PP
Sigh. I was interested, I wanted to read this, but then –
Mine is a predictable photo album – a baby transforms across a camera roll from limpid mole to Ian Hislop in leggings, kittens simper beside screengrabs of news stories, pink cake, a very big plum. It was the juxtaposition of three pictures that documented April though, that pricked my fury. A photo taken from our car of one of the anti-vaccine marches that shut down London sat beside a headline that pregnant people were finally being offered the coronavirus vaccine, then a picture of my son’s first birthday party.
Her son gets to be her son, Ian Hislop gets to be Ian Hislop, but pregnant women aren’t allowed to be pregnant women, they have to be concealed behind “pregnant people” just as elsewhere they’re concealed by yards of cloth.
And it’s spreading. A New Yorker Talk of the Town piece a few weeks ago about Sarah Hoover, a former director of the Guggenheim Gallery who gave a lecture there called “Maternal Instincts: An Art Historical Review of Motherhood.”
“I had terrible postpartum depression and anxiety,” she said. “It ended. But it actually gave birth to a whole new me in the end. I wrote about how I opened up all the cracks in the narrative around motherhood for me, and I really want to change it all. I want women – and people who give birth, who are not all women – “
So I don’t care how she finishes her sentence or what the rest of the piece says, because you can’t do both. You can’t pretend you’re doing this for women and then hastily throw a dropcloth over them. I don’t care how she wants to change the narrative, because she just betrayed the whole idea.
Women have been colonized, again.
“Not all people who give birth identify as women.”
Why can’t they at least try for accuracy AND “inclusion?”
I like this. Shall we call it “the rhetorical burka?”
‘Pregnant people’ is a term that can only include women. So it is pointless using it as a substitute for ‘pregnant women.’ (Category error?) And all this bullshit rains down in the cause of protecting the tender feelings of men who wish they were women (that goal will be forever out of their reach) and want to be everywhere received, accepted and hailed as women. Sad fact for them is that they never will be.
They will spend their lives amid fields not of flowers, but of raised eyebrows (at best) and smirks, sniggers and abuse, at worst. And no matter how many concessions they get, they will always want more.
Very sad.
It’s true, though. Not all people who give birth are women.
Some are but girls.
Categories again. When a girl becomes capable of giving birth, she becomes a woman.
Are we talking legally, ethically, biologically, intellectually or emotionally?
Some girls become capable of pregnancy well under the age of 13. There are some (but not many) jurisdictions where sex with girls that young is permitted under certain circumstances. Certainly not in western nations. Ethically? Well I guess that depends on frame of reference, but I know of many Americans who would consider the age of consent in NZ (16) to be unethical and represent child sex. Even when a girl becomes capable of pregnancy, there are still changes occurring in her body that means that she is not actually suited to, or at comparable risk to, a fully adult woman when carrying a pregnancy or giving birth. It’s a sliding scale with poorly defined edges and form to be sure, but I can’t say I’ve ever met a teenager (male, female or other) that I’ve thought had the emotional and intellectual maturity to become a life partner to someone, let alone a parent to a totally dependant bundle of cells. Some rise to the occasion with help to be sure, but empirically many do a bad job of it.
Personally I’d be cautious about an absolute pronouncement.
She wanted to change the narrative away from what a woman actually is.
I read this as a direct quote of the headline, and not necessarily in an approving way. After all, the three pictures described are said to have ‘pricked my fury’. I must admit that anti-vaxxers and the phrase ‘pregnant people*’ are pretty infuriating; and I suppose her son’s first birthday party might have been infuriating if it had to be held over video link instead of in person, as it would have been pre-pandemic. But then again, she presumably chose to become pregnant during a pandemic; what did she expect?
*Because women aren’t actually regarded as people during pregnancy, but as vehicles for the fœtus, to whom they have ceded all rights and autonomy.
Rob @# 6:
I have known a few men in my time whom I would rate as incapable of finding their way home from the pub, even when stone cold sober. Descartes’ ghost (wherever he is today) may disagree, but I would nonetheless place them in the category of ‘men’.
BTW: That is an absolute pronouncement. As the psalmist wrote: there is a time for every purpose under Heaven. I would add: ‘And a time to throw caution to the winds.’.
I did have to make a tiny decision about whether to include the word “girls” or not – on this occasion I decided not to, just for the sake of clarity and economy. It’s the word “women” that Hoover stabbed in the back, and I wanted to leave that as clear as possible.
tigger_the_wing,
Even assuming the conception was intentional, the math doesn’t quite check out on this. If the offending party were held today, that means the child was born in mid-August 2020, and so was statistically probably conceived between November and December 2019. For those who don’t know, “week zero” of a pregnancy is reckoned from the woman’s first missed period instead of the (generally unknowable) date of conception, so it is theoretically possible to have conceived a child an entire month before the trimester clock starts. And there is quite commonly a week or two more or less than the “ideal” nine-month window to a normal gestation period, so it is quite possible the author had an entirely unremarkable pregnancy which actually began near the beginning of November 2019.
At that point, and for a few months after, there *was* no pandemic. There were vague rumours on certain circles of Twitter for geopolitics nerds of another novel virus outbreak in China, and quite a bit of uncertainty about the potential consequences that ranged from “bird flu” to “swine flu” to “SARS-COV-1” to “Spanish Flu”, which didn’t collapse into general global certainty of a worldwide pandemic until about March, and even then there was a decent chance it could’ve been an H1N1-style pandemic that would kill relatively few people and retreat after a single cold season, and not something closer to the years-long Spanish Flu-style pandemic it is turning out to be.
About the best you can say is the author decided not to get an abortion in the second trimester once it became clear that the pandemic was here, global, and serious in a way no pandemic had been for a hundred years. And regardless of your stance on abortion, it’s easy to see why the moral calculus of getting a second-trimester abortion is very different to most people (including presumably the author) than choosing not to conceive shortly before what was probably going to be another normal Christmas.
Omar #3 wrote:
Not in this context. “And people who give birth, who are not all women -“ is clearly referring to trans men, women who reject their sex and identify as male. Apparently conceiving and giving birth won’t remind them of the horrible truth if the whole world just starts agreeing that “men get pregnant, too.” That’s scientific, because it is.
While we have a tendency to focus on the aggressive entitlement of the TIMs, we shouldn’t forget that TIFs often suffer from the same aggrieved righteousness and belligerence. Chase Strangio. Plus I keep coming across accounts of formerly loving daughters and kind friends deciding that they’re really boys and doing a 180. I suspect it’s partly the testosterone, partly the paranoid narrative of true self under persecution, and partly the secret recognition that their claim is extremely fragile.
Sastra:
I think that 99.99% of the whole world can see through that quite easily, were not born yesterday, and know bullshit when they see it.
#Omar:
I’m not so sure. I think 99.9% of the world has trouble thinking clearly under ambiguous conditions, and has even more trouble when intuitive or moral buttons are pushed.
Ask the average person if they agree with the statements: “A woman is more than what’s between her legs/A man is more than what’s between his legs” and most will agree. If trusted authorities and/or people in their community then leverage the similarity between this broad minded understanding and a narrow definition to broaden the definition, it’s probably not hard to confuse a fair percentage into agreement. Add to this an all too common belief in inherent gender essences and the percentage may rise. With relentless propaganda, even more.
I worry that the main thing keeping the general public from agreeing that “men can get pregnant, too” is the religious belief that “God wouldn’t put a man’s soul in a woman’s body.”
Thank you, Seth. You are right, of course. My mistake, and I am sorry.