It doesn’t
Oh godddddd the stupid.
Awareness month! So inaccurate misleading language is vital! It’s VITAL I tell you!
When queried on this gross mistake, Sefton Council replied with a smirk.
Editing to add: they’re rubbing our noses in it.
Tip Jar
Oh godddddd the stupid.
Awareness month! So inaccurate misleading language is vital! It’s VITAL I tell you!
When queried on this gross mistake, Sefton Council replied with a smirk.
Editing to add: they’re rubbing our noses in it.
It’s a bit like those drug commercials which show happy people being happy and suggest “ask your doctor if Xanzzyzipan is right for you.” What is it? What is it for? Doesn’t say.
I can imagine some poor gentleman asking his doctor if his problem could be “endometriosis.” Because he read about it being so common.
But…wouldn’t that be mathematically incorrect? I mean, if it’s 1:10 women, then it would not be 1:10 people, would it? Did they adjust their statistic to account for the fact that women are only slightly over half the population?
It seems risky in something like this to say 1:10 people, since I have discovered that few, if any, of my students have heard of endometriosis when I talk about it, so how would people know this is only going to be a problem for them if they have female bodies? How can people with female bodies realize they are the ones who need to be on the lookout for symptoms? At least when they say “pregnant people”, they are dealing with something that nearly everyone knows enough about to fill in the women, and know that they aren’t likely to be counted in that, because they are not a woman. Something less known, like endometriosis, has some implications from failing to properly inform the public. Because, yes, it is women who get endometriosis.
Why yes, yes it would, as many many people have pointed out to the smug fool who runs Sefton Council’s Twitter.
This is actually dangerously incorrect information. Yes, for the most part endometriosis doesn’t kill (although it does slightly increase the risk of ovarian cancer). But it is a terrible condition nonetheless.
But if you say 1 in 10 people, you’ve now screwed up the statistic. It’s not 1 in 10, because almost half the population is not at risk at all. And they can’t say 1 in 10 people with a uterus because it is possible to get the disorder without one in places such as the fallopian tubes, pelvic cavity, and even the bowel.
Now imagine if we were talking about something that does kill people but has differential risks for men and women. Breast cancer is common in women but rare in men. Lifetime risk of breast cancer in women is 1 in 8, for men it is 1 in 833. If you say 1 in 8 people instead you are grossly distorting the statistics. There’s no way I can think of that positively separates those at high risk and those at low, other than the word women. Even if you have a mastectomy, breast cancer is still possible (which is why prophylactic mastectomy by BRCA1/2 positive women is not very smart). You could I suppose say cis women and trans men, but that still doesn’t cover the non-binary and whatever the hell queer is supposed to mean these days.
Here’s another, more immediately relevant example: the risk of death from coronavirus seems to be higher in men than women by a considerable degree. Now, because most of the statistics we’re relying on come from China, we don’t know if that is true or whether there is confounding by smoking (~50% of Chinese men smoke compared with ~1-2% of Chinese women). Nevertheless, if it holds up, this needs to be communicated and quickly. Coronavirus don’t care how you identify.
Ugh. The feelings of people who will never suffer from Endometriosis are more important than the health of the 1 in 10 women who do. Because let’s be clear: this wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for the mostly men bullying organisations at large into compliance.
[…] a comment by Claire on It […]
We need a word for those men. How about harrop? If it weren’t for the harrops bullying organisations at large into compliance.
What, do the Trans Identified Females never bully people? That’s not my understanding. That menstrual product company removed the universal symbol for “woman” when a TIF complained. This whole erasure of women in favor of “people” is instigated not by the TIMs, but by women who hate their womanhood and cannot bear to be reminded of it ( and their supporters, of course.) They’re neither weak, nor powerless, nor reticent.
Sastra,
Of course. But men seem to be shouting the loudest and most threateningly.
This is a good point. This use of “person/people”, resulting in the erasure of “woman/women” was indeed to include TIFs, “…as not everyone who suffers with #Endometriosis identifies as a woman.” There is no mention of “not everyone who identifies as a woman can get endometriosis….” Some of the comments on the tweet are from people who think this wording was to appease TIMs, which is not the case.
The erasure of “woman” seems to be happening in several ways at the same time. The use of supposed “inclusive” language (chest feeding, uterus bearers, front hole, “men” giving birth…) is intended to “include” TIFs without having to use the word “woman”. Redefining “woman” to “include” TIMs, results in women becoming a subset of their own sex through the use of “cis” as a descriptor. Once this redescription and redefinition is accepted, TIMs are able to supplant (erase) natal women in positions and facilities originally set aside and intended for women only. Any confusion or uncertainty about what “woman” actually refers to helps this redefinition by diluting or subverting the original meaning of the word. Certainly in living languages, words change their meanings all the time, but this is different. This is not an “evolutionary” change but a hostile takeover. And, tellingly, we do not see this combination of erasure and redefinition/replacement happening with “man/men”. “Women” become “people”, “men” remain men.
So women trying to become men are refusing to be reminded, by any use of the word “woman” in connection to them, of the womanhood they think they’re “escaping”, while men trying to become women demand that the meaning of the word “woman” be changed so as to be included within it. The two aims are almost mirror images of each other; one side vehemently rejecting that which they actually are, the other desperately grabbing for that which they can never be.
There certainly seem to be no vocal and visible TIF equivalents of Yaniv, McKinnon, Oger, Hubbard, Jenner, Fox, Madigan, Bunce….etc. The costs of this “inclusivity” are not equal for each sex. Men’s status and position are not being threatened, whereas each of the individual TIMs named above has intruded into spaces, positions and awards originally intended for actual women, not men pretending to be women. Society was nowhere near recognizing sexual equality (Re: pay, medical care, safety, harassment, violence, abuse…) and now women are having to fight a war on two fronts; the original ongoing one to win the rest of what is owed them, and now a new one to retain what little they’ve managed to win so far in the face of sudden and unexpected inroads by TIMs spearheading a surprisingly well-supported trans “rights” movement. I’ve not heard of the same happening (or at least not to this extent) with TIFs in men’s spaces, positions and awards.
^ That.
There are some belligerent TIFs but, like Holms, I don’t know of any who can compete with Oger or McKinnon or Hayden and the list goes on and on.
It’s not that women never bully, but it is that women don’t get rewarded for it from birth the way men do.