[This article appeared in O&G Magazine 23/4 (Summer 2021). The online version of the article was removed due to complaints, but you can still find it in the full magazine, which you can download here].

In 2014, Milli Hill was in the news because Facebook had removed photos of her childbirth and given her a three-day ban on the grounds that posting them ‘violated community standards’. Both news.com.au and The Guardian ran stories publishing the photos, and they used the headlines ‘Facebook censors photos of women giving birth’¹ and ‘By removing photos of childbirth, Facebook is censoring powerful female images’² respectively. Fast-forward nearly seven years and Hill is in the news again, protesting not the suppression of images of women, but the suppression of language referring to women.

In response to an Instagram post about obstetric violence against ‘birthing people’, Hill had responded ‘…obstetric violence is violence against women. Let’s not forget who the oppressed are here, and why’. Her response blew up on social media, and she was subjected to a slew of abusive comments including that she was ‘trash’, ‘toxic’, ‘poison’, ‘anti-LGBTQ’, and ‘transphobic’. Hill told The Times that it wasn’t ‘random trolls’ making these comments about her, but ‘doulas, hypnobirthing teachers, antenatal teachers, midwives, birth trauma specialists’. The charity Birthrights severed its relationship with her, and professional contacts distanced themselves.³ More than 2000 people signed a petition asking the New Zealand College of Midwives to remove Hill as a keynote speaker, describing her as a ‘known transphobic writer’.⁴

What explains this response? When the women’s liberation movement kicked off, it was seen as vitally important to name male violence against women and girls for exactly what it was. Such violence is patterned, disproportionately perpetrated by men against women. The people who objected to this sixty years ago, and said ‘but women can be violent too’, were men’s rights activists, not progressives. Today, many are progressives. So what’s changed?

What has changed is that naming obstetric violence as (male) violence against women instead of against people is to make reference to what some progressives would like to make unsayable, namely the reality of biological sex, the link between femaleness and pregnancy. In naming a truth perfectly obvious to everyone since we developed the language, as a species, to name such things, Hill was also dissenting from a new orthodoxy: the ideology of gender identity.

The new orthodoxy denies the reality of biological sex and claims that it is a mere ‘social construct’; believes in gender identities—subjective inner identifications with one sex/gender or the other, or neither (it is often unclear what exactly is being identified with); insists that everyone has a gender identity; believes that for all legal purposes, it is a person’s gender identity, not her sex, that should determine her treatment, and her legal rights. This set of beliefs has gained swift social acceptance, due to the widespread allegation that questioning any part of it is ‘transphobic’ and ‘exclusionary’. It has gained extraordinarily rapid legal entrenchment, too: Victoria, for example, has already made it the case that any person can change her legal sex by statutory declaration (sex self-ID); and that adults (with a few exceptions) are at risk from legal action if they engage in practices that ‘change or suppress’ someone’s gender identity (conversion therapy). Victoria is also expected to soon introduce legislation that extends vilification protections to ‘gender identity’ as a protected attribute, even though the state’s definition of gender identity is so vague as to include almost everything. ‘Gender identity means a person’s gender-related identity, which may or may not correspond with their designated sex at birth, and includes the personal sense of the body (whether this involves medical intervention or not) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech, mannerisms, names and personal references’ (p. 39).⁵

The ACT and Queensland have versions of the conversion therapy legislation in place; Tasmania has sex self-ID, and the ACT, South Australia, and the Northern Territory require only ‘clinical treatment’ before a legal change of sex, which can be as little as a few counselling sessions.

Thus, we land in a situation in which naming the realities of femaleness and maleness is considered unacceptable; in which we must make all biological issues ‘sex-neutral’ so as not to exclude anyone who doesn’t identify as their biological sex (some nonbinary people), or who identifies as the opposite sex (some binary trans people) [I say ‘some’ because not all people who claim gender identities deny their biological sex, but many do]. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted that ‘The gutting of Roe v Wade imperils every menstruating person’.⁶ Women and girls menstruate; Ocasio-Cortez is writing in the new orthodoxy on the grounds that someone biologically female with a ‘man’ or ‘nonbinary’ gender identity might menstruate. A parenting website dealing with periods refers only to ‘children’ getting their periods,⁷ as though this is something that could happen to any child. The Australian Department of Health retitled its vaccination decision guide for ‘women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy’ to being for ‘people who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy’.⁸

In a male-dominated society, which ours is (and is marked by the legacy of being such), ‘gender-neutral’ language risks being androcentric language. The default human is male, so if we don’t specify that she is female, and draw attention to her femaleness in order to insist upon female representation, our gender-neutral human will be male. Second-wave feminists Mary Daly and Marilyn Frye helped to reveal this. Their example was ‘man’, allegedly referring to all of humanity, but revealed to refer to men by way of the dissonant phrases ‘the sisterhood of man’ (Daly, 1973), and ‘female man’ (Frye, 1983). More recently, in her book Invisible Women (2019) Caroline Criado-Perez revealed countless examples of androcentrism throughout medicine, town-planning, product design and more. The ‘default male’ is responsible for health apps that don’t track periods, bullet-proof vests that don’t fit around women’s breasts, and snow-ploughing that leads to more accidents for young mothers.

This all makes it particularly distressing that it is often women at the forefront of the movement to erase women-centred language. Those women may have good intentions: the inclusion of people with cross-sex or no-sex gender identities. But the conversation is constantly framed as though it is a matter of inclusion versus bigotry, a matter of respecting trans people versus being a ‘transphobe’. It isn’t. Considerations against gender-neutral language for female-specific health issues include the history of struggle for women’s representation in language, which our feminist foremothers fought hard to win; the fact that inclusion is not the only value that matters; and the fact that even if it was, including trans people may come at the cost of excluding some women, such as women for whom English is not their first language, and who do not understand that they are ‘menstruating persons’, ‘cervix-havers’, ‘people who are pregnant’, ‘children who will get a period’, etc.

The most vivid example of what we lose in the shift to gender-neutral language can be seen when we consider domestic violence. This is disproportionately an issue of male violence against female people. There is occasionally domestic violence between men (in gay couples) and between women (in lesbian couples), as well as between people of different gender identities whatever their sex. But if we recast domestic violence as an issue of violence ‘by people against people’ an incredibly significant piece of information would be lost. For it is not people who are disproportionately the perpetrators of domestic violence, but men (males); and it is not people who are disproportionately the victims of domestic violence, but women (females).

The problem might seem less drastic in the case of terms like ‘people who are pregnant’, ‘birthing persons’, or ‘menstruating persons’, where at least there is a clear reference to female biology with the references to pregnancy, birth, and menstruation. But concessions here are still dangerous, for they take us one step closer to the erasure of women in language and a return to the default male. There are better alternatives that don’t take this risk, and that take a clear stand against allowing women to become invisible in language once more. Our concern should be to centre women, while also making sure that female people who don’t identify as women know they’re included. We can do this with phrases like ‘women and trans men’, ‘women and other people who give birth’, ‘women and others who menstruate’.

The objection to this is likely to come from transwomen, not trans men, who object that ‘not all women!’ get pregnant, give birth, breastfeed, menstruate. This objection ought to be ignored. It is based on a misunderstanding, an assumption that something is not a women’s issue unless it is an all-women issue. But virtually nothing is an all-women issue. It was never the case that all women were assumed to get pregnant, give birth, breastfeed, menstruate. That doesn’t mean these aren’t women’s issues. We don’t need to take a stand on the contestation of the term ‘woman’ between being a sex or a gender identity to grant this point. Whether or not transwomen are women, pregnancy is a women’s issue, and we need to retain the language to talk about that fact.

Our feature articles represent the views of our authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG), who publish O&G Magazine. While we make every effort to ensure that the information we share is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions or correction of errors in our comments section below, or by emailing the editor at [email protected].

References

1. Sullivan R. Facebook censors photos of women giving birth. News.com.au. 2014. Available from: www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/pregnancy/facebook-censors-photos-of-women-giving-birth/news-story/a1b92afd7d40ad2b9b60c23d6228c373.
2. Hill M. By removing photos of childbirth, Facebook is censoring powerful female images The Guardian. 2014. Available from: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/22/facebook-removing-childbirth-female-images.
3. Llewellyn Smith J. Milli Hill: the campaigner cancelled for questioning the term ‘birthing people’. The Times. 2021. Available from: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/milli-hill-the-campaigner-cancelled-for-questioning-the-term-birthing-people-dkqplw0b7.
4. Rainbow Midwives Alliance. Call for NZCOM to remove transphobic keynote speaker & make conference a safe space for all. Our Action Station.2021. Available from: our.actionstation.org.nz/petitions/call-for-nzcom-to-remove-transphobic-keynotes-speaker-make-conference-a-safe-space-for-all.
5. Victorian Legislation. Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill 2020. Available from: www.legislation.vic.gov.au/bills/change-or-suppression-conversion-practices-prohibition-bill-2020.
6. Twitter thread. Available from: twitter.com/AOC/status/1435639330102460424?s=20.
7. Raising Children. Periods. 2021. Available from: raisingchildren.net.au/pre-teens/development/periods-hygiene/periods.
8. Facebook thread. Available from: facebook.com/SenatorChandler/posts/257156512892778