The BMA predicted the ‘pregnant man’ craze by issuing absurd advice to doctors last year banning the use of the term ‘expectant mother’ in favour of ‘pregnant person’ so as not to offend transsexuals.
The advice was published in a BMA internal booklet: “A guide to effective communication: inclusive language in the workplace”.
Gender-neutral
The document is grindingly politically correct. Doctors, it says, should strive to be ‘gender-neutral’. A meeting has a ‘Chair’ not a ‘Chairman’. That one has whiskers on. So does “use the word ‘partner’ instead of ‘wife’ or ‘husband’.” But “‘parent’ instead of ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’, and ‘child’ instead of ‘son’ or ‘daughter’?”
One function of language is to convey a precise idea. In farming we can refer to cattle but it is often useful to specify bull, bullock, cow or heifer. Eskimos are famously careful to differentiate between fifty different types of snow.
What if a woman has twins, one of each? With no access to ‘son’ and’daughter’ must doctors now refer to them as ‘Child A and Child B’? How will a parent cope with that?
The BMA veers off into the plainly fatuous. It seriously suggests to its 160,000 members: “You can also mix up the word order in common expressions, eg instead of saying, ‘men and women’, use ‘women and men’.” There! That will deal a blow to ‘patriarchy’.
Mind your pronouns!
The BMA is even worried by pronouns, previously the preserve of crazy university student unions. Doctors should ‘use the term preferred by the individual’ even if it flies in the face of reality. A ‘trans-female’, which it helpfully explains is ‘ie male to female’, should therefore be referred to as ‘She or her’ and never ‘He or his’.
Similarly, a ‘transmale, ie female to male’ should be ‘He or his’ but never ‘She or her’. Every UK newspaper slavishly follows that dictum already.
Nor should doctors ‘use phases that are reductive and overly-simplify a complex subject. A person’s sex is determined by a number of factors’, they claim. Doctors should not speak of someone as ‘Biologically’ or ‘Genetically male/female’ or ‘Born and (sic) man/woman’. Perish the thought that someone is actually male or female. Now, in the world of medicine, people are said to be ‘Assigned’ or ‘Designated male/female at birth’. If doctors have to worry about student politics will they have any time left to practice medicine?
Feminism runs riot
If it will come as no surprise that feminism runs riot in the embarrassing guide.
‘Gender inequality,’ it moans, ‘is reflected in traditional ideas about the roles of women and men. Though they have shifted over time, the assumptions and stereotypes that underpin those ideas are often deeply rooted.’ That’s because they are God-given.
If it goes on: ‘If it is common to assume a woman will have children, look after them and take a break from paid work or work part-time to accommodate the family. … However, such assumptions and stereotypes can and often do have the effect of seriously disadvantaging women.’ Only in the work place, silly. Not in the home. Stuck in a feminist mindset, the BMA misses the fundamental reality that women and men are not in competition. In the God-given institution of the family, a man and a woman work together for their mutual benefit. They divide up jobs according to aptitude. Watch my video on the ‘pay gap’!
‘A large majority of people that (sic) have been pregnant or have given birth identify as women.’ If it does not matter how people ‘identify’. Every person who has ever given birth has been a woman. But that is not good enough for the BMA:
“We can include intersex men and transmen who may get pregnant by saying ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘expectant mothers’.”
Intersex pregnancy is very rare indeed.
Intersex is a rare condition, affecting at most 0.05% of the population. Those sadly affected have a mixture of male and female organs. The South African athlete Caster Semenya, for example, has external female genitalia but internal testes instead of a womb and ovaries. If it is consequently very rare indeed for someone intersex to conceive and carry a baby to term.
Intersex individuals should be approached with compassion and sensitivity. But that is not to say society should overturn reality. Caster Semenya, for example, is brimming with testosterone. He should not be competing in women’s races even though he has decided he ‘identifies as a woman’.
The overwhelming majority of hospitals, let alone doctors, will never see an intersex pregnancy.
‘Pregnant man’ is always a woman
The Sun newspaper has bought the rights to the story of Hayden Cross. It describes her as ‘the first British man to give birth’ The only flaw in the story is that Hayden Cross is genetically a woman. She has the full set of female chromosomes. Naturally (in every sense of the word), she has a fully-functioning womb and ovaries. She became pregnant by a sperm donor. That was a man.
She has postponed ‘gender reassignment’, which kicks off with massive testosterone hormone injections, to carry her baby.
I am ‘mis-gendering’ Hayden Cross, according to the BMA, but I do not care. The truth is: Hayden Cross is a woman. No amount of male hormone and no surgical mutilation will alter that plain genetic fact. She will never be a ‘dad’ as The Sun ridiculously describes her. She will always be her baby’s mother.
Speaking about the BMA guide and linking to Hayden Cross, even the Daily Mirror said: ‘Some 775,000 women give birth in Great Britain every year – and there are no other known cases of transgender people having babies.’
There is actually another woman, a mother of three, in the United States, going down the same path. Her name is Tracy LaGondino but she now styles herself Thomas Beatie. The Sun idiotically describes her as ‘the world’s first pregnant man’. Even the liberal Huffington Post is putting the expression ‘pregnant man’ in inverted commas.
So that’s one ‘pregnant man’ in the UK and one the US. The BMA is overturning reality and offending real mothers to solve a problem which is non-existent. The numbers are “vanishingly small,” as the person cited below put it.
Too much detail
If you do not like ‘too much detail’, skip to the next heading. The BBC interviewed another ‘trans-male’ woman. She is the self-styled ‘Freddy who has been on BBC4’s Woman’s Hour. ‘Freddy’ has a testosterone injection every twelve weeks. She has already had a mastectomy performed in the States. At the same time they gave her ‘a male, contoured chest’. How much that cost is not stated. Hayden Cross only got on with her pregnancy because the NHS would not pay to store her eggs.
‘Freddy’ would also like to be a ‘parent’. She objects to the term ‘mother’. The surgeons have not been let loose on her internal organs or genitalia, so to become pregnant she will just have to stop the testosterone injections, wait for her menstrual cycle to kick back in and hope she is still fertile. Stopping the testosterone, says the BBC, ‘ is risky for a trans man because it could lead to gender dysphoria’, which is a feeling of depression.
A post-truth world
If it was the Blair administration which started the rot. With the Gender Recognition Act 2004 Parliament legislated a lie. A majority of MPs and Peers voted to allow any individual to go back to his birth certificate and falsify it. (Yes, our masculine usage does include the feminine.) Then the Equality Act 2010 made transgenderism a ‘protected characteristic’ which had to be promoted by public authorities.
Forget post-Christian and post-modern. Our elite are now living in a post-truth world. In discussions about religion, it is common these days for people to talk about ‘my truth’ as opposed to ‘your truth’, let alone ‘the truth’.
Subjective truth does not actually work even in religion and doesn’t work in life and it certainly won’t work in a criminal court. If it is no use the burglar saying ‘his truth’ is that he was in the pub and that his fingerprints being all over the house he has broken into are ‘the forensic peoples’ truth.’ There is an objective truth the court has to agree upon.
It is the same in the Courts of Heaven. And as we are made in the image of God, playing fast and loose with the truth does not sit well with us either.
The BMA can pontificate all it likes, but there will only ever be pregnant mothers.
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“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats
I hate to agree with Stephen, but this time he is on the side of the angels, as it were.
Have the hospital cleaners, nurses, and doctors realised that English already lacks a word for grown-up children ? Not being able to use “son” or “daughter” is not going to help here. Everybody is going to be trying to get a bed in the Children’s Hospital. We are all children, after all.
Presumably midwives will now be called midspouses or midpartners,
I dislike “Mum” rather than “your mother”.
When the nurse/ male-nurse says “Here she is, Mum has had a good day” it strongly suggests that your mother can’t understand what is going on, or even that the male-nurse/nurse is trying to sneak into the family. But I suppose he or she will now have to say “Here he or she is, Parent has had a good day”. So that solves that one, I suppose. I do hope that Parent, already thoroughly confused by Philipino and Indian accents, will understand what is going on. This new correctness really won’t help.
A fine example of a feminist handling these awkward pronouns has come to my notice. The Brontë sisters were feminists in their time, because they went out into the world to work (two of them even went abroad), and they wrote successful books. Recognising this as a male profession, they at first wrote under masculine names (though I do wonder how many people were fooled by that !).
In the obviously semi-autobiographical Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë writes in the first person about the problems of being a governess like Agnes —
” a more arduous task than anyone can imagine, —-charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty; while at the same time he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power who exacts from him …..” etc .
You don’t have to be a feminist to think that “she” and “her” would be more appropriate here !
Incidentally, the book is an endless catalogue of failure — Anne was apparently completely unable to cope with a class of THREE well-bred primary schoolchildren, neither getting them interested in anything, nor able to stop them messing about. She frequently bemoans being forbidden to use corporal punishment. I really don’t know how she would manage a modern class of 30 or so ! It’s rather a strange subject for a book.