Effective communication
A sciency article by 13 yes 13 authors arguing for “gender inclusive language” in [checks notes] childbirth.
The abstract:
Effective communication in relation to pregnancy and birth is crucial to quality care. A recent focus in reproductive healthcare on “sexed language” reflects an ideology of unchangeable sex binary and fear of erasure, from both cisgender women and the profession of midwifery. In this paper, we highlight how privileging sexed language causes harm to all who birth—including pregnant trans, gender diverse, and non-binary people—and is, therefore, unethical and incompatible with the principles of midwifery. We show how this argument, which conflates midwifery with essentialist thinking, is unstable, and perpetuates and misappropriates midwifery’s marginalized status. We also explore how sex and gender essentialism can be understood as colonialist, heteropatriarchal, and universalist, and therefore, reinforcing of these harmful principles. Midwifery has both the opportunity and duty to uphold reproductive justice. Midwifery can be a leader in the decolonization of childbirth and in defending the rights of all childbearing people, the majority of whom are cisgender women. As the systemwide use of inclusive language is central to this commitment, we offer guidance in relation to how inclusive language in perinatal and midwifery services may be realized.
I can’t help thinking it’s a parody. In particular, I can’t believe they wrote “We also explore how sex and gender essentialism can be understood as colonialist, heteropatriarchal, and universalist” with a straight face. Doesn’t that read like parody? Anything “can be understood as” anything, because people are good at coming up with stupid ideas and getting other people to endorse them.
Or take the first sentence:
The notion of childbearing having a necessary or logical belonging within the nuclear two-parent family initiated by heterosexual couples whose gender has a normative relationship with their sex assigned at birth is a recent development in our human history, and one still inconsistently observed around the globe.
Wait wait wait, slow down, you’re jumbling too many things together there. You’re mashing the social into the physical as if they were the same thing, which seems pretty amateurish for an academic article. This is supposed to be an academic article isn’t it?
The heterosexual couple bit is, of course, the reality of How To Make a New Human. The nuclear two-parent family bit is social. A heterosexual pair can make a new human even if the male half of the pair then departs for the other side of the planet, never to be seen again. Sperm meeting egg is one thing and family is another.
13 authors and they couldn’t even get the first sentence right.
Well, Ophelia, you have to remember that in the Brave New World, we have translesbians with penises who are fully capable of getting their female partner pregnant while having translesbian sex, so obviously you can’t call couples like that heterosexual good god I can’t believe I got through that entire thing without my head exploding….
I can’t even wade in to the substance or merits of the argument, the prose style is impenetrable with all the jargon and buzzwords. It’s the kind of writing done by people who think it makes them sound knowledgeable but in actual fact they’re either too lazy to learn how to write properly and clearly, or too worried that their ideas will be exposed if they state them plainly.
The writing is just godawful.
I can’t help being reminded of the Sokal affair. Alan Sokal, a physicist, submitted a paper to Social Text that was filled to bursting with nonsense so obvious that you only needed to read a few lines to be sure it was nonsense. It was accepted and published.
How many of they/them authors does Judith Butler identify as?
Athel, same. That’s what I meant about thinking it has to be parody.
The Sokal hoax was kind of the inspiration for B&W all those years ago.
We just celebrated “all who birth” day not all that long ago, didn’t we? It may have been called something else, it’s getting hard to remember…
By choosing to support and promote gender bullshit, they are working against the interests of the vast majority of clients, all of whom are women. By placating the tiny, deluded minority who believe that “identifying” as men makes them men, midwifery is going to retool the language they use in their communication to “validate” those delusional few. If accurate, truthful use of language “triggers” these people’s dysphoria, just think what having a goddamn baby will do. There is no need to go along with their fantasy that “Men can have babies too!” because they don’t and can’t.
Retooling that language will no doubt involve its enforcement, as the redefinitions are both counterintuitive and dishonest. That enforcement will undoubtedly fall on women in general, who stumble through ignorance of the requirement, and particularly on those who refuse to toe the line.
Doing a quick Google search of each of the authors, I believe that this is, sadly, not a hoax. It would seem they are in deadly-dull, unreadable earnest.
Not all are midwives, or even doctors, or scientists. Here are a couple of them:
https://themumpoempress.com/blogs/news/meet-the-poet-ash-bainbridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna_Istha
Shouldn’t that be “midspouseery”? Or perhaps, given the etymology, “midbirthing-personery”?
What a Maroon, excellent point. We should remind Sally Pezaro et al. that “wife,” from the Anglo-Saxon wīf, originally meant “woman.” Not only women give birth, and not all “midwives” are women. Furthermore, in post-Colonial times the term “wife” has taken on a meaning embedded within cisheteropatriatchy, (“the nuclear two-parent family initiated by heterosexual couples whose gender has a normative relationship with their sex assigned at birth,” as the authors so elegantly express it.)
The term “midwife” itself, therefore, perpetuates essentialist thinking and the colonization of childbirth. As long as practitioners like Pezaro et.al. continue to use it, midbirthingpersonery will remain uninclusive, linguistically shackled to cisheteropatriarchal normative norms and the marginalization of gender diverse folk.
So universalism is specifically a harmful principle? Not just something they allude to with all the other rubbish? If universalism isn’t inclusive I don’t know what is…
@BKSA, universalists assume that there are true facts that can be discovered. They also believe in universal systems of ethics and universal rights.
These principles aren’t compatible with genderism, identitarianism,* Foucauldian analysis, or Critical Theory. I think the authors would tell you that universalism is just another ideology designed to legitimize White cisheteropatriarchal** power structures and delegitimize Marginalized Folk.
* Example: The deafening silence of Progressives on the appalling human rights abuses of Islamism. Islamists are Muslims, and Muslims are Oppressed and Marginalized, therefore shut up, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charlie Hebdo, Maryam Namazie, the state of Israel, all the Muslim and ex-Muslim women and men, in Iran and elsewhere, risking death to defy the death cult.
** Some patriarchy is bad. Other patriarchy is a marginalized culture.