The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature
For what it is worth, I wanted to provide a transgender woman&#x27;s opinion on this article.  I am only speaking for myself here, not all transwomen, especially since I have only come to a realization I am transgender earlier this year.  I have hardly had to live most of my life subject to discrimination, although this year I may have lost a job and definitely lost a friend due to it.<p>Reading the author&#x27;s article, I couldn&#x27;t help but think about this situation as it relates to other minority groups and how it relates to the growth and change of language over the years.  I am not a linguist, but I can say that some words that were commonly accepted in my adolescence in the 1980s could now end careers and friendships, and rightfully so.  MLK said the long arc of history bends towards justice, and I think our language has moved certain injurious words into the trash bin.  I think that certain people react to the language changing as they do to many other aspects of social change: by planting their flag and declaring they won&#x27;t stand for it.  I think such plantings have as little effect as prior plantings have: life is going to change, whether you like it or not.<p>I think the author&#x27;s reasoning is suspect in, at the very least, two particular issues.  First, she declares outright that she is not bigoted nor a social conservative, and uses as backup support that she&#x27;s not evicted transgender students from her class (despite the fact that would&#x27;ve opened her up to a lawsuit, most likely), that she <i>almost</i> worked for a transgender woman, and that she&#x27;s dated trans men.  It feels like a list of credentials that lets her exempt herself from examining with self-awareness the actual beliefs she holds for bigotry or social conservatism, especially when she goes on to describe Dylan Mulvaney as &quot;an adult biological man going through a grotesquely stereotypical transgender girlhood.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s interesting that in the exact essay she references, Orwell cites a &quot;lack of precision&quot; as one of the problems of the English language.  Yet she demands that lack of precious, which Orwell rails against!  Orwell goes on to note that words must be consciously chosen: &quot;[a]fterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning,&quot; saying, moments later, that when choosing that word, above all else, &quot;[b]reak any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.&quot;<p>&quot;Politics and the English Language,&quot; to me, can be accurately read as a caution not to let legalese and rote phrases enter your head and flow out of your fingers without self-examination.  But that essay also, to me at least, is very much for the accuracy of language and for not limiting its growth: &quot;[t]he defence of the English language [...] has nothing to do with [...] the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. [...] What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.&quot;<p>And look at Orwell&#x27;s other essay, &quot;The Politics of Newspeak,&quot; speaking of how (in a &#x27;1984&#x27; dystopia) words are eliminated and definitions stripped away from them.<p>The author&#x27;s essay, though, seems to be based on a very significant misstep that I&#x27;m surprised no one caught before this went to print, unless I&#x27;m very much mistaken: she seems to be attacking trans <i>women</i> who were AMAB.  (A common abbreviation today is AMAB and AFAB - assigned male&#x2F;female at birth.)<p>Perhaps someday, a trans woman will be able to have a uterus implanted and be able to bring a child to term.  But the vast majority of the accommodations she complains about, she seems to think is somehow aimed towards accommodating AMAB trans women who, right now, cannot give birth (&quot;making biological men happy&quot;, &quot;while almost no one actually believes that men can get pregnant&quot;, etc.).<p>But these accommodations in wording are aimed at AFAB trans men, who <i>can</i> biologically get pregnant.  Trans men, depending on the choices they have made up until that time, CAN become pregnant and give birth.  But they are men.  To call them &#x27;biological women,&#x27; or to argue that they must be called biological women and not trans men, is &quot;barbarous&quot; (&#x27;characterized by savagery; very cruel&#x27;).  It is also factually imprecise, in that it does not accurately reflect the gender identity of the individual in question.<p>I hesitate to get personal, but I feel that her essay is mostly about screaming from a visceral level of her being that this trauma she&#x27;s experiencing is hers and hers alone.  But she uses this trauma to branch off into a very fervent diatribe that demands that AMAB trans women should not be referred to with inaccurate wording, while ignoring the existence of AFAB trans men who <i>could</i> experience the very things she describes as dealing with.<p>In the very first paragraph of her essay, the author relates the origin of these opinions as coming to her (and perhaps contemporaneously being written?) in the midst of a time where she was experiencing what sounds like very severe physical and emotional trauma with badly weakened access to her support system.<p>That doesn&#x27;t excuse anything on her part.  Trump had a truly horrifying childhood, but that does not excuse what he&#x27;s done to other people during his life.  Abuse doesn&#x27;t excuse being an abuser; trauma doesn&#x27;t excuse becoming one who traumatizes.