Here’s a new article in Nature (click on the title screenshot below to read it); it’s about the dearth of information about the safety of drugs used by pregnant women. Except, to Nature, they refer not to “women” but to “pregnant people,” for in the article, that is about the only term that refers to women who are pregnant. “Women” is used almost exclusively when it’s in quotations from others.
Here’s my count:
“Pregnant people”: Used 41 times
“Women”: Used 5 times, 4 of them in quotes from others
Clearly some bowdlerization is going on here.
The sad part of this article is that it has a lesson worth reading—a dearth of knowledge about how many drugs affect pregnant women—but it’s annoyingly peppered with politically correct and annoying usages. For example:
The first usage of the “pp” term is in fact in the subtitle, which I’ve highlighted below (again, click the article to read it):
Here’s a screenshot with “pregnant people” highlighted. This is only a small sample of the article:
Need I say more? What this means is that Nature is clearly truckling to the language adopted by extreme gender activists, who consider trans-identified men as “women”. Ergo, the words “pregnant women” are seen as offensive, because “women” include trans-idenfied men who can’t have babies. Voilà: “pregnant people.” Also, as reader Coel says below, “The main problem is trans-IDing women, aka ‘trans men’, who, being women, can get pregnant, but who they regard as ‘men’. Hence ‘pregnant women’ would exclude them, and so amount to erasure of and thus genocide of those ‘trans men’ who are indeed pregnant.”
Here are the five uses of the word “women”, all but the last quotes from other authors (they can’t sanitize other people’s words):
Note that the last usage of woman, not in quotes, is required because they are referring to females who are not pregnant. But the journal still slipped up: they could have used “people with uteruses”, or, like The Lancet, “bodies with vaginas”:
Conclusion: Nature has been ideologically captured. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
The journal should be ashamed of itself.
h/t: Schnoid
Just to quibble that that’s not the main problem. The main problem is trans-IDing women, aka “trans men”, who, being women, can get pregnant, but who they regard as “men”. Hence “pregnant women” would exclude them, and so amount to erasure of and thus genocide of those “trans men” who are indeed pregnant.
Yes, I ommited the pregnant trans-identified women. I’ll fix it, thanks.
An excellent point. Thank you very much.
The study is using “inclusive language” to literally accomplish what you want – to increase sample sizes of pregnant “biological females” in studies.
Perhaps we should give researchers and publishers who are using inclusive language a bit of a break and realize maybe they’re just trying recruit some “pregnant people” for a drug trial… Focusing on the process (of recruiting study volunteers… whatever they wanna call themselves).
I find arguing over the semantics of gender and sex as boring and unproductive as arguing about “species” definitions. I’d rather learn about the process of divergence – not the semantics of old and new vocabulary words.
If you find ;this discussion so boring and unproductive, I suggest you stop reading this site and go to read others more amenable to your ideology.
I also see you’re too afraid to use your real name.
Arguing over the terms “pregnant women” vs “pregnant people” is like arguing over the terms “evolution” vs “change over time.”
While it’s technically correct that yes, women are people and yes, in evolution there’s change over time, the purpose of insisting on using the second phrase is to undermine the meaning of the first. The stage is set for “men can get pregnant” and “the dog was specially created by God, but different types of dogs developed from there.”
[ GIF of Captain Picard holding his forehead ]
E.g: https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/Captain-Picard-Facepalm
“Most people take medication during a pregnancy…”
is a false statement. (Most people never get pregnant at all.) False statements in the service of social justice is not serving social justice well. Language choices which delegitimize women are not serving social justice well. And language choices which obscure clarity in medical journals is the exact opposite of the mission of any medical journal editor.
Do your job, Magdalena Skipper and Richard Horton!
Good call.
Abuse of language.
I don’t know if both of you are joking or not, but on the chance you are serious….
No, that isn’t a false statement because “Most people never get pregnant”. I don’t know if it is actually false, but assuming “Most pregnant women take medication during their pregnancy” is a true statement, “Most people take medication during pregnancy” is also a true statement. Language is contextual, and while I agree that this wholesale replacement of “women” with “people” is absurd, this particular case isn’t.
I’ve been nostalgically playing World of Warcraft Classic recently, and was describing the possible “builds” of my Warlock character to my partner. While explaining this, I said “Back then, most people, including me, went with an SM/Ruin build….”
What a liar I am! Claiming that back in 2006 over 3.3 billion people even played World of Warcraft! Claiming that the majority of WoW players played Warlocks with SM/Ruin builds!
No, of course not. In context it is completely clear that my sentence meant “Back then, most of the people playing Warlocks in WoW, used the SM/Ruin talent build”. Just like “Most people take medication during pregnancy” obviously means “Most of the people who get pregnant, take medication during their pregnancy”.
Sorta serious – but agree with contextual.
[ meme/gif : Leonardo DiCaprio cheers ]
You do realize that they chose to use the word “people” instead of the words “pregnant women” on purpose because ideology, right? The word “people” has a meaning – it means men and women – and so there is indeed a connotation in which the statement is false.
Clarity was sacrificed for ideology.
You were not making an argument that this was simply ideologically bad, you were making an argument that the statement was false. I agree that they are making a conscious effort to avoid using woman/women, and I agree that is not a good thing. However, even before the rise of wokeness, it would not have been unusual to see a sentence like “Most people take medication during pregnancy” instead of “Most women take medication during pregnancy”.
People doesn’t mean “men and women”, the gender of the group members is unspecified and could include one or the other, or both depending on the context the word is used in.
The problem is not individual instances of this sort of usage. It is the concerted effort to avoid the also perfectly good “Most women take medication during pregnancy” style sentences. Or to put it more more wokeish language, it is the concerted effort to erase women that is the problem, not the word they have chosen to erase them with. This is in contrast to constructs like “people with vaginas”, which is both an attempt to erase women AND horribly twisting language to do so.
It’s all so mindnumbingly stupid. Men literally don’t have vaginas, no matter what medications they take or operations they get. It’s not enough that minds have to be tabulae rasae, bodies are supposed to be, too. They aren’t.
Possibly wrong. Depends on how you define ‘men’. Males with 5-ARD (for example, Imane Khelif) do have Vaginas. The condition is both rare and real. The real issue is not Vaginas, but Uterus’s and Ovaries. Sweyers persons (very rare and real) have a Vagina, an Uterus, and Fallopian tubes, but no Ovaries. With medical help (IVF), they can ever give birth! Sara Fossberg (YouTube, Finnish) is an example of a Sweyers person.
Yes. This is annoying. It could be worse. They could have called them “incipient chest feeders.”
One of the most insidious aspects of this ideology is that non-scientists who read this may conclude that science is as political as, well, politics. Politics is a sewer with only rats and other vermin living by it and because of language like this, science may be seen in the same way; filled with sewage.
I am beginning to disregard any article, scientific or not, that contains language like that. In fact, I actively ignore it in media. But now I won’t read the article quoted here. It’s not a subject I would read about anyway without prompting -there are simply too many things to read- but knowing now that it was written (and published) by ideologues, I’ll skip it. I would not regard it as reliable anyway and would likely dismiss it outright. Just because of ideology. There…right there…see how insidious this kind of shit is?
Good point; I’m sure that in science and academia as a whole, this kind of woke speech-policing, which surely makes its way into the mainstream media (or on right wing sites) turns people away from the center and towards the right.
My guess is that such language raises the credibility of the science among fellow travelers and lowers it among critics. It unnecessarily creates a problem for science communication.
When I search for a wide shoe size on the Hoka shoe site, it asks me what gender I identify with. Wouldn’t that just complicate the size issue?
On Tuesday this week in a small town in northern British Columbia, a trans-identified male killed two family members and a bunch of kids and a teacher at a nearby school before killing himself. In the middle of that mass shooting tragedy , the Royal Canadian Mounted Police put out an alert for town residents to watch out for “a female with brown hair in a dress”, and later referred to the shooter as a “gunperson”. That’s what I call ideological capture.
A shout out to the BBC, who by the next day were referring to “a female-identifying male”
For a time (an hour maybe?, a long time in a fast-moving situation involving gunfire), the report of a female with brown hair in a dress caused the police to worry that the shooter (now safely dead and male) had a female accomplice still at large. This could have produced chaos, as most women in that part of Canada suspected of violent crime would be aboriginal. Indeed when I first heard they were looking for a suspect of that description I assumed that another aboriginal spree was underway. (There had been two multiple shootings on Reserves already that month.) I didn’t immediately assume the trans angle.
Fortunately the Mounties put two and two together (and got four this time) and figured out that the female in the dress was the dead gunperson. Truly bizarre. A native woman could have been shot over this mistaken identity if she, oblivious to all this, resisted arrest.
Initially the shooter was reported to be a woman in German news media. I wonder where that mix-up happened.
The Canadian police, news media, and talking-head activists and politicians are still referring to him as a woman. German media can be excused for being mixed up.
Years ago I read a defense of this practice which argued that if the word “woman” was used then transmen who were pregnant might think the statement didn’t apply to them. Presumably such trans-identified females were either seriously convinced they weren’t women, performatively “convinced” they weren’t women, or so deeply embedded in affirmative circles that they would blithely assume that the rest of the world of course included them with men. The phrase “pregnant people” helped communicate medical information to patients who might otherwise not understand.
Uh huh. Who did they think they were kidding? No, this is language aimed not at the patients, but at the reader — heavy-handed propaganda persuading the public that gender identity is more significant than sex in deciding who qualifies as a man or woman. Use the right words, think the right thoughts.
And these semantic wars are now becoming the hill to die on for both sides.
For both sides? Does that include people who adhere to the biological definition of the sexes?
Yes, meaning that I think more and more people who adhere to the biological meaning of sex are recognizing that speaking about some men as if they are a type of woman – and speaking about women using the vocabulary we’d use for a man — implicitly concedes the dispute by accepting the framework of those who deny the binary.
Because, from the very beginning, language was substituted for rational argument and has been very effective , a lot of the gender critical are digging in their heels and taking a stance. No more. Look where “being polite” got us. There’s a growing commitment to using accurate, sex-based language and refusing to say things like “he gave birth.”
Ah, I thought you were criticizing those people who wouldn’t use gender-activist language as mistakenly holding tenaciously to that view.
These have become a “hill to die on” because they are “semantic” battles in a larger war—and it was one side that sought everywhere semantic hills to seize. But the broader conflict is not ultimately about the words. When one influential segment of society seeks through social coercion and legal penalty to impose the use of ideological language and adoption of the corresponding views, when it seeks to indoctrinate other people’s children without parental consent, then that group is attacking the foundations of a liberal society. They have shown time and time again scant regard for free speech, free association, and due process. Do we really believe that they will change their tune should our votes elevate them to full control of federal power?
So we can assume there’s a shortage of data on pregnant men?
Not at all.
100% of pregnant men have been included in the data set.
Got me there. I needed the laugh.
This adds yet another reason to not to engage with Nature in any capacity (for other reasons, see here: https://hxstem.substack.com/p/why-i-no-longer-engage-with-nature).
This idiocy illustrates that ideological capture, which starts as inane policies, ultimately impacts the actual content of published articles.
There has been a court case in the UK, in which a female human being who identifies as a man gave birth to a baby, and wanted to be officially listed as the father of the child. Since this was the person who gave birth to the baby, the person was officially listed in the UK as the mother of the child. Despite going to court to be listed as the child’s father, the person lost the court case and on official records is the child’s mother. This is perhaps an unusual case in which the gender-woo person lost.
That person was both mother and father – a case of human parthenogenesis!
It is alleged that human parthenogenesis actually happens. See “Pregnancy in true hermaphrodites and all male offspring to date” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19155947/). See also “A new hypothesis may explain human parthenogenesis and ovarian teratoma: A review study” (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10227352/)
The person who lost the case to be listed as the father of the child in the case I mentioned is a trans -identified man called Freddy McConnell.
They could have replaced “women” with “[people]” in square brackets. We should complain to the editor.
While we’re on the topic, I read the other day that there is a female who identifies as a man (Elis Lundholm) competing in the winter olympics, and guess in which category? In the women’s category, of course. Should cause some questions to be raised, but has apparently been graciously ignored for the most part.
Not ignored at NBC, where their commentators “repeatedly misgendered trans Olympic skier Elis Lundholm.”
https://x.com/greg_scott/status/2021739459306266701/photo/1
“How did this happen?” It’s a mystery how a female entered in the women’s skiing competition could be referred to as “she” and “her”. We’ll never know.
An erasure, nay, a genocide, of the most gruesome sort.
I just hate the phrase “pregnant people!”
Yes. Very annoying.
“Bodies with vaginas” sounds like scenes in a morgue.
Another perfect example of why I have repeatedly pleaded for using the term “bodies which vaginas who identify as bodies with prostates”.
The TRAs’ delusions will never allow that. For them their sex is completely irrelevant to their essential gender identity, so it’s yet more genocide to even associate the two.
I don’t know. It all sounds a bit frayed, splayed, and confused.
Well, cosmetic genital surgery does involve a fair bit of fraying and splaying; and riffing on a phrase familiar here, the delusion leads the confusion.