The fragile sex
I’m so sick of these commissars.
A childbirth campaigner says she was “cancelled” for suggesting violence in childbirth was committed against women rather than against “birthing people”.
It’s women. The violence is done to women. If we can’t name them we can’t do anything about the violence.
The flare-up began in November when [Milli Hill] was “tagged”, or name-checked, by a stranger in a post on Instagram. The person wrote: “Birthing people are seen as ‘the fragile sex’ who need to be kept under patriarchal authority by doctors.”
Hill replied: “I would challenge the term ‘birthing person’ in this context though … It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence [medical interventions performed during childbirth without a woman’s consent] is violence against women.”
Result: instant campaign to pound her into oblivion.
Hill, who has three children, was then contacted by Amy Gibbs, the chief executive of Birthrights, a charity that campaigns for human rights during childbirth, an organisation she has worked alongside for years.
Gibbs wrote: “I was really concerned to see public comments you made today on Instagram about obstetric violence. Particularly the comment that “obstetric violence is violence against women” and challenging/disputing that it could happen to non-binary or trans people who give birth.
“As you know, obstetric violence is violence perpetuated in the maternity context, which means it can happen to birthing people who don’t identify as women … I’m afraid that Birthrights isn’t able to work with people who don’t share our inclusive values.”
Telling women to stop talking about women when talking about obstetric violence.
In response to the criticism, she has decided to close the Positive Birth network, which had 400 groups internationally.
Birthrights said: “Equality and inclusion is core to our ethos, and our services are available to everyone who is pregnant … We regularly review all our partnerships to ensure they reflect our values.’
Another win for kicking women out of childbirth organizations.
But but but… “birthing people who don’t identify as women” are WOMEN who don’t identify as women. It’s not excluding anyone to correctly describe them.
And then Hill wrote (or was forced to write):
“I fully support trans and non-binary people and acknowledge that they also give birth, but as a person whose work has been centred [on] female biology, I should not be attacked or have my livelihood threatened for asking for nuanced discussion, or worse still, for simply stating facts.”
That they also (!) give birth. So she states that they are not women. (Again, likely under severe pressure.)
The major biological reason for sex dichotomy in animals (and some plants) is arguably to divide the conceptual and prenatal roles. Transwhatevers (men who wish they were women) do not have the equipment to become mothers; and that development by necessarily artificial means, is probably a loooooooong way off. Though it would not surprise me to learn that they are working on it in some lab or hospital somewhere.
Sometimes it seems like the entire trans project is nothing but a scheme to roll back women’s rights.
Here’s Milli’s account of the abuse she received and her refusal to be silenced. Powerful stuff.
https://www.millihill.co.uk/2021/07/10/i-will-not-be-silenced/
The gall of some people, to contact someone about a thing they said and misrepresent their own words back to them. Like Hill doesn’t know what she said on Instagram; like her comments aren’t still right there (I assume!) on Instagram for Gibbs to go and have another look to check her own reading comprehension. “disputing that it could happen to non-binary or trans people who give birth”, my arse. Hill was disputing the idea that we shouldn’t call someone who is giving birth “woman”, and I’m sure Gibbs knows it.
@latsot #5
Powerful stuff indeed. How horrible people can be. I shouldn’t be shocked, but I was. Calling for her books to be burned? Calling her simple questions violence? Creating garish posters attacking her? Really?
@GW #2
I don’t read that response the way you do. “They also” is simply in addition to people who are not trans or non-binary. She’s defending her statements and calling for discussion.
I think it’s clear from her description of the history linked in #3 above that she is adamant about using the word “women” and using it correctly, and is less concerned about directly rejecting the claims of The Women Who Would Not Be Women. She was horribly attacked for asking questions, for seeking discussion.
People on various sides in this “gender” conflict often enough don’t examine the logical consequences of positions they may float or adopt, especially initially. One of the most illuminating aspects of reading discussions here and reading articles elsewhere has been the exploration of those consequences, realizing problems and contradictions and incoherence. Well-meaning people adopt incoherent positions because it seems “nice” and “inclusive” to do so, and maybe they question those positions later, or maybe they get stuck with the “no debate” spear.
Disputes like this one (“birthing people “ vs. “women”) and the subsequent dramatic overreaction to what could, in theory, have been only a mild disagreement about phrasing further convince me to personally avoid dealing with conflicts like this one. It’s simply too far down the chain of disagreement. That goes for women’s sports and bathrooms.
The important question isn’t “do transmen and the non-binary give birth?” but “what does it mean when someone is ‘transgender?’” It involves abstract categories and concrete facts regarding sex, gender, and self-identification. Otherwise, we’re asking whether all girls should be allowed to use the girl’s bathroom, or dealing with confusing concessions where “of course transmen give birth too but I like the word ‘women’ instead of ‘birthing people’ anyway.”
Not for the first time, the “inclusive values” include a readiness to exclude anyone who disagrees with them in any way at any time.
And she didn’t even suggest that they drop ‘birthing people’; her suggestion was to expand it to ‘women and birthing people’. She got piled on, not for excluding ‘trans’ and ‘non-binary’ women-who-don’t-want-to-be-called-women, but for including women who do want to be called women.
The reaction just highlights the fact that this movement isn’t really about including ‘people of identity’, but is entirely about excluding women.
@Richard;
Are they being “exclusive” though — hateful, unfair, horrible?
When I try to imagine that the Existence of God is clear and obvious— not only from the evidence around me of a Creator but through an immutable, undeniable, inherent knowledge essentially on par with knowing I’m conscious as opposed to unconscious or me instead of you— I can understand why people who are convinced of this see atheists as evil. We’re playing pretend in order to hurt people and destroy their relationship with God. Excluding us from civil society makes sense. It’s justified. Not hateful, not unfair, not horrible.
The Existence of Gender Identity is likewise considered clear and obvious, both as an inescapable conclusion and as an experience. “Asking questions” is disingenuous unless the clear subtext is “yes, I agree and want to learn more.” We’re supposed to be intimately familiar with our own gender identity; it takes little imagination then to put ourselves in place of someone with a “mismatch.” Argue against it and you’re like an atheist believing inGod and denying Him at the same time. They see it as a trick designed to harm others. We’re predators, in other words. Read what happened to Hill and imagine they were instead dealing with someone trying to destroy their community.
We see it as superficial question-begging entitled nonsense on stilts. That’s the disagreement. It’s not over whether we should kick out toxic people causing anguish for fun, which is apparently how they frame it.
I understand how it could be seen as rude to point out to a female trans or non-binary person that they are indeed, still, female. They are suffering from an unhappiness with their sexed body. I would no sooner poke at the area of their discomfort than I would poke at anybody else’s. If a transwoman wants to be called “she,” I will oblige “her.” If a transman wants to be called “he,” I will oblige “him.” If a “non-binary” person wants to be called “they,” I may attempt to overcome my cringing and do so (or I will, more likely, avoid pronouns entirely).
But is there any greater proof of being biologically a woman than giving birth to a child? How exactly could calling that birth-giving person “her” or a “woman” make their gender dysphoria worse? Baby is crowning in my man-gina? Can baby latch on to my moobs? We’re not even talking about the small minority here who identify as transgender, we are talking about only those transgender women who have not destroyed their fertility, and who want to bear children, a minority of a minority. This tiny group of people need so badly to be affirmed as “not women” right down to the placenta (man-plancenta?) that we must disrespect and alienate all women from medical and support services provided by the politically incorrect?
What do we trade off for that vapid lip service to a tiny minority? Place it on the balance: losing any part of the comfort and the services now available to the vast majority of people who give birth, who are women and know that, would outweigh that wispy, transparent affirmation offered to a tiny handful of narcissistic auto-misogynists.
Is it really for this tiny minority of TiFs? Or is it really for TiMs, who want to divorce pregnancy and childbirth from womanhood, so that they can affirm their own womanhood; and in order to do this, they’re drafting the tiny minority — birthing TiFs — to demonstrate: “Look, birthing has nothing to do with being a woman; even non-women birth!”
Re #13, it’s for both, and it’s for erasing the word “women”, and probably other things.
@Sastra #8
You raise good points. A friend of mine, of a more conservative viewpoint than I, seems to understand the dispute over the nonsense of gender identity, but wonders why it’s a problem. He’s not on board with feminism, with fighting the oppression of women. And I think that’s part of the problem in the splitting of the issue as you illustrated. Men in women’s changing rooms is a concern for safeguarding women and girls, so of course the apparently superficial discussion of terminology there is really about distinguishing men from women, but if one doesn’t really care about safeguarding women and girls, it’s just a language argument with some implication for the civil rights of tiny minority. It’s difficult to get someone to understand the serious implications of maintaining “women” as a biological class when that person doesn’t think women face specific and disproportionate discrimination and abuse.
How anyone can use the phrases “birthing people” and “fragile sex” in the same sentence shows they know childbirth is something members of only one sex can do, and no person who gives birth does not belong to that sex. They just don’t want to accept reality.
I think that they would say: “Yes, there is a sex that can give birth. It doesn’t have a name (at least not a common name — maybe some Latin scientific name), because sexes are complex scientific concepts, and laypeople have no names for them. However, we can refer to that sex as ‘birthing people’. None of this has anything to do with gender. Look, I gave birth, and I’m not one of those shitty horrible ‘women’ people!”