Otherly gendered pregnancy

Another winner from . . . wait, this isn't from The Onion, either.  The Guardian is seriously quoting the British Medical Association's serious advice about not insulting intersex men and transmen by calling pregnant women "expectant mothers."

Step (1) Men and women are so different from birth that they must inhabit rigidly segregated public spheres, without our checking first to see what any individual is good at or prefers doing.

Step (2) ???

Step (3) Men and women are so identical in every important way that we have to do backflips to avoid assuming that a pregnant human is female, while skipping the step where we ever simply observe which individuals are good at what.

Any excuse, in other words, to keep ordering people around, so people will know we're nice.

6 comments:

Grim said...

Surely the easier thing is to declare that "mother" is no longer a female-gendered term, but merely applies to the child-bearing womb-having person who might of course be male.

E Hines said...

Maybe we should just refer to them as expected motherf*rs

Except that would denigrate honest men and women, parents-to-be or not.

No, I'll just stick with my newly articulated resolve to refuse to surrender the language to the PS sewage spewers. And wonder whether they actually kiss their mothers with those mouths.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

I'm not sure we can say "womb" any more. Isn't it an organ that self-identifies as part of a cisfemale reproductive apparatus?

E Hines said...

PS sewage spewers ==> PC sewage spewers. My keyboard still is far too literal.

Eric Hines

Ymar Sakar said...

The new normal of humanity.

One crazy internet person is a joke. 5 billion crazy people is a mainstream culture, nation, and religion, it is now the New Normal.

Tom said...

Maybe it goes like this:

Step (1) Men and women are so different from birth that they must inhabit rigidly segregated public spheres, without our checking first to see what any individual is good at or prefers doing.

Step (2) New edition of Oceania's "Dictionary of Newspeak" comes out.

Step (3) Men and women are so identical in every important way that we have to do backflips to avoid assuming that a pregnant human is female, while skipping the step where we ever simply observe which individuals are good at what.