It’s a guessing game
A British Columbia doula asks some questions:
Where do you see yourself in the hierarchy of birth? Are you at the bottom? The smallest player with the smallest voice? Or are you at the top?
Basically the doctor isn’t the boss of you. But what’s intriguing to me is the graphic that illustrates the hierarchy-dismantling.
Isn’t it fascinating that whoever created this graphic sees nurses and midwives as women and doctors as men, but the pregnant woman as the “birthing person”?
You’d think it would at least be consistent – nurse person, doctor person, birthing person, but no, the medical personnel are divided on the strictest of (outdated) lines. Somehow it’s only the one pushing out the baby who is portrayed as Mystery Gender.
Yeah, and frankly, the hierarchy isn’t what my experience looked like. The nurses, doctors, and all others were definitely putting me…and my baby…first. I felt very much “centered”. Even my husband (now my ex) and my mother were putting me first, and that was a true first…and a last.
In the diagram on the left they left out the machine that goes “ping.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcHdF1eHhgc
What physician is between an OB and the nurse/midwife?
Colin Day, I think that might be Dr. Who. Or is it Dr. Pepper?
Would some graphic consistency have been too much to ask for? Looks like too many sources were used, without much thought about how they would (or wouldn’t) look or go together. This is almost as bad as the Gender Spectrum Powerpoint slide we dissected a few months ago.
The OB HAS NO FACE AND NO EYES!!
The Doctor looks like Bunsen Honeydew before he went bald.
Only the nurse is fully featured, though she has nothing below the neck. Is that worse than being a pencil neck?
Looks like the midwife (also no face) is bringing a SECOND (faceless) BABY to the “Patient.” (Did they know they were having twins? Who’s the father (or sperm donor?) of this second child? Was the “Patient” excercisizing their rights to surrogacy just in case their own pregnancy didn’t pan out?)
Did he get his MD before or after his stint in the army with the Lonely Hearts Club Band?
Mystery gender birthing person has longish hair and wears a dress, so… clearly a trans woman?
Not Bruce:
Yeah, the graphical inconsistency enrages me nearly as much as the content. What sort of monster could produce that and then sit back with a sigh of satisfaction and the knowledge of a job well done? Even the arrows are inconsistent, for goodness’ sake.
I’m currently writing an app that assesses the needs of young carers using forty questions. The app itself took about two days to write but each question has to be illustrated with an image and it took me about a fortnight to find copyright-free pictures with the same aspect ratio that looked as though they were part of a collection rather than just random images. I suppose it wouldn’t, strictly speaking, have actually mattered if the images didn’t match well but I still feel that the hugely disproportionate effort was worth it.
And this person can’t make one diagram without:
a) Making it wildly inconsistent, and
b) Saying a whole bunch of stupid shit.
I mean, aside from what’s already been mentioned, where in all fuck are the medical professionals in the second scenario? It doesn’t seem to me as though they ought to be at the same level as “everyone else”. Their opinion seems more important and urgent than some random person’s. And Jesus, learn to use bold or italics instead of asterisks.
The graphic used for “birthing person” is going to trigger trans men. Yes, it indeed has long-ish hair and a dress. This excludes trans men, who would be better represented by an illustration with pants and a beard. Unfortunately, that would trigger trans women, who would have the long hair and dress. The only way to include both sides — trans women and trans men — is with a genderless stick figure like so:
https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/pregnant-mother-stick-figure-vector-27776268
“Yes, this is better — more just.” — Dr. Zhivago, returning home to discover his ancestral home occupied by Communists.”
They may be teachers. We are being required to take all bold and all italics out of our documents because of something something readers for the blind something. I do not remember what the something something is, it’s not that I’m trying to be disrespectful of the disabled.
It seems the readers have some sort of issue with those, at least according to our disability specialists. We are also not allowed to underline because apparently the readers will read it as a hyperlink. So we are supposed to use asterisks for emphasis.
Yes, I grumble about it. Yes, I complain about adjusting my classes around students who are not actually enrolled at the expense of those that are, knowing that I could keep a separate copy for those who need them, but the school will not permit that because…some reason they made up on the spur of the moment.
Well that’s what tags are for. Bold and italics and underlines are meant for different types of emphasis. You should present all your course material in strict HTML. They can supply their own style sheets. Win….win…?
In all seriousness, I’d have thought that marking up text according to convention (any convention, as long as there is one) would do nothing but help the visually impaired. It would mean they get to decide how the text is presented to them, in keeping with whatever difficulties they have. I mean, HOLY FUCK, this is what markup languages are for and they’ve been around a lot longer than HTML has.
Well now I’m imagining students frowning as they repeatedly tap underlined text on a printed page. It wouldn’t surprise me. I used to teach an MSc class in object oriented programming. In one tutorial I told a student to move his mouse to point at something on the screen he literally picked up the mouse and placed it on the screen. MSc student. From one of the highest-rated universities in the country.
On second thoughts, perhaps you should just distribute your lecture notes in all caps.
iknklast, I use em instead of i and strong instead of b in my HTML because I was informed, many years ago, that readers can interpret those.
@tigger:
Well, the reason tags like em and strong exist is that people can use stylesheets to apply whatever style to the tagged text they wish without necessarily overruling italic and bold tags. The content in marked-up languages is separate from how that content is presented.
So if I were visually impaired, I might want my browser to read out everything in italics in Wil Weaton’s voice because he lampshades sarcasm so well and it would amuse me. But I might also decide that anything generically emphasised be read by Sandi Toksvig, because she always sounds like she knows what she’s talking about.
Markup languages are there to allow people and robots to specify for themselves how the content should be presented. So iknklast should definitely present all her course materials in a single line of all-caps marked-up text with no spaces at all. If her students can’t work out how to render it, that’s an easy fail and she won’t have to spend the rest of the year rolling her eyes while marking. Like I said, win win.
iknklast, do you teach math? How do screen readers read equations?
@Colin:
There are markup languages and decent interpreters for that, too. You have to be patient, have a good memory and excellent concentration skills. But they are not as simplistic as Open bracket, they are not all terrible at describing equations in a way that makes sense to mathematicians.
People are really bad at using that markup, though.
*sigh*, damn it all. It is the end of a long week. I used HTML while discussing HTML and my post doesn’t make sense on about nine levels.
I go to bed cuddling an irony meter, what’s your excuse?
;)
Colin, I teach science. Which, of course, contains a lot of math. We have programs that will make the equations readable, but the programs don’t work well. I am sure there are other methods, but we have to work with what our campus requires. And our campus is providing things that work okay for straight text like you might get in an English class or a history class, but not for the sort of things we do in the sciences, or in math.
I did finally get them to agree to let me use italics for scientific names. And they say we can’t use green or red for things because of color blind students, so I’ve sent emails to the creator of the universe to try to get him to change the colors of red stars, to adjust the red shift to a different color, and to remove red and green from the electromagnetic spectrum. So far I have not heard back. Of course, if he wants to help me, it would probably be easier to just do away with the genetic mutation that causes color blindness in the first place.
Right now, the faculty are struggling, because the people in charge of this do not understand things like what latsot is saying; they required us to begin the process of converting our documents, etc, without having put a policy in place, and without actually being aware of what will do what. Half the time when I call to ask them about something relatively common, they have never heard of such a thing. Like scientific notation.
Tell the color blind to get in line and wait until the creator of the universe is finished moving heaven and earth (and biology) for trans students. And their supporters.*
*A thought. (Yes, they occur occasionally. It’s unpredictable, but whaddya do?) Another of those mini-epiphanies about something that everyone else already knows but I’ve just figured out for myself. (If I were Trump, I’d be prefacing this with “Very few people know…”)
Trans activists who are not themselves trans are super-duper, extra special good guys, fighting the good fight for others. They get to vent their righteous fury on behalf of the weakest of the weak, the most victimized of victims, the downtroddeniest of the downtrodden. It makes their righteous anger purer, their woke cookies sweeter, and their beards glow with an extra-special sheen of Virtue. And they get to bash women who disagree with them. Bonus! They’d probably be bashing them anyhow, but they now get to do so with Truth, Justice and all that is Good and Holy on their side. Double bonus!!
Thank you all for your indulgence of my Learning Moment.
And with the applause of young women who call themselves feminists. And, of course, PZ Myers.
@ latsot :
It seems that we were typing our comments above at the same time, and yours only appeared when I submitted mine. It wasn’t intended as a response to you. I think I understand what you’re saying!
Colourblindness runs in our family. Half my sons and half my grandsons (so far – we don’t know about number 5 grandson yet; he’s only a baby) are red/green colourblind, as was my father. Both my father and one of my colourblind grandsons are artists. One of my colourblind twins studied digital art at college. As long as they keep their colours labelled, they don’t often make outrageous mistakes, although my son once managed to light a scene with a green lamp which shed orange light.
(By the way, whatever happened to the ‘Preview’ button? I keep messing up the HTML and can’t check it first)
I don’t believe this. I’m not saying that there aren’t at least some trans women who seem to be pretty misogynistic, but the trans supporters who are ‘cis’ don’t strike me as anti-women or anti-feminist. They seem to be behaving the way sincere feminists would behave if they genuinely believed that trans women were like black women, or disabled women, or overweight women — and bigoted women in their own organizations were trying to kick them out. It’s really just Truth, Justice, and all that is Good and Holy. But being wrong.
At least, to begin with. There’s a dark side to extreme righteousness, which creeps in when it’s okay to punch nazis (or abortion doctors, if you’re on the Right.) It gets Bad and Unholy, pretty fast. But I still the TRAs are classifying “terfs” with fascists, and not secretly trying to destroy feminism, or gay rights.
For one thing, they tell each other that the “terfs” have a secret agenda to destroy feminism and gay rights.
tigger @ 19 – The preview button went away when WordPress forced an update a few weeks ago. It took me a week or more to figure out how to work with it and I still hate it. It wasn’t broke, so they fixed it.
Sastra – not all of them. There are many many many men who take an obvious pleasure in being able to attack women again, this time in the sanctity of the church. There’s this doctor called Adrian Harrop for instance…
Leaving aside the trans issue: The fact is we expect specialists to know their business.
And that’s what the hierarchy on the left – is. And that hierarchy has, in fact, reduced maternal mortality.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm
This is part of what I find so startling about the bullshit industrial complex, there is a fundamental resentment over the fact that OBs, doctors, nurses and midwives might actually know enough of their business to give recommendations to patients.
And that resentment is supposed to beat out any concerns we might have for women, you know, actually surviving childbirth.
Which you can see in this:
This is someone who is not medically trained giving medical advice – specifically aimed at promoting their business.
This isn’t concern for women, this is marketing.
Bruce Gorton, this is something that needs to be said, and said often. Yes, doctors were (and maybe still are) condescending to women, and sometimes seemed to shut them out of the birth process. Yes, women were mothers for millennia before the doctors became primary in maternal care. But the death rate was high…too high. Both maternal and infant. Both are living longer, thanks to the institution of modern techniques.
And when I read things like Barbara Ehrenreich’s rant against OBs, describing her own experience with childbirth, I want to point out to her that she is an older woman, and that things have changed a great deal. When I was born, my mother was put to sleep with gas, and my father was not allowed anywhere near my mother through the whole process. He was expected to pace the waiting room. The doctor would decree, the patient would do. But…my mother lived through a difficult childbirth (her last one) which would have killed most women in earlier times. I know a number of women who survived eclampsia and other things that would have been less likely to survive in an earlier time.
And by the time I had my son, things were much different. I was given choices – did i want anesthetic? And it wasn’t general anesthetic, but just topical that could ease the woman’s pain for the time. My husband was in the room with me for the entire process. I had contact with my child immediately, and frequently (by the time my sister had her children a few years later, the children were left in the hospital room with the mother). My doctor did not routinely do episiotomies, only if there was a need (like in my case – even with the episiotomy, my son was almost too big for me to deliver, and I tore badly. He wasn’t large. I couldn’t have delivered the nine pounders my mother did). I actually was the center of the process. I made the decisions on what I wanted, and I told the doctor how I wanted things done.
I know that has only gotten more that way, at least at the time my younger sisters were delivering. I haven’t been involved in a birth for at least two decades, and am not sure if we have moved backwards to my mother’s time, but it seems unlikely. Women were very centered in the birth process when I had my child in the early 1980s, and I suspect they are now, but there is a school of “thought” out there that suggests anything that smacks of medical experts is wrong, bad, fascist, evil, demonic, misogynistic, or whatever other horrible word the “thinker” can apply.
Meanwhile, medical expertise has prevented not only a lot of maternal deaths, but a lot of orphans. Double win.
Well duh. These are the blinkered, prejudiced, “evidence -based” reductionists who deny the health benefits of jade eggs and vaginal steaming.