Gendered language at the abortion clinic
Another damn fool tries to erase the existence and needs of women, and thinks she’s progressive for doing it. I wish these people would hurry up and become adults.
I got pregnant four years ago, when I was 26, and had an abortion in my first trimester. At the time, I wasn’t in a position financially or emotionally to be a parent. I was unemployed, and I knew that choosing to have a child would make it very hard to get a job in the near future. I wasn’t in a living situation where I had room for a baby.
I didn’t feel ashamed about having an abortion. It was an easy decision for me. But as a non-binary transgender person, my abortion experience led to a lot of gender dysphoria. Every clinic had the word women’s in the name, all the pamphlets used gendered language and featured images of gender-conforming people…
Because it’s women who have babies, and thus it’s women who have particular needs, such as abortion and pregnancy care. The self-absorbed protagonist of this ridiculous piece wants to pretend she’s too Special to be a woman, and she ought to be put on the Naughty Stool for about 50 years.
It felt dehumanizing. I had to emotionally disconnect from the experience entirely because of how gendered it was.
Of course it’s fucking gendered you absolute halfwit – what else would it be? It would be a good educational experience for you to try to get a man pregnant; maybe after a decade or so you would catch on.
I saw a post from Medical Students For Choice patting themselves on the back for rejecting the notion that one should fight for abortion access “for women only”, and promoting the fight for abortion access “for all genders”. Argh.
Maybe a more honest version would say “abortion access for all women, even those who don’t like to consider themselves women”.
Women aren’t human? Is that what this twit is saying? Nonbinary identities are valid, but women aren’t human? And it’s not “gendered” language, it’s SEXED language that’s being used, and you still have one and by the fact you were pregnant, I’d take a stab at it and guess that it was female.
Unless and until you grow out of this narcissistic twaddle, you never will be. So unless and until you do, please do not have a child.
Sorry, but it needed to be said.
So both trans and NB? There really are no rules for this are there. Doubleplus special it is.
You’ve got a GODDAMN FETUS INSIDE YOU and your dysphoria is triggered by vocabulary choice in a pamphlet?!! FFS.
That is, as a woman that does not like being called a woman.
I am pretty sure the woman would simply point to all those trans men, i.e. women, that have given birth and proclaim victory over your challenge.
She doesn’t say that her pregnancy was the result of rape, so she’s a perfectly ordinary heterosexual woman having consensual straight sexual intercourse with a man, but she wants to be oh, so special. Too right she’s not ready to become a parent. Emotionally, she’s even more clueless and narcissistic than the average thirteen-year-old.
What you are in your head does not negate what you actually are physically. In my head I’m a strong, capable person who could easily run a marathon, then fight off an army of Visigoths single-handedly, and build a wall afterwards. In reality, I, have to use a wheelchair, can’t win a battle on a games console because I can’t mash the buttons fast enough, and can barely lift one brick with both hands (and then I can’t lift anything else at all for ages). Should I scream that I’m trans-non-binary-abled at people who put up wheelchair accessible signs and don’t see the Amazon inside my head?
Bruce, I believe the rationale is that disregarding someone’s claimed gender identity is dehumanising them, because disagreeing with a person’s inner reality (or quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo this one might use) is on par with considering them not a human.
It’s totally stupid, but no I don’t think she is referring to women as non-humans.
She’s implying it though, whether she means to or not. She is in fact adding to the age-old encrusted contempt/disgust/loathing directed at women with her histrionic “dysphoria” about being perceived to be a woman.
I meant to fume at the ‘”trans non-binary” idiocy in the post but the intention melted in the heat of my irritation. The two are exact opposites but the Special Specialies get to be both anyway. They are Better Than You.
I can only guess but I think that NBT is a reflection of the Spectrum/Fixed Identity duality of gender.
It’s the height of narcissism to go into a clinic built and run for women’s specific health needs and wonder why they don’t splash Transgender flags all around to make her feel more wanted. Does not having literature catering to her personality make her feel violated in some way? Only because she wants it to make her feel that way.
YNnB? already made the point I came to make, but it bears repeating–she’s complaining about sexed language, not gendered language. Gendered language is the neuter form “das Mädchen” in German, or the feminine “la persona” in Spanish. Gender is almost non-existent in English (with some exceptions such as referring to cars or nations as “she”).
As for the transgender non-binary combo, I’ll repeat what I said the other day: Cisalpine Gauls were the ones on the Roman side of the Alps, Transalpine Gauls were the ones on the other side. And non-binary Gauls were looking down on everyone from the tops of the mountains. Every now and then they’d invite a trans up there to roll rocks down on the cis scum.
In another connection with religion, non-binary seems to me like “agnostic”. ‘I am not willing to commit to a firm belief, I am better than those dogmatic people on either side, I am more open-minded, more flexible, more grand.” This is, of course, even more true of the ridiculous “gender fluid”. Your gender is water? WTF? Oh, wait, you mean you might be one thing one day, and the other thing another day.
I would compare the NBs to the platypus, a mixture of all sorts of things, not one thing or the other (actually it is, it’s a monotreme) but the platypus is not pretending to be something it’s not. It’s just being a platypus the best way it knows how.
I just thought of another comparison: astrology.
James Randi used to do an experiment where college students who had previously given their birth dates were each presented with a paper written by a “master astrologer” describing what the stars said about them, specifically. After they finished their personalized readings, they were each asked to rank how accurate they were on a 10 point (?) scale. There were lots of 8s and 9s, and even some 10s. On the whole, they were all impressed, and gave the astrologer high marks, too. Then they were asked to pass the papers to the student in the next desk.
It was the same reading, of course, with the sentences mixed up so they’d appear to be different if anyone glanced over. What they thought surprisingly unique about them was also “unique” about everyone else.
Enbees strike me as little different than the students who ranked the Super Special Just About You astrology reading a 9 or 10. It’s just that they’re holding tight to that paper because it’s totally, totally THEM.
Ophelia #6: Your comment brings me back to one of my favorite Jesus and Mo cartoons:
https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/special/
This just cracks me up every time. How can a simple line drawing (in the last panel) be so 200% illustrative of the nonsense that otherwise rational people now promote?
That’s perfect.
[…] a comment by Sastra on Gendered language at the abortion […]
No, that’s aquagender. https://pride-color-schemes.tumblr.com/post/161735566825/aquagender
Googling around for “aquagender” led me to this, as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ask_transgender/comments/g466vi/is_it_bad_that_i_feel_uncomfortable_about_certain/
The author’s complaint about “gendered language” is that she sees woman as a “gender identity” she does not feel:
Her identity-based complaints are consistent with gender identity activists calling the sex-based phrase woman: adult human female “hate speech”, and police in the UK asking the public to report stickers with that phrase as “hate incidents”.
In other words, I think of woman as a sex-based term that I can define objectively and use coherently. She thinks of woman as an identity-based term that is “gendered” by her definition.
Don’t forget the Invisigoths; they’re much harder to see.
I’ll see my way out.
Thank you for the laugh, not Bruce!
You’re welcome! Happy to share the lunacy. Glad you liked it! I’ve had the idea of “Invisigoths” rattling around in my head for years, just waiting to spread the infection to others. Any time I read or heard the word “Visigith”, there it was. It’s such an obvious idea (to me anyway), that I can’t imagine it’s original.