went to school as a child I had to wear a dress or a skirt, so I couldn’t play on the jungle gym because my underwear would show.That was reserved for the boys.
I had to wear a hat to go into a church. If I forgot a hat then a piece of kleenex with a bobby pin would would suffice. Boys and men could go in bare-headed. Even God discriminated. (Obviously, my viewpoint is Christian.)
Years later in my first law job a fellow woman lawyer who had a job at a much more prestigious firm than mine told me that at their annual dinner at the fancy men’s club she had had to sit at a back table behind a pillar because women weren’t supposed to be there. A male fellow associate went up to the buffet table to fetch her dinner because she wasn’t allowed to because she wasn’t supposed to be there.
When my then nephew came out as trans I wasn’t surprised because it so much fit the person that I knew. But a side of me was surprised. Why choose to be part of our constricted world? The answer was obvious. She hadn’t chosen. This was who she had always been.
TonyG
@Matt McIrvin: Like many people I cursed Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s stubbornness and narcissism a little bit when she died and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett but … enough. It happened, and it happened almost two years ago. There’s nothing that can be done about it now. And, a case could be made that Roe v Wade would have been just as doomed with a 5-4 rather than a 6-3 right-wing majority on the Supremos.
JoyceH
@RinaX:
It is, and maybe we need to underscore the fact that far from this being an issue of ‘minority rights’, females are in fact the majority of the country. Nixon yammered about the Silent Majority, we need to be the Pissed Off Majority.
Starfish
@RinaX: It’s really not about you.
The attack on trans-rights has been the worst, and clueless women wanting to make it about themselves and fight with other people with uteruses or take up Republican talking points is part of the problem.
After killing Roe, Obergefell v Hodges is next on the agenda for Republicans.
After the recent attacks on trans-children, the banning of affirming gender identity in schools in certain states, y’all need to learn quick.
Children are being banned from children’s sports because they do not fall into gender categories. People are passing laws to discriminate against a handful of children.
Tenar Arha
@louc: I basically had to long ago put the discussion about trans kids (or even women who produce extra testosterone) in sports under the category of speech where Satre put anti-Semites, because there is no logic there, only prejudice and bad faith arguments. It’s bad faith, goalpost shifting, redefinition all the way down.
I really should have remembered that in this discussion about terminology, my bad.
IOW What @artem1s said.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
A story along Jager’s lines:
When I met the woman that became the missus a million years ago when we were both young, we were each involved with other people, and in her case, she’d been living with the dude. There was an undeniable attraction and those relationships blew up. Learned shortly in that she was pretty newly pregnant by prior dude, but I was OK with going through with the pregnancy and sticking by her.
Life would have been complicated, but manageable.
She made another decision, at a timeframe when there weren’t a pack of jackals at the clinic door in this community.
Shes never said she regretted that decision.
eversor
@Matt McIrvin:
Nobody has to be thrown under the bus if the argument is you cannot legislate your religion into the nation or a state. You go after the states that impose bans because those bans are imposing Christianity on anyone who is not a Christian.
Jews, Muslims, athiets, Buddhists, Shintos, Hindus, Satanists, Wiccans all have grounds to say that they are having Christianity imposed on them and turned into a state religion.
This dodges the whole pronoun and gender issue, also helps defend against the other nonsense that will come from the court, and has the benefit of being what Altio and co’s actual goal is.
If we don’t go after Establishment and get into “what is a woman, what is pregnant” we are going to lose hard.
Betty Cracker
@Ivan X:
True. I guess we’re all trying to find the best way forward.
RinaX
@Starfish:
Yeah, it kind of is. I’m sorry that irritates you so much. My main concern is about women and girls who are losing rights they’ve had for decades, and I make no apologies about that.
Betty Cracker
@sab:
Yes.
Leto
OT but On Topic: Gov Bill Lee, Tenn, just signed into law a bill criminalizing anyone who obtains abortion pills via the mail. It becomes a Class E felony.
KBS
@Dee Lurker: That story in Acts is possibly my favorite story in the entire New Testament! So joyful.
Soprano2
@Steve in the ATL: I don’t know why they don’t just say Latin. That covers everybody and it sounds normal.
Peale
@Leto: Yep. People who think they’ll just get around these new laws through the mail order – well I don’t think you’re going to be getting them from CVS Caremark Mail or another service like that. They won’t be shipping them into Tennessee.
citizen dave
I hate what is happening (or about to) at SCOTUS. But am enjoying the fencing going up; and have been thinking about the dynamic in the court with the 3 minority justices, and can only imagine what the minority opinion is going to be like.
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Biology makes it a lot messier than that. Roughly[1] 50 percent of fertilized eggs do not end up implanted, for starters.
Occasionally a blastocyst will absorb another (resulting in a chimera). Did the blastocyst commit murder, a mortal sin? Or do chimeras have two souls, and if two, how is the guilt apportioned if the one that controls the body causes it to perform sinful bodily acts?
Do identical twins each have half a soul?
I agree with those above who say that the main intellectualizing; frame should be that this is the Establishment Clause vs Christian Dominionism, or Religious Tyranny.
(Recently, when bored, I scanned the scholarly theological literature on ensoulment. Religious scholars have not resolved the above issues.)
[1] Early embryo mortality in natural human reproduction: What the data say (Gavin E. Jarvisa, 2017)
KBS
I think it’s vital to use the most inclusive language we can. It might, and often does, sound awkward, but that’s hardly a bad tradeoff to avoid erasing people. Trans rights are under vicious attack in multiple countries, and I’m quite happy to say “pregnant people” as one small way of signaling that I’m on their side. I sincerely hope I’d have felt that way even if I didn’t have trans friends and family members, but it’s a lot easier to be stalwart about human rights when you love the humans who are being attacked.
Doc Sardonic
As I have read through this thread, I see us getting farther and farther into the weeds. Alito’s decision as written is of the whole idea to deprive everyone who is not a white male christian(using small c because most of those fuckers are what a friend who is a capital C Christian refers to as Christers, they only show up on Christmas and Easter) of the most basic of human rights. The Right of Self Determination, to become to the best of your ability to be who and what you want to be. Even though many of us never make it to that ultimate goal, no one should be denied the right to try to get there. We fought two wars with Great Britain for that right, the founders placed it prominently in the Declaration of Independence. That’s what this fight is about, and maybe that is a way to make it lnclusive.
TonyG
@Starfish: As far as I’m concerned, a trans-man is a woman who has decided that she is a man. That’s fine with me. Whatever. I could decide tomorrow that I am 20 feet tall, but the biological reality would not support my self-image. Millions of WOMEN will lose their reproductive rights because of this decision, and many of those WOMEN will suffer and die as a result. That’s what’s important, as far as I’m concerned. But, if people want to muddy the waters with quibbles about language … whatever.
CaseyL
@Doc Sardonic: What Doc Sardonic said. Reversing Roe is establishing a State Religion, is an assault against self-determination, undermines a lot of other SCOTUS decisions based on the right to privacy, and therefore affects everyone. It’s everyone’s fight.
cwmoss
@Dee Lurker: agree with your point. As a member of the Pedant Patrol I must mention that I think you mean Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, not Paolo Fieri, and further assume that this is an autocorrect thing.
TEL
@artem1s: So much this! Why is it assumed if someone uses the word “woman” or something similar that trans people are being left out? When “Black lives matter” became a thing, did it automatically follow that no-one other than black folks mattered? Of course not (except to right-wingers deliberately trying to divide everyone else). Sigh.
citizen dave
@Doc Sardonic: Very well said. As I read through this thread, was thinking about the Equal Rights Amendment–so close! The whole thing is an affront to all of us and all of our freedom and liberty.
Bupalos
@Soprano2:
That is my strongest reaction to this question as well. And it’s not just that in tying ourselves in knots to untangle that which cannot be untangled we’re “playing into stereotypes” in a way that compromises us politically. It’s that it actually serves to confuse US about what we’re actually doing here.
The right to control your body is the most fundamental human right. It belongs to all people, and the right is absolute right up to the point that it infringes on the right of another. The way to not get tangled up in gendered language around it is just to recognize that there need be no more specific language here at all, that the less gender specific this issue is the better and truer it is.
sab
@CaseyL: When you first commented I held off on posting my first reaction, but what the heck. In a cage match who would win? You or JK Rowling? My bet is on you.
Starfish
@TonyG: You can go sit next to J. K. Rowling on this one.
JWR
@Leto: Similar OT but on topic, too:
Rep. Jackie Speier was on Amanpour & Co last night, (can’t find the video yet), and she said that Lil’ Marco Rubio has already proposed an amendment that would criminalize crossing a state border to obtain reproductive services. I guess interstate travel will be next up on the chopping block that is the SCOTUS lawtaking jubilee.
Relatedly, this was good: (Full video)
Kristin Du Mez: How Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith | Amanpour and Company
Dee Lurker
@cwmoss: Yes and yes. Thank you for the correction.
Roger Moore
@eversor:
My feeling is that the degendering of these terms is something that’s happened mostly by example rather than by scolding. I don’t remember anyone telling me how wrong I was for calling flight attendants “stewardesses”. Instead, airlines started using the new term, and people adopted it because that’s what the airlines used. Also, there were more men in the job, and it was simply easier to use the single gender neutral term than both gendered terms.
I think that latter reason is an understated reason the gender-neutral terms have taken over. When work was much more segregated by gender, you could use gendered terms easily because the people in a particular job were overwhelmingly one gender or the other. As gender boundaries have been eroded it makes less and less sense to use gendered terms for workers. It’s more effort to use the gendered terms (since you now routinely have to use both) than the single non-gendered term.
LongHairedWeirdo
I confess, I’ve always been puzzled by people who’ve never even bothered to think about abortion.
The right to an abortion is not granted because no one loves embryos or fetuses. It is granted because a woman is bearing significant burdens I don’t care if evangelicals call them “joyous burdens” or not, carrying a baby to term is a *serious* burden, especially if the pregnancy is unsafe, or unwanted.
Carrying a child to term also carries a not insignificant risk of death – and that risk is unacceptably high in the US already.
Finally: yes, viability is a bright line, and if you’ve gotten onto the Supreme Court of the US, and don’t see why, you’re a goddamned moron. If a woman was suddenly mortally injured, and the fetus is viable, doctors try to save it. If it was pre-viability, they wouldn’t. There are many people who wouldn’t have an abortion as viability approaches more closely, but, that’s why it’s called “pro-choice,” see. Many people would choose not to have an abortion. Other people, with different beliefs, can choose otherwise.
It’s perfectly legitimate (even if it upsets some people) to say a person doesn’t have to treat a fetus like a full blown, out of the womb, baby, because doctors, based on science, won’t, either. Yes, it makes some people feel sincerely up-chucky, much like deliberate assault on peaceful protestors makes me feel, but, alas, doctors will try to save the lives of peaceful protestors, if they have a chance. They’ll even do it if shooting victims made someone “vewy scawed, your honor (Boohoohoo! (checks to see if jury is buying it.) oh WAAAAH, I was SO SCAWED!!!!!”
If Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero, how is abortion, at any stage of pregnancy, considered wrong, if the woman is afraid of the chance of dying, if the baby is carried to term, and delivered vaginally or via c-section? It’s certainly not due to science, or that the embryo has human DNA, or that the fetus is a “person” or any other thing. In most states, the fear doesn’t even have to be reasonable – a defendant simply says they were scared, and “forced to protect themselves,” and it’s a “get out of jail, free!” card. Whether they were, or should have been, afraid, doesn’t enter into it.
So it’s clear that “pro-life” isn’t what drives them. They don’t care about human lives, and they certainly are willing to say that Black lives don’t matter to them.
Oh: but it would be shrill and divisive to point these things out. Good. If it divides their legs, stuck together from their knees knocking in fear all day, they might be able to pull their heads out of their rectums, get cleaning and surgery to remove the obvious shit-head stain, and become viable members of a free nation, instead of closet terrorists.
Bupalos
@Doc Sardonic: The only thing I’d change is that
“everyone who is not a white male christian”
isn’t even broad enough. Nothing could be broad enough. There is a natural logic to the authoritarian impulse that runs through a “no true scotsman” loop until it is beaten back, collapses, or arrives at a absolute dictatorship. No one is exempted, it’s only a question of where in the line of execution you are standing.
Betty Cracker
@JWR:
That may be helpful for Val Demings’ campaign.
piratedan
one other insidious thought about this…. if a woman is convicted of getting an abortion, then she becomes a felon and then subsequently loses her right to vote too, true?
Kathleen
@Jager: Thank you for sharing your daughter’s story and for being a supportive father. I’m glad she’s doing well.
sab
@JWR: Well,Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t like the Commerce Clause. These RWNJ justices don’t like most of the Constitution. They want to get back to the Brits, although they object to looking to international law because we are Americans.
Last I saw, British ancestry Americans are a small sliver of who we actually are. I should keep my mouth shut because those are my people. But in fairness and honesty that isn’t who we are.
JeanneT
I think for the immediate future I’m just going to talk about reproductive rights, the right to privacy, the right to travel, the right to medical care, and freedom from religious laws as they apply to any person’s body.
sab
@LongHairedWeirdo: Thanks. Interesting. I especially liked Kyle Rittenhouse as a frightened fetus. Feti with guns.
sab
@piratedan: Shut your mouth!
ian
@piratedan: Depends on the state. Some states lets felons vote, others don’t let them vote while serving time, others ban them from voting (and juries) for life.
Felon enfranchisement is another ‘great’ example of letting the states do their own thing. Some places become more equal than others.
JWR
@Betty Cracker:
That was my first thought, too. (FSM make it so!) Jeebus, I mean how crazy are these panty-sniffers gonna go with this crap?! Oops, my bad. Normal humans can’t see that far.
FelonyGovt
@artem1s: Thank you, you’ve summed up how I feel better than I could.
As a woman, the misogyny of the Republicans and the religious right makes me vibrate like a tuning fork. Limiting abortion rights is at base a way to put women in our place. It minimizes and trivializes the disruption to our lives and bodies that pregnancy and childbirth causes. I don’t think we’re being exclusionary by acknowledging that this is ALMOST exclusively a women’s issue.
Roger Moore
@Tenar Arha:
I think the previous comment also had it backward. Male and female are about biological sex, while man and woman are about gender. That make sense because man and woman are about social roles rather than purely biological sex. We keep our biological sex when we go through puberty and become adults, but our social roles change. That’s why we change from being boys and girls to men and women; our sex doesn’t change, but our social roles do.
Ruckus ??
My thoughts.
If I want to be a part of a human society, I have to actually be part of it. I have to fill a space that has other spaces around it. If I want to be respected as a part of human society I have to respect all others attempting to being part of a human society. My humanness means I may be equal in rights as all others are but I also have to respect the equality/rights of others. And that is all humans. A gay human is still a human. A female human is still a human. And so on. If I want the position of human I have to recognize that not all humans look like me, have the same genitalia, the same desires. I have to recognize that not all humans are going to be good people, nor are all going to be bad people. I have to recognize that we all have our foibles and mine may be different and other humans may have some I am not comfortable with, as is their right. I have to recognize that all humans have different levels of melanin and therefore skin color and that skin color is highly variable – and totally natural. I have to recognize that humans are not all the same, we vary widely, size, weight, color, hair, we have the ability to speak different languages, to think, to not think, to act, or not. We are not the same in so many ways and yet we are all human beings. And we have to respect the other human beings and the other animals and inhabitants of the planet we live on. We have to control our greed because it makes us less. We have to control our temper because it can make us unbearable. We have to learn because it can make us better able to do all the things that make life better. We have to over all other things, have respect for our fellow travelers on this planet, because we all are born, live and die. We share life, we can make it better or worse for others and ourselves. I know the side of that I want to be on.
LAO
@JWR: I’m incandescent with rage, gaming out how the laws criminalizing abortion will be enforced has left me almost bereft. I think that we’re all going to get a shocking lesson on how powerful the surveillance state really is.
TerryTime
@Roger Moore: Yes. Parent, child, spouse, sibling. We adapt.
Roger Moore
@louc:
It’s not hard to understand at all. They don’t want anyone to transition, period, and they’re going to do everything in their power to stop it from happening. They don’t want to acknowledge that kids can be trans. If they’re forced to, they’ll try to block them from getting medical treatment in the hope that will discourage them. And, of course, if they aren’t allowed to take hormones, they shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports. Their answer is always no. Nothing inconsistent about that at all.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: Chimeras are interesting, and yet another example of how rich human biology is. I’m reminded of the story of Lydia Fairchild.
Obligatory – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfE8CA8EJWA
Letting religion rule state decisions about human biology and human rights is nonsensical and dangerous.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
It’s a tricky subject, but what’s especially weird is that you can rewrite 90% of the awkwardly-phrased stuff you see to sound totally normal. It’s like editors are doing a find-and-replace instead of some basic sentence rewiring. Anyway!
Abortion is 90% a controlling-cis-women issue, 10% philosophy, and ~0% aimed at the, what, 300? trans men who get pregnant a year. If we’re talking political messaging, you need to address the issue as being about what it’s about. This isn’t a tampon ad where you can use whatever language you feel like, or asking people to state pronouns in their Twitter bio. This is life and death. Messaging affects politics, politics has consequences, consequences create winners and losers, that’s life. Sometimes it’s my group(s) being made invisible, sometimes it’s yours…
At least this particular policy affects all fertile ovary-havers equally.
WeimarGerman
@Alison Rose ???: Is this not then a “war on freedom” ? This Court will go beyond reproductive rights and use their pseudo-impartiality to end our Democracy.
Bupalos
@Betty Cracker:
Sometimes the best semantics is the semantics of assumption. By which I mean I think the most effective way to convey that it is about gender equality and full humanity is to not actually open the question by addressing the particular gender at all, as if there would be any question.
“In trying to ban the right to abortion you are denying human beings the most fundamental right, control of their own body.”
Naming the particularly interested group I believe only weakens the case and the coalition for freedom. Doing the opposite puts the onus on the other side, to argue how and why people who want to control their own bodies aren’t full human beings, or aren’t as full in their humanity as zygotes and fetuses.
“In upholding slavery, you are denying human beings the most fundamental right, control of their own body.”
Is it stronger or weaker if I replace human beings with “black people?”
chopper
being pregnant and delivering a baby is a job. it’s a fucking job. it’s really difficult, and there’s a reason why surrogates get paid for it. cause it’s fucking work.
which makes you realize that forcing women to do that kind of hard legit work, work that other women get paid to do, against their will is a form of slavery.
trollhattan
@Leto: Is that not a violation of Interstate Commerce or somesuch?
JWR
More of this, please.
Captain C
@trollhattan:
“Oh, look, officer, the video shows that your kid broke in and wrecked it. Going to charge him with all that manslaughter now?”
Ruckus ??
@Jager:
Thank you for being a real man and a real dad for your daughter. I’d apologize for all those assholes except there is no excuse for them and I don’t respect those who can’t respect others. Those that demand a life for others that they would not believe in if it was them in the same situation do not deserve respect. Just like the person above who changed his name to protect his stupidity. Deserves zero respect.
Felanius Kootea
@piratedan: I think this is an intended consequence for those who have never believed women should have the right to vote.
I tend to agree with those who would frame what the Supreme Court’s extreme right is doing as a privacy issue as well as a small fringe trying to impose Christianity as *the* state religion of the United States of America.
I think artemis articulated my thoughts well, upthread.
JWR
@LAO: Same here. And just now on TV news, Louisiana Repubs just voted to make abortion “a crime of murder”. Jaw, meet floor.
This BS must not stand!
MisterDancer
I’m reminded, in this moment, of the utter stupidity of the Civil Rights Movement, in excluding women, esp. Black Women, from a lot of respect, voices and roles of power as it grew.
And how much of the fight of the Women’s Movement was taken up because Black Women didn’t get a proper share respect, voices and roles of power as it grew, as well.
Telling a group that has actual “skin in the game” to get out of the fight, to not be heard, because it’s mostly someone’s else fight, is never a good move. People with Trans and Intersex (as I’m reminded in this thread) identities matter — they have always mattered.
And in my opinion, this is far more about those people having to deal with a long-assed history of being isolated from the fight, and the resulting lack of awareness. Not looped in, when decisions need to be made,including how to frame concepts for the world. And, as I’ve seen myself, with my own eyes, shamed when they offer to join in.
One TERF alone can derail all the good will a Trans person has, to help with Reproductive Justice. That this debate isn’t centering on that, that long history of how often “only women” meant excluding a host of people that don’t match the so-called “default”? That we’re sitting here running around trying to figure out inclusive language, without asking the very people we want to include? Just strikes me as good intentions, but the wrong approach.
To be kind about it, honestly. I’m doing my best, it’s been a long day.
(For the record, I have asked 2 Trans friends to contribute to a post for here. They both, however, have major life events…and frankly, given there’s at least a couple of commentators who don’t seem to respect Trans identities, I’m not sanguine about pressing them further.)
mali muso
@JWR: Oh and it gets better. They went back and redefined when life begins to “fertilization” and scrapped implantation. So…my ectopic pregnancy that I needed an abortion to resolve to save my life? Murder. IVF? Nope. IUD? Illegal.
JAFD
@Another Scott:
Stroy, possibly of interest
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/saints-once-did-abortions-it-was-a-lesser-sin-than-oral-sex-1.3466881
Paul in KY
@eversor: They really are freaking nuts. Evil, also.
sab
@MisterDancer: I always thought women were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. Not often in the forefront but always there in support, and everyone knew it. You can’t have a movement without women. Coretta Scott, Myrlie Evers and all. Their men could not have done that if their women were not willing to accept the risks and back them up.
That is what enrages me about MAGATs. Their women. Of course a lot of the Jan 6 crowd are going to prison because their women are pissed at the stupidity.
Bupalos
@JWR: Again, I think the “can’t ban abortion because pregnancy is too risky” angle is overall a pretty bad one. Or at least not the strongest one.
The reason everyone is to be allowed to control their own body is that that is simply the absolutely starting point of freedom. Period. Not because we have to let them if it’s too risky or they can prove they may be harmed.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Trans and non-binary people are 0.6% of the US population. When people say this is mostly not about them, that is literally true. 99.4% of the people impacted by this decision are cis-gendered women. There absolutely are more cis-gendered women who feel erased by gender neutral language around pregnancy than there are total non-binary and trans people (male and female) in the US. I understand the desire to be sensitive and inclusive, but not to the point it derails every conversation about these horrible abortion laws. The horribleness of these laws have absolutely NOTHING to do with gender identity, and every conversation about it should not end up centered around the trans communities feelings about language.
sab
@Bupalos: Bullshit. Pregnancy is risky, and I am really tired of men pretending that it is not.
ETA With my health issues I couldn’t even use hormonal contraception. My blood ptessure shot through the roof. Diaphram or condom were my only options. Pregnancy would have killed me.
ETA Hormonal contraception mocks pregnancy. That is how it works, it tricks your body into thinking it is already pregnant. My body did not like anything to do with being pregnant.
JWR
@mali muso: When is this sh(t gonna stop?! I mean, wasn’t Roe a best case scenario for federalizing this stuff in the first place? But I guess the Repukes are putting all their marbles into this particular game, and will continue playing until they are STOPPED! Stopped via legislation, or amended to the Constitution. (Boy, I crack myself up.)
Ksmiami
@Jager: My advert- Somewhere in America, people are having fun- And Republicans are really mad about it
Elizabelle
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Thank you. Always knew you are both compassionate and courageous.
debbie
@trollhattan:
Since when can a state control a federal function?
buggrit
@StarfishTwinkles: BOK BOK BOK BOK
Bupalos
@sab: I’m not saying it’s not risky, of course it is.
I’m saying that the case for one’s right to control one’s own body is only compromised when we go down that road. We’re implying contingency. If pregnancy could be made safer than driving a car, would that mean this forced birth stuff is suddenly OK? If a doctor examines the woman and declares her risk is low, did she just lose the right to abortion?
Darkrose
@Steve in the ATL: Every time I see this I sigh, because context matters.
I am an academic librarian at a California university. I use Chicanx/Latinx because that’s what the student community organizations and the staff who work with them have chosen to use:
Right now I’m working on a project that looks at how the library is doing outreach to students from historically marginalized communities–the term we use instead of “minority”–and first-generation students. It would be incredibly disrepectful and counterproductive not to use the language the community has chosen for themselves. It would also be counterproductive to use Chicanx/Latinx, a term that originated with students and academics, when knocking on doors and doing community-based activism outside of academia. For that matter, it would be counterproductive to use Chicano/a/x on the East Coast, because the term is specifically referencing Mexican Americans, and is a California/Southwest thing.
I usually call myself Black. The staff support organization uses African American. The student academic support unit is called the Center for African Diaspora Student Success. I personally find “African Diaspora” to be clunky and awkward nomenclature, but when I meet with the director of CADSS, that’s the language I’ll use.
gvg
I don’t think the careful academic phrasing is going to work in this fight. I would just go with women and people’s rights. I don’t think it erases trans people. Unfortunately for them, I think this fight is going to impact both trans women and trans men. The bigots will try to give them the worst of all rules. I also don’t think I need to list all the other subcatagories of people this will impact. White women, black women, husbands, doctors, already born children, friends, boyfriends, on and on. It is going to seriously drive away more doctors who can’t do an honorable job with laws like this hanging over them.
Don’t make the perfect, the enemy of good. The perfect all inclusive language doesn’t exist. Most of the time, calling it women’s rights or human rights is as good as you can get. In specific examples you can cite how it impacts a trans person, among all the other examples.
Kropacetic
How about simply “women and trans men?”
Darkrose
I think they have everything to do with gender identity.
Right wing evangelical Christians believe that women are defined by their ability to give birth. Trans men are women as far as their concerned because having a uterus is the only thing that determines womanhood; the role of a woman is to have babies. (It’s no accident that this tracks with the TERF position as well.)
sab
@Bupalos: I agree with your point, but I don’t want to minimize my point. Pregnancy for me probably would have been fatal. I had a friend who died of the same health issue, leaving her husband widowed with a newborn
ETA I know we are on the same page. I just feel urgent about my point.
ETA There was nothing in the world I wanted more than children, but biology was not on my side. My stepkids like me.
debbie
Ruckus ??
@sab:
I agree with you.
I can not get pregnant, but I’ve known humans that can and humans that could and for health reasons never should. I really don’t feel this is my place to make decisions because of my first five words. It isn’t my body, it isn’t my place and it sure as hell isn’t any religion’s place to make that decision.
We are at another cross roads in politics and the concept of religion. We’ve been here before. But the controllers and the religious freaks who think they have the right to make life and death decisions for me or you or anyone besides themselves have not been shut down, sat down and taught what is their business and what is absolutely not. I don’t know how we make that clear. This Alito shit is so far past the pale and it has to be fixed at whatever cost.
Darkrose
@glory b: Latinx/Chicanx are terms that were developed by actual people of Latin American/Mexican American descent. Because those people were largely US-born students, may of whom don’t speak Spanish as a first language–and I think largely from California–there a very specific context that doesn’t work for a lot of people. And that’s fine; as I wrote at length below, you’ve got to look at the context and who your audience is. I use Latinx when I’m talking to people at work because I work in academia, and that’s the term the students in the community have chosen to use.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropacetic:
Why create unnecessary divisions when we can just use flows-off-the-tongue language like “persons of uterus”?
But yeah, this becomes a lot less silly with some basic editing.
Betty Cracker
@Bupalos: I agree with you that general framing can be incredibly compelling, and I think M4 is right at #170 that probably 90% of this can be addressed via better editing.
Still, I think we need room for discussions about how events like the potential fall of Roe affect women as a specifically targeted group. Seems like we should be able to discuss that without getting wrapped around rhetorical axles, but it’s complicated.
Bupalos
@KBS:
If you come into a room with 30 people, and instead of saying “hello Katie, and Dave, and Sandra, and Rodney, and Lynn, and Raymond, and Tess, and Stephanie, and”…ok you get the idea, if instead you say “Hi everyone!” you really haven’t erased anyone. And it’s beyond “awkward” to run through all the names every time, it actually distracts from the reality that we are all a group, together here in one place, with some real common experience and interest from that reality. I feel like the best way to be truly inclusive in language is to mindfully use non-particular language that embraces and leaves room for all manner of difference and individuality, not to keep reformulating in ever more “accurate” but complex ways. I frankly don’t think that latter project is even possible. Language is quite simply not made for that task.
debbie
@Bupalos:
Certainly political messaging isn’t either.
ksmiami
@JWR: There are other means to stop them. And if this assault on basic autonomy isn’t quashed now, well, I don’t foresee America lasting
Mike in NC
The Republican ‘War On Women’ has been ongoing since Reagan, so let’s stick with the term we’ve been using for 40 years.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
I think this shows what a lot of this is really about. There are people who want to adopt, but they don’t have the selection of babies they want. They genuinely see adoption as like shopping, and they want to be in a buyer’s market. They want more unwanted births to ensure they have the selection they’re after. As it is today, they’ll probably get stuck with a (gasp) minority baby, maybe even a special needs baby, because that’s all that’s available. This is a big reason so many people adopt from overseas; they can shop around and get the exact baby they want.
Kropacetic
@Major Major Major Major: Main take away from English 101, “just say what you mean.”
“People” also works. Simple.
KBS
@Bupalos: I meant to imply that we should use the most inclusive words possible, not that we should name every group. “Pregnant people” is more inclusive than “pregnant women”, and also less awkward than “pregnant women and trans men”, which also leaves out pregnant non-binary people. We don’t need to separately name every group, but we need to be intentional about advocating for the entire group of people who are affected.
AM in NC
@artem1s: Thank you for this comment. And Betty, thank you for raising this issue. I am your age, and I feel the same way about being erased as a woman, because we sure are attacked as women with expressly female bodies.
That being said, I don’t want to make trans women or pregnant trans men invisible. But I don’t think focusing on language right now is doing our broader cause of equal rights for everyone any good – I think it is doing the opposite and giving the freaks on the right another thing to point at and refocus the question away from rights being stripped away.
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: I actually have discussed this with my wife who is very feminist. She actually used to be about where you are now, just a couple years ago, but paying more attention to Transgender voices moved her more into the camp that it’s really not such a huge loss to her or women in general, to add clarifications or language that is more inclusive. And it’s important to her because one of our closest friends has a Transgender son who will have his rights stripped as well by Roe being overturned. I also know some Board Members at our local Planned Parenthood who are keenly aware of this history but still choose to be inclusive whenever they can.
All that said, there’s definitely nuance to the discussion and at least from what I’ve seen from Transgender friends and people I follow, this is pretty far down on the list of things that bother them.
I do see the nuance and the tie to history that makes it complicated for some. When I see someone with “Women’s Rights” or some such on a sign, I give them the benefit of the doubt rather than assuming they are trying to be a TERF. But I think times are changing and language is changing and I’d rather be in the front of that change than a holdout, when I can help it.
Kropacetic
@AM in NC: We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time too. Yes, cis women are the current primarily affected group. But they’re already coming after gay and trans folk, in ways that still make it a bodily autonomy issue (with a soupcon of free speech).
Putting this under a broad umbrella of freedom and privacy rights covers the most bases.
Betty Cracker
@MisterDancer:
I’m not sure whom you’re trying to scold here. Sounds like…everyone?
Anyway, I’d love to hear your friends’ perspectives on this issue. The one trans man I asked said, “Who gives a shit?” ?♀️
Kropacetic
@Betty Cracker: Trans folk have weighed in on this thread. We can’t select our sample of people.
Feckless
That’s a funny quote especially when you compare it to the one in todays Nazi screed by Alice Stewart of the Harvard Kennedy School of government in CNN today published (I’m glad I voted for trump) an op-ed where she cites rbg’s opposition to roe v Wade.
This is the true legacy of RBGs ego, damnation and tyranny.
sab
So my stepkids are giving me a lunch a week after Mothers Day. My day is actualky and officially Stepmothers Day.
As a stepmother i am beyond thrilled. My stepsons’ with a mother are going along with the program.
My stepdaughter was the child of a single mother who adored her but died young of a degenerative disease. Which tossed her into foster care. Fostercare can be good or bad. Hers was hoIrible and terrifying. Her fosterparents son-in-law beat his own son to death while mo m sat downstairs watching tv.
I believe mom loved her kid . I believe my stepdaughter in that circle knew what happened. Of corse she wouldn’ t say because she was so scared. This was the child we got out of foster care. And her first mom ran for the hills.
Me, the autism spectrum mom, who has few friends and doesnt like turmoil, landed as her stepmom. The universe is not a friendly place.
Feathers
Just read this tweet from a trans man:
And the the responses was a professor of trans studies, who linked an essay on the problems of moving beyond the binary – making an important point:
This is something that I’ve felt for a long time and gotten pushback on: that intersectionality seems to just somehow happen to erase misogyny. This essay (from 2016!) points out that in “moving beyond” the gender binary, what is lost is that in the binary construction of gender, there is an enormous power differential and it is completely asymmetric. So moving beyond it means ignoring this fact.
It’s not in the essay, but it’s why saying “I don’t see gender” is similar to saying “I don’t see race.” It sounds good, but it is a willful blindness to the horrors faced by women from the patriarchy over the millennia.
Anyway, I’m going to be studying this essay, and strongly recommend everyone else to read it too: Feminism, Gender Pluralism, and Gender Neutrality: Maybe it’s time to bring back the binary – Paisley Currah
Omnes Omnibus
I am not really qualified to weigh in on the language issue. I’ll try to use whatever gets agreed on. In the meantime, if someone needs a ride to a clinic for an abortion or gender reassignment, I will do my best for them. Also, kudos on the RBG pushback, BC.
sab
@sab: I love my grandaughter. Just weird that she actually isn’t. But that isn’t my problem.
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: We agree on that — times and language are changing, and it’s important to find productive and inclusive ways to move forward. Good faith differences of opinion are possible, and I will try to keep that in mind. :)
AM in NC
@sab: Oh they were there all right, doing a ton of the work, but they were pushed out of leadership and disparaged by many of the male leaders. See: Carmichael, Stokely (“The only position for women in the movement is prone”).
Dee Lurker
@Feathers: I disagree pretty strongly with Currah’s essay. Intersectionality is very much focused on power disparities and the existence of sovereignty. I don’t think a gender blind ideology is being erected in comparison to the color blind myth that prevails among genteel white supremacists.
I think Currah draws a false correlation between the trans rights movement and the feminist movement. One does not have to suffer just because the other appears (and it is an appearance) to be thriving. Currah also fails do define what intersectionality is: the acknowledgment that marginilization occurs across gender, race, sexuality, etc. with a degree of experiential overlap which makes the experience of oppression individually unique. The experience of being the existential Other is different from double consciousness which is different from closeting yet one person may experience degrees of each of these. How cultures through power structures perpetuate and defend oppression is the most pressing object of study… and notice how it is that any and all attempts to effectively analyze these power structures are met with obfuscation? I think it is because a lot of us hate these structures but fear the outcome of their collapse or reform. This is also part of oppression… learned helplessness.
In short, feminism loses nothing from intersectionality any more than the civil rights movement lost nothing from feminism.
Starfish
@UncleEbeneezer: Honestly, same. When my child was in preschool, there was a trans child in his class, and “How the hell does a three year old know their gender?”
Eventually, I learned consistent, insistent, and persistent.
As I tried to figure out my position, I read the TERF blogs like Fourth Wave Now. I did not read Bug Brennan, but one of my trans friends was really upset by her.
I got better at not misgendering my friends after they transitioned by practicing.
I am deeply opposed to people thinking that they are going to call other people whatever or that it is up for debate when politicians are passing legislation excluding trans children from sports and requiring teachers to inform parents if they expect the child of being gay or trans.
I don’t want people being abusive to children, and I need people to catch up quick of they don’t want to be mistaken for abusive jerks.
Starfish
@Feathers: The original discussions of intersectionality were about black women. People acting as if intersectionality is the tool of The Man are telling me they don’t know the history of the term intersectionality. It was Crenshaw.
Darkrose
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Oh. My Dog.
I ask myself at least once a week why I still go to that site–especially since they’re dead set on litigating the decisions of a woman who’s been dead for almost two years now. I brought that up yesterday, and the main response seemed to be, “We have to make sure that the people who don’t think Ginsburg should have retired in Obama’s first term know that they’re wrong and we’re right.”
So instead of looking at where we go from here, or discussing things like court reform, we’re going to yell about this until Dalia Lithwick admits that we were right all along. What a waste of time.
Juju
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I get pissed because those wankers don’t blame the actual villain, Mitch McConnel, destroyer of norms, customs and country.
Darkrose
@Juju: They also don’t seem to put enough blame on the people–primarily men–on the left who claimed that it was “blackmail” to use the Supreme Court as a reason to vote for Hillary. Because if the people who didn’t vote or voted for Jill Stein had voted for Hillary instead of whining about her emails and her speeches and which states she did or didn’t visit, fucking Donald Trump wouldn’t have been able to appoint three justices. If Democrats actually voted during the midterms, the Fascist Turtle woudn’t have been in a position to cram Federalist Society hacks down our throats. But no–all of the blame goes on the woman who is, in fact, still dead.
livewyre
Late to the thread, and for what my opinion is worth, but…
This is an issue that’s very close to me, something I’ve studied and grappled with for decades. Not just gender in specific, but things around it, leading up to it, and springing from it. So I feel obligated to add something if possible.
There have been quite a few lucid and compassionate comments here that I appreciate a lot (and of course some of the opposite). It’s been a clarifying experience. The way I see it now, a lot of interconnected issues are being touched on at once and with great potential for moving society forward.
In short, it could be as simple as a matter of trust. Not so much trusting people individually, but for the web we all struggle in to not need every single strand to be placed just so. Trusting language to spring from circumstances rather than having to consult a focus group for every novel bit of phrasing. In other words, both/and. Walk and chew gum. I’m convinced that we can refer to women without erasing other gender statuses, and to people in general without erasing women, as long as we’re still working towards inclusion for all of us.
Part of what convinces me of this is that the idea of such mutual erasure, of effectively pitting groups against each other, is a wedge strategy – one informed by exclusion as a goal. We’re not fighting for which group gets to have rights most expediently before the next one in line gets a go, but rather between inclusion as a whole and exclusion as a whole; between gender affirmation and gender assignment; the same split, even, as between democracy and autocracy, coalition and domination, mediation and authority, law and force, or even liberalism and conservatism. Between asking and telling. Do we decide who we are, or is it decided for us by nature or god or government or medicine? I think that’s the heart of the conflict. The various attempts to drive a wedge between inclusions have ironically cemented this for me, as well as inspired me to weigh in on it. So, thanks to those, and nice try.
Feathers
@Dee Lurker: This is true is theory, but unfortunately doesn’t always hold up in the real world. Part of the issue is that there is only so much attention a person has to offer and only so much time in the world. Tools of analysis are not revealers of truth.
Intersectionality creates a huge incentive to focus on the areas of greatest oppression, even if there is grave danger and opportunity for change higher up in the oppression matrix. Feminism and trans rights aren’t in opposition if both give equal freedom to each other to act upon the dangers that they see, with promises to have each other’s support when necessary. I’m not seeing that on the ground. I see a lot of women who used to be active in feminist circles now mostly just shutting down other people’s feminist activism in the name of intersectionality, without necessarily stepping up into trans or anti-racism activism.
Feathers
@Starfish: Thanks for the comment. I know this, it’s just that how it is being applied in this discussion is along the gender axis.
MisterDancer
I’m not thrilled, no. But I’m trying, really hard, to say a thing that’s not directly about the “better ways to say X” theme, yes.
At the end of the day, I’m not the best person to say what’s better language. I can say, though, that maybe implicitly choosing to work with the people and groups that feel slighted is a better approach. to figure out how to address this with them. they can explain their needs far better than I.
And that there are historical reasons why that hasn’t been done, which impacts why we’re even having this discussion, to begin with.
Look, y’all. I don’t enjoy being seen as a scold. I’m a loudmouth, but I really don’t enjoy it; I’m just used to saying these things, and trying to balance my wellspring of emotions that drive me, with striving to be clear and resonant in these spaces about the “rational” parts of my opinions.
Because: I also think about, yes, those Trans friends of mine, and others I’ve known and who have taken time to educate my sorry ass. and that leads me to think “were the roles reversed, what would I want them to say here for me, in this moment?” What can I say for them, with them not being here in full — if anything?
Mind you: Sometimes I do just need to shut up, and maybe this was one of those times?
But I don’t think so. I do think this discussion misses some aspects of how to approach the issue, even if I don’t have The Answer, just concerns. Because you can, in fact, select your sample of people. Just as this blog’s culture “auto-selects: for certain types, so too can you “override” that, with thought and care. And that’s possible for most groups involved in these activities.
I have a voice here, because I’m broadly compatible with how we “talk”. And as noted, there are Trans folx here who do feel conformable speaking up. Nor is this isolated, as noted elsewhere, to Trans identities.
But yeah, if I were Trans, I think I’d not be happy to step into a space where people “go anonymous” to (even with the best of intentions) denigrate Transness. [EDIT: And I could be wrong about this, too!] Y’all know I’ve been hot about that with my identity as a Black man, when that happens; why would I be OK with it about Gender Identities?
I do feel, strongly, there should be no light between people who identify as Women. in the sense of having deeply shared, if not identical, struggles. Yet I don’t think that happens when the majority of such people evade engaging deeply marginalized groups in that identity, be that Black Women or Trans Women (or those who are both!). And I saw some of the latter here, and it left me disturbed.
Thus, my post. Again, not trying to be mean, or a scold, just not thrilled with the direction of this discussion. And also really damn tired, by situations outside this blog.
FluxAmbassador
@Darkrose: I was just informed over there that actually it’s a good thing to remind people that women are capable of doing anti-woman things!
Another Scott
@JAFD: Thanks very much.
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
Deleted.
Flynn
“Woman” has become a taboo word…unless of course it has the prefix “trans” in front of it. This is why women…oh pardon me, cervix-havers or breeders or front-hole-bleeders…are abandoning the Democratic and Labour parties in droves.
Whereaway
I like this very much – it puts the focus on Freedom for persons, regardless of gender or orientation. I think the assault on reproductive rights is an assault on freedom, period. If you look at the laws in Texas and other states, those laws restrict the Freedom to travel for persons seeking abortions and punishes people for leaving a state.
That being said, I think it’s also very important to explicitly include and engage those who would be victims of religious bigotry for any reason.
I’m happy to see the backlash to the issue of reproductive rights. But, the backlash to the assault on freedoms for and demonization of LGBT+ folk has been quieter, and I think that this is just as important.
It’s all part and parcel on a frightening attempt to install religious government that’s different only in degree from the Taliban which would deny freedom to anyone not closely aligned with the correct tribe, and I’m not sure how big the difference is between the religious right and the Taliban.
I like the idea of focusing on the assault on Freedom, it throws a word badly used by the right back in their faces.
I’m not sure how I can contribute to how to the discussion on how to use inclusive language, being an old cis straight white man. So, I will listen to those much more directly impacted by these assaults on freedom on how to do so, and work from there.
Kay
You guys, you cannot exclude the word “women” from abortion. Whatever inclusive phrase you come up with cannot involve excluding that word. That’s insane.
You’re really going to do this right now? A large group of women feel suffocated and are grieving the loss of a right and your response is don’t use the word they use to identify themselves? What did you learn in first grade? What do you call people? You call people what they call themselves. You don’t give them another fucking word to identify themselves if they all use “woman” and they do.
livewyre
@Kay:
I’m not completely sure what this is in reference to or if it pertains to what I’ve said, but I put a lot of stock in your message on this topic and I want to be sure not to cross any wires. Is it coming across as “you can say this but not that”?
To be clear – my position is about an inclusive approach to inclusion; using any and all terms for their descriptive ability as they come up, rather than proscribing some in preference to others. My foremost aim is not to forbid or to demand of anyone what to use or not use, especially when it comes to describing themselves. If anyone identifying as a woman finds abortion to pertain specifically to womanhood in addition to the wider category of people who may need to terminate a pregnancy, then that finding becomes necessarily part of the idea I’m working from. Same picture, shared space, inclusive.
If there’s anything I feel like we can’t afford to do, it’s deciding up front – prescriptively – what terms are allowed or forbidden. As someone said before, language has a way of shaping itself to fit. I don’t think we need to worry about it being dictated by some “woke” party or other, and if we do, that’s a problem of its own.
And since some throwaway nick brought it up, I’ll represent myself. Part of my heap (or, nicely, “journey”) can be construed as “trans woman”. That’s a portion of where I’m speaking from. So, one could see how I would have a stake in all of us advancing together instead of one category at a time. Hope some of this helps.
Starfish
@Kay: The language is what is being used by all the reproductive justice activists. This is not new. That everyone here wants to rehash battles between second and third generation feminists because they are unfamiliar with them is not their problem.
Angela
@Kay: Thank you.
Betty Cracker
@MisterDancer: Once again, I think we have different ideas about what this blog is for. That’s okay because it can probably be for more than one thing.
We have lots of educational, fundraising, and group action posts. That’s great, but I’m here to shoot the shit about politics, pets, food, film, family, life, etc., with the quirky little community John built.
I’ve been identifiably female online for a couple of decades now, so believe it or not, I have some insight into how lightly moderated, freewheeling online discussions work — not always great!
Are some comments appalling? Are some commenters assholes? My god, yes! We banned someone for a grotesque rape comment in this thread fairly early on.
But mostly, it’s good, thoughtful people thinking aloud about complex issues and sharing different perspectives. Hell, we even had a goddamn hero reveal himself at #59 with an incredibly moving story that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
So, if the symposium seems disorganized and lacks a curated array of relevant viewpoints up top, it’s because it’s not a symposium but rather a post and comment thread on a blog. I’ll keep posting about things that interest me in the way I see fit until I get tired of it or John takes the keys away.
I value your thoughts on the topic; your critique of the approach, not so much, though obviously you’re free to express that too.
Kay
@livewyre:
Restrictive laws on reproductive rights are not targeted at “people”, a word that includes all men- they are targeted at women. Both the intent and the practical effect of the laws is to strip rights from women. Any other effects are tangential and collateral to that. Using “people” obscures that in a way that is just intolerable to me. It is less true that saying “women”, less descriptive, less powerful.
“People will lose reproductive rights”. Well, which people? Not all people, right? Primarily, overwhelmingly, as a matter of deliberate intent by the people drafting the laws- one group of people – women.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Thank you, Kay.
Jackals: has it occurred to any of you that some portion of online activists might be throwing out the “inclusive language” topic as a way of dividing those who would be allies? Especially in a week when it has become obvious that women — yes, women, and the people who love and admire them — are under threat from this ridiculous and illegitimate Supreme Court?
We have seen it on this blog.
I think we can be inclusive about welcoming gays and trans people and nonbinary individuals without erasing the word “women.” And — as Joyce H reminds us — add in “girls” there too. Girls become pregnant too.
And a lot of girls are in danger from or impregnated by older men in nonconsensual sex. But, no exceptions for rape and incest, because “the wimmens tend to lie.”
Don’t let a fight over language distract you from the very real danger out there. As one wise jackal (gvg) said upthread, don’t let the perfect (which does not exist) be the enemy of the good. We need to be allies.
Tony Gerace
@Another Scott: Yup. And when a fertilized egg is defined as a person, then the logical next step will be that every miscarriage will be investigated by the police as a possible homicide, with the woman being detained until the investigation is complete. This is what they wsnt
Kay
@Elizabelle:
Men still have all their personal agency and autonomy rights. “People” didn’t lose them. Women did.
Anathema Device
@Ivan X: “I’m a language snob. ”
I’m going to say this very gently because I don’t think I’d win much approval by saying it with the full force of my reaction to your comment – distaste about language change has never been a friend to the oppressed. It is a tool wielded without mercy or morals by oppressors.
It is also deeply ahistorical. You love English. How can you say that and not know how what a labile, larcenous, and downright lunatic language it is? English is a hoarder, a pawn shop, a big box store and the tiniest boutique. It pinches, melds, moulds, mimics and invents on the fly. Resisting that is like trying to stop the tide, and Cnut understood the utter futility of that.
It is not the duty of minorities to put up with the grinding boot of oppression. It is the duty of the majority to make sure no boots are used, and that anyone caught under one, is lifted up and helped to thrive. I am a cis, white, heterosexual woman. I expect men to let me enjoy my human rights, and anyone who is not white, cis, or straight should have the expectation I will do the same for them.
We know what kind of society comes from telling minorities they have to endure oppression. I don’t want to live in one of those.
Anathema Device
@Alison Rose ???:
“couldn’t it be “war on reproductive freedom” or something? ”
What it is, and what the left in your country and mine should hammer down at every opportunity, is a war on parenting.
It’s a war on your right to choose when and how you want to be a parent. It’s a war on how many children you can have. It’s a war on protecting the children you do have from harm.
This argument is made even stronger when you throw in the fast-growing attacks on contraception and IVF. Tie it all together. Make it crystal clear that the same people who want rape victims to carry their rapist’s child, also want to force clueless teenagers to become daddies (yeah, don’t forget how that will ruin young lives), and stop married couples from conceiving with the help of IVF. Jam it down their necks that they will not be allowed to decide when they can afford kids, and also, when they can afford kids, they won’t be allowed to have them.
And even if married couples get pregnant naturally, and one of them develops an ectopic pregnancy, the anti-choice crowd have just made it a criminal offence to try and save that person’s life.
Make people imagine watching their beloved spouse dying from a medical condition caused by pregnancy. Made them understand this isn’t just about nasty careless sluts who should keep their legs closed. Show them how it affects anyone who can get pregnant or can get someone else pregnant, or who loves someone who can.
I had an abortion at 29, and I would not be here if i hadn’t. I will never support any limit on abortion access, for any reason – and the “safe, legal, and rare” can bugger right off. Free, safe abortion on demand is the minimum a modern, democratic, equal society should allow.