The Erasure of Women From Online Pregnancy Literature

I’m 32 years old and don’t have children quite yet, but I’m pregnant with two of them. During the seemingly endless first trimester, I spent my time lying in bed, clutching a pillow, and trying (unsuccessfully) not to throw up. Migraines regularly stabbed me in one eye or the other almost daily. The smell of my own hormonally oily skin made me sick, but the smell of soap made me sicker. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t be around my husband or my pets, and I sank into a miserable puddle of exhausted, nauseated depression. As a result, the house fell into disarray, yet the only thing I could do was lie in bed and read pregnancy websites and medical journals describing what was going on in my body, and assuring me it was all perfectly normal.

As I read popular parenting and pregnancy websites such as Parents and Verywell Family, however, I discovered something strange: Many of these publications are making a deliberate effort to scrub words such as “woman” and “mother” from newly published articles, in favor of something called “gender-inclusive language.” Even venerable scientific publications such as the Lancet and Science are falling in with this trend, or else issuing caveats about how, “unless otherwise specified, the terms women and men refer to ciswomen and cismen”—which is to say, biological females and males respectively.

Many older webpages on pregnancy sites likewise have been retroactively edited to remove feminine-gendered language altogether. Terms such as “pregnant woman” are replaced with “pregnant person,” and “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding” (a particularly senseless redirection, since men, too, have breast tissue and not chest tissue). One also finds plenty of other similarly awkward phrases, such as “uterus owner,” “menstruator,” “front hole” (i.e., vagina), and “opening of the genitals” (i.e., vulva). Some of the efforts at inclusive language involve no fundamental difference in meaning—“monthly bleeding” in place of “menses,” or “hardening or stiffening of erectile tissue” instead of “erection”—but simply involve replacing well-understood words with longer, more confusing synonyms.

I have seven brothers and no sisters. I’ve never felt constrained by being a woman. I’m good at math, and have no problem asking for a raise. My wonderful husband and I have a respectful, egalitarian relationship. Yet from age 13 or 14, when my younger brothers started being able to easily beat me in our frequent fistfights, I was always acutely aware of the obvious biological differences between men and women. Two decades later, at a time in my life when I have never felt more essentially female, more debilitated by a physical condition directly attributable to my biological sex, more in need of clear, informative language describing what I’m going through, journalists and medical authorities are hard at work seeking to obfuscate the differences between male and female bodies.

I’m no fan of the credential-cataloguing throat-clearing that writers often do in the opening paragraphs of essays such as this one. But I think it’s necessary to mention something of my background, because I’m not a social conservative and certainly not a reactionary bigot. Before the US Supreme Court ensured that gay men and women had the right to marry everywhere in the United States, I advocated passionately for marriage equality, and I was highly involved in my college’s LGBT club. I’ve dated transgender and transvestite men. I’ve taught transgender students, and I nearly ghostwrote a biography for a transgender woman. I don’t think transgender people should face discrimination in housing or employment, except in such limited areas where biological sex really does matter. I certainly don’t want any transgender person to feel that his or her life is devalued. Yet none of that changes my belief in the plain fact that sex differences between men and women are real, and that medical language around pregnancy—among other topics—ought to speak directly to biological women, full stop.

I find that this aspect of the transgender-rights movement—which requires a wholesale revolution in language and nomenclature—is not only absurd but offensive. It makes me angry, in fact: Even as I’m wallowing in the misery of chronic pain from stretching ligaments, and enduring sleep deprivation from getting up to pee six times a night, so many of the sites I read to find out whether this is normal won’t use the term “woman.”

I’m an English teacher, and I think George Orwell’s essay about politics and language, condemning exactly this type of intellectual dishonesty in the service of ideology, got it right. Yet I am told that such contortions of language are necessary in order to protect transgender men and women, a class of people who are supposedly more “oppressed” than biological women. Even if this were true (and I’m deeply skeptical), it wouldn’t change the obvious fact that pregnancy is something that has been experienced exclusively by biological women, much to our frustration and detriment, since time immemorial.

I wish that gender ideology—a term that’s now used to describe the general idea that abstract notions of gender identity must trump biological sex in all areas of social interaction and policy-making—could be ignored as a goofy academic doctrine. Perhaps it was possible to do so as recently as a decade ago. But gender ideology now influences the real world in abundant ways. And because its precepts are now baked into everyday interactions, it’s become absolutely impossible to ignore. Just since getting pregnant, I’ve experienced the following:

• I am in a Discord group chat with several dozen other women who are pregnant with twins. We’re obviously all female. But the admins, who are part of the group, call us “gestating partners” and “pregnant people.”

• Earlier this year, a thread on a major Reddit pregnancy group asked in good faith whether the group’s members were offended by the removal of the words “woman” and “mother” from discussions about reproductive health and prenatal care. An enthusiastic and surprisingly polite discussion ensued, during which most women said that, while they were happy to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns, they strongly disliked being called “menstruators” or “uterus owners” and found such terms offensive and objectifying, not to mention gross. Admins let the thread go on for a few hours before locking it on the pretext that the views expressed were “transphobic,” and then deleting it.

• Until a few weeks ago, I was in a great Facebook group about English literary puns. Some members had a discussion about whether using gendered terms for electrical plugs and sockets was still politically correct, and I was among those who said it doesn’t matter, as long as everyone messing around with electricity is safe. A moderator, a complete stranger to me, then sent me an obnoxious, unsolicited private message about the importance of using inclusive language, reminding me, of course, about claimed transgender suicide rates. I told her to fuck off, and my membership in the group was immediately terminated.

The phenomenon I am describing extends from trivial chat groups to the most important organizations on the planet. Even NATO—the intergovernmental military alliance that Sweden and Finland are trying to join as the specter of Russian nuclear attack hangs over Ukraine—has a manual instructing everyone on appropriate use of gender-neutral language. The United Nations also has countless webpages dedicated to the issue, complete with gender-neutral guidelines for all of its six official languages, four of which are gendered. Healthline—which boasts of being the number one health information website in the United States, and whose tagline is “Medical information and health advice you can trust”—has lectured readers on the importance of acknowledging transgender pregnancy, gushing that medicine is on the cusp of “a transgender woman [bearing] a child with an implanted uterus.”

Anyone who has a Twitter or Facebook account (or who teaches at a university) knows why polite society has largely submitted to being gaslit on a set of delusions so demonstrably false that even infants can see through them. The ever-present threat of public shame and stigma, and possibly even job loss, are real for those accused of transphobia. Outrage over so-called “gender-critical” (i.e., biologically based) views has cost people their careers, prominent social media platforms that they use to make money, and countless friendships. And while almost no one actually believes that men can get pregnant, most of us care whether our friends, family, and bosses feel pressured by ideological enforcers to shun us as bigots.

Just a year ago, I wouldn’t have written this essay, because the prospect of losing my job scares me, too, and I just didn’t think this stuff mattered that much. But right now, I am exhausted, and not in the sense of Twitter activists who claim to be fatigued from educating the rest of us. Rather, I am literally physically exhausted—from lugging around two heavy fetuses that won’t stop kicking my bladder and sucking the nutrients out of my blood. I have no patience left for male fetishization of femininity. And if being a trans-inclusive feminist means re-embracing classic female self-negation to make biological men happy (didn’t we all agree this was bad decades ago?), then I’ll gladly trade in my feminist card so long as I can stop pretending that Lia Thomas is a feminist hero.

One of the gifts of pregnancy is that it makes certain truths excruciatingly clear. Accidentally vomiting on my feet in public because I can’t always get to a garbage can every time I leave the house is not so easily followed by watching President Biden seriously interview an adult biological man going through a grotesquely stereotypical transgender girlhood. Flowery sundresses, petting puppies, and flouncing one’s hair playfully while crossing the street, all while sipping daintily from a blended drink? Cut the shit, please. That’s a lot of things, but it is not literal womanhood, and I’m no longer interested in acting like it is because someone’s feelings might be hurt.

When I wake up in the middle of the night because I’m having excruciating stomach pain that could possibly be a placental abruption—but could also just be a fart—I need the Internet search results to tell me the difference between the two using straightforward, accurate, widely-accepted and easily understood language. The potentially fatal nature of pregnancy leaves no room for gender ideology in language. It doesn’t matter that a tiny handful of self-identified transgender men give birth every year. Their doctors know what a woman is, and so do they.

If this movement continues to encroach on online pregnancy discourse, millions of biological women will be denied clear, easy-to-understand terms that describe what is happening to their bodies, at a time when they need that help most. It is already infiltrating conversations between practitioners and their patients, and there are accounts of nurses struggling to maintain gender neutrality during birthing classes. In Canada, a nurse has been facing an endless, Kafkaesque ordeal at the hands of her regulator for saying what everyone knows to be true.

Of course, if this gender-ideology nonsense is exasperating and confusing to privileged knowledge workers like me, imagine how it strikes truly marginalized members of our society. What the hell is a “birthing person” or “menstruator” to a non-native English speaker; or to someone who hasn’t been exposed to college sensitivity training sessions, and is simply looking to buy pregnancy-related drugs at Walmart?

Whatever the gender ideologues may say, only one sex has ever, and will ever, face the extreme risks, dangers, and difficulties of bringing children into the world. No matter how egalitarian a society becomes, it is only female bodies—whatever else they may call themselves—that bear this singular burden. Only women can submit themselves to pregnancy, knowing what may come their way. Only women can be forced to carry a pregnancy to term if it is thrust upon them unexpectedly (even if the ACLU now refuses to use the word “woman” when it talks about abortion). Humans may wish for a God of miracles to regrow the arm of an amputee. But he never does because some things in life just come with hard limits. So it is that, no matter how many times we insist that transgender women are literally women, they are never the ones to die in childbirth.

A woman’s power to bring new human life into the world is truly awesome. It is wonderful, it is awful, it is scary, it is sacred. Not all women need to have children, and not all children need to be with their biological mothers, for inescapable biological truths about womanhood and motherhood to rank among the most fundamental aspects of the human condition. To obfuscate this for any reason—especially in medical literature—is not only deeply dishonest and unscientific. It also dishonors the hard-won progress made in women’s rights over the generations.

The fact that we now have the science and language to understand and describe the complex and beautiful processes of fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth with amazing candor and accuracy feels like a miracle. And yet we are surrounded by those who would throw it away because of an idea no less foolish than that the world is flat. Motherhood and womanhood deserve our respect. The least we can do when we talk about them is tell the truth.