Inform and…
Hmmmmm. It says “NHS inform” at the top. It shows other available languages. Surely the goal here is to inform patients. And yet…
The goal is surely to inform, and yet the NHS tells people, including people who don’t read English, that there are people who are not women or girls yet who “bleed from their vagina.” Well, what people? What people are those exactly? What people who are not women or girls have the ability to “bleed from their vagina”? Why don’t we all know about them? Why haven’t we all always known about them?
The NHS, let’s remember, is not the Guardian or the BBC, nor is it an activist on social media. The NHS is a health service. An important part of its work is providing information that is as clear and unambiguous and easy to understand as it can possibly be, and also as accurate. Accuracy is key. You don’t want to go mixing up milligrams and micrograms, and you don’t want to go mixing up women and men. You need to know exactly what the patient weighs before you prescribe meds, and you need to know exactly what sex the patient is before a whole lot of things. That’s the job, and it’s crucial. Pretending boys and men can menstruate is the opposite.
“Oh, it’s only a small number of people who are trans; why are you getting angry with them?”
“I’m not generally angry at people who think that they are trans, but I am angry at the cavalier treatment, by organisations which should know better, of the half of the population who are women and girls.”
“How does accommodating a small number of transmen affect you?”
“If the accommodation was made by adding an explanatory paragraph that the information also applies to transmen, or female people who think that they are non-binary, of course I would have no issue with it. But they’re writing women and girls out of the language entirely, because the writers are so afraid of being a target of activists for imagined ‘transphobia’ that they are being misogynistic instead, because women generally don’t form online or offline violent mobs”.
Just have a separate pamphlet aimed at “trans men and nonbinary people”, make it pink and blue with a Corporate Memphis cartoon of a woman with mastectomy scars on the front, done.
Notice that the NHS fails at being “inclusive” : it implies that women and girls have vaginas.
Women, girls, AND people!