Guest post: Supplanting is not inclusion
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Updating”.
…but the general public are not at all informed about the issues.
And if they rely on mainstream media to inform them, good luck with that. Their style guides and codes of conduct are preventing them from reporting honestly.
Asked “do you support giving trans people rights?” they say yes, of course. Asked “should biological men who claim to be women compete in female sports, use female changing rooms, have open access to women’s refuges?” they say no, don’t be daft.
Showing the importance of framing what little debate there is, and clarity of language. If the media manage to wake up and smell the lipstick, and start doing their job properly, we might get an informed discussion that doesn’t result in women getting robbed.
How a group like midwives get captured like this bewilders me.
Maybe it’s a generational thing? Can anyone be that scared of the whole “wrong side of history” bullshit? They can’t see that expunging “mother” from midwifery guarantees that that’s the side of history they’ll be on? Women have had to fight for their health care since forever; for an organization supposedly dedicated to the most woman-centered form of health care it’s possible to have to succumb to this is mindboggling.
It’s long since past the point where I see this sort of thing as benign or well-meaning, for the sake of being “inclusive.” It’s possible to be inclusive without obliterating the word “woman.” Add a clause or two onto what you’ve already got written down. Erasing “woman” or “mother” is not being “inclusive” it is supplanting. Replacing. It excludes and disappears most of their clientelle. The move to erase rather than add to shows me that the erasure itself is the point of the excersize.
To be that concerned about triggering the tiny number of trans identified females WHO ARE PREGNANT with the word “woman” is too much of a stretch. You’d think the PREGNANCY itself would be a hell of a lot more triggering than a word or two. If it is that disturbing, then maybe they’re really not cut out to be a parent at all.
I’m quite suspicious as to whether the people who actually don’t want the words “woman” and “mother” associated with motherhood, pregnancy, and childbearing are not concerned about it triggering any sort of GD. I suspect it has more to do with power over language. Validation.
I’d still say that for many, if not most, normal people who speak the words, they’re well meaning. I’d just also say that those same people are letting themselves be controlled by insecurity, by laziness, and by cowardice. It’s the same thing we’ve seen in the religious sphere forever, a combination of motivated reasoning in support of whatever the tribe says, to which is added fear of ostracization, desire for social status, and unwillingness to fully accept the possibility that one’s own group could be horribly wrong.
Once again, when TRAs speak of “inclusion”, clearly what we are meant to envision is taking the circle that already includes the ‘cis’ women and expanding it to also include the ‘trans’ women. In reality, of course, redefining “woman” in terms of ways of thinking and feeling best left unspecified doesn’t simply “expand” the circle, but replaces it entirely. And this matters, since TRAs have made it abundantly clear that all of “women’s rights” are supposed to go with the name rather than the actual people. If they have their way, every right, every protection, every piece of progress that women have managed to wrestle from the arms of the patriarchy throughout the ages will henceforth apply to people like themselves instead of the people for whom they were originally intended (and the people who did all the actual work fighting for them). We know for a fact that the old circle included roughly half the world’s population. It is far from clear that the new one includes anyone other than TIMs (hence the “best left unspecified” part). Doesn’t seem quite so “inclusive”, does it…