The Death of Women’s Rights in America

Brought to Us by the Very Organisations Claiming to Represent Women

Pro-choice demonstrators outside the Supreme Court in 1989, Washington DC. Photo credit: Lorie Shaull

Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma this past decade has noticed the encroachment of “queer” TV characters and subplots, the new ritual of “coming out” which involves telling one’s friends and family that they are identifying as [fill in the gender here], the increasing pressure put on employees to declare “their” pronouns on their work office ID and email signature, and the myriad HR training kits and programmes that teach employees about gender identity. From gender reveal parties that resulted in an almost month-long fire burning across 22,744 acres in El Dorado, California to another gender reveal party near the Coronado National Forest in Arizona which resulted in the burning of 46,991 acres, gender has increasingly replaced common sense. 

Are you omnigender, two-spirit, gendervoid, neurois, bigender or any number of dozens—or is it hundreds—of gender identities? Who really knows the finite number of gender identities? Especially because this term is simply a surrogate for personality. The extremely well-funded gender lobby has reached the level of capture within governmental institutions that political parties would be envious of: the public school system, private corporations, gyms, sports, and medical practitioners and midwives who are being instructed to refer to women who claim a sic gender identity as that of a “man.” As gender has been weaponised largely against women and gay men and lesbians, an all-out culture war has been raging in the UK and other anglophone countries for the past decade. 

Indeed there is a conflict between those who view sex as somatic, as real, and those who believe it is irrelevant claiming it is a social construction. Many who push gender identity have advanced the notion that gender, an alleged feeling of selfhood, is somatic while sex is psychological. Of course, none of this pseudoscience would allow anyone to pass their A-levels. But as history has demonstrated time and time again, propaganda works not because it is true, but because people wilfully believe and parrot it, often feeling empowered by the crowds who clamour in unison to be seen as belonging to the new wave of empowerment. 

After the leak of Supreme Court Justice Alito’s brief last month, the ACLU tweeted:

Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black, Indigenous & other people of color. The LGBTQ community. Immigrants. Young people. Those working to make ends meet. People with disabilities. Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.

The language of this tweet demonstrates what has gone on across anglophone countries for the past decade. Women no longer exist. And the ACLU not only painfully avoided stating the word “women” employing the term “pregnant people” in its stead, but this organisation went out of its way to avoids using the word “woman” regularly about a medical reality that uniquely concerns women and girls. And the ACLU is in good company with myriad other media, politicians, scholars, and human rights organisations that deftly avoided using the word “woman” through linguistic obfuscation: NPR, Lambda Legal, New York Magazine, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Reproaction and its executive director, Erin Matson, We Testify, AbortionCareNetwork, Physicians for Reproductive Health, the DC Abortion Fund, Democracy Now!, Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, Deputy Director for Transgender Justice and staff attorney for the ACLU Chase Strangio, and Medical Director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition Kim Sue, among many many others who are involved in the procurement of women’s right to healthcare and abortion access while paradoxically being unable to enunciate the word “woman.” While Amnesty International and Congresswoman Pramila Jaypal dared to mention “women and girls” in addition to “pregnant people” in their social media criticism of the decision, one must wonder why stating facts has become so controversial. 

Amongst so-called “progressive” politicians, organisations and governmental agencies, and those claiming to represent women, over the past five years we have witnessed a tidal erasure in language that designates the specificity of which bodies get pregnant. Even the Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, Lynn Paltrow, tweeted about “pregnant people” earlier this year. And for those of you raising your eyebrows, on the scale of kray-kray these terms—even if deeply dehumanising to women—these above descriptives are far less offensive than the smorgasbord of body parts that women have been called on social media and by organisations claiming to fight for women’s rights. Here’s a taster of what women are now being referred to both by the intelligentsia of social media and organisations working on women’s health and civil rights: “chestfeeder,” “womb carrier,” “menstruator,” uterus-haver” “bleeder” “birthing person,” “front holer,” “cervix-haver,” “bleeder” and dozens more from this juicy linguistic potpourri.

While women are on the receiving end of such essentialist language, men never are. The erasure of the word “woman” has become a phenomenon not limited to the US—it has taken hold of public institutions, government bodies, publications, and NGOs around the world. Last year, British cancer charity, Macmillan, removed all mention of “women” from its cervical cancer page while continuing to use “men” on its prostate cancer page. Even after much public outrage, MacMillan eventually changed its website putting women back in, still leaving in “transgender (trans) men and people assigned female at birth” while being obliged to include men who identify as transgender albeit at the very bottom of the page on prostate cancer. Also last year, British medical journal, The Lancet, ran a cover that referred to women as “bodies with vaginas.” How can women be informed about cervical cancer when it is increasingly becoming verboten within the medical establishment to utter the word “woman”?

These trends have permeated the American medical and NGO sector to such a degree, that for all the criticism of racism directed at the right, leftists are hardly concerned about immigrant women being able to comprehend the Centers for Disease Control’s guidance on breastfeeding in the context of Covid-19 is entitled “Care for Breastfeeding People” where the word woman doesn’t appear once. Or the American Cancer Society’s calling women “people with a cervix”

This erasure of women goes back some time time. In January 2014, actor and activist Martha Plimpton tweeted about a benefit for Texas abortion funds called “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas,” sponsored by A Is For, a reproductive rights organisation. Plimpton was on the receiving end of a pile-on by offended neoliberal internet feminists who argued that the word “vaginas” hurts sic “trans men” and one user, @DrJaneChi, went down the rabbit hole of illogic tweeting “many POCs & poor ppl are alienated by white middle-class feminist insistence on "rah rah VAGINA.” A common derail by this lobby is to leap from discussing sex to calling feminists racists. Dr Jane Chi continued: “Given the constant genital policing, you can’t expect trans folks to feel included by an event title focused on a policed, binary genital.” When Plimpton insisted on referring to the word “vagina” which was in the title of the benefit, a pile-on ensued by what was then an already aggressive gender lobby. Since 2014, many users involved have deactivated their accounts and Plimpton’s was suspended by Twitter. The Nation, Salon, and various other left-of-centre publications covered this mobbing, none of which took to task the misogyny at the core of this lobby. The articles tended to lean towards urging women to “to keep listening to each other about inclusion” with Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon having lost the plot as to what was at stake eight years ago: “I still believe that feminism and reproductive rights are concerns for all of us, not just the select portion of the population that can get pregnant.” 

I certainly hope Williams had a large serving of humble pie last Friday because it is most certainly not a concern for “all of us” when women’s rights to access reproductive healthcare is withheld—not men, not effeminate men, not men with a proclivity for fishnet stockings, not men of any self-hallucinated identity, and not men who call themselves “feminists.” The message has been clear for the past decade: when women refer to their vaginas, they are told it is “exclusionary” and when they refer to themselves as, er, “women,” they are told that this too is bigotry. Linguistic guidelines have even been produced for media outlets like Britain’s NUJ (National Union of Journalists) whereby the word “woman” is today considered offensive while paradoxically not calling a man “woman” is as well. 

Today men are the only humans allowed to “identify as” or to be referred to as “women” while women are de facto, to quote Verso Books from its now-deleted tweet from last week, “womb carriers.” Examples of this insanity can be seen in this week’s call for assistance by the Toronto police department that tweeted a photo of a man with a full beard stating, “Missing Woman, Ryerson Avenue and Bathurst Street area, Isobella Degrace, 27.” The responses to this tweet ranged from sharp criticism to hilarious with one person putting a photo up of cat, writing: “Missing dog. Please help.”

Let’s be clear here— this kind of pandering by public bodies was, in part, orchestrated by neoliberal feminists and media that routinely pointed out that removing the word “women” is an act of engaging in “inclusive language” even if anyone reading the room could see that there has always been an asymmetrical application of this ideology: public and private bodies are simply not calling men “front-noodlers,” “testes havers,” or “ejaculators.” This begs the question of why these organisations and government bodies have spent so much money and time on public relations campaigns when they could have simply reverted to calling us “bitches,” which at the very least is a more honest term than the creative misogynist jargon being concocted. 

Blame for the unmooring of identity from physical reality lies firmly, in large part, at the feet of neoliberal feminist journalists and bloggers who have for the better part of a decade demanded the language of sic “inclusivity.” Blogger Amanda Marcotte, who in 2008 framed gender as interchangeable with sex and who still used the word “woman” concerning pregnancy in 2012, by last year she had entirely vacated her writing of the word “woman” in relation to human gestation. That is, except for her articles about “misogyny” where she uses the word “woman” liberally. And in her recent Salon article covering last week’s SCOTUS decision, Marcotte didn’t mention the word “gender,” “non-binary” or “queer.” It’s almost as if Marcotte knows what a woman really is. 

Roxane Gay similarly pretends not to know which of the two sexes get pregnant, hence the repeated use of “pregnant people” in much of her writing. Even after last week’s SCOTUS decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, Gays tenaciously tweeted about “people with uteri,” refusing to budge on the reality of which sex last week’s decision affects (Hint: it’s not the front-noodlers!) 

Lindsay Beyerstein is a bit of an enigma since she knew what a woman was in 2011, and 2013, but towards 2020-2021 she stopped using the word “women” when she launched her podcast, The Breach, and instead employed “pregnant people,” a term she has defended on Twitter as being “inclusive.” It is also notable that she uses this term specifically on her ReWire podcast and ReWire’s editor is the husband of Amanda Marcotte. 

In addition to individual journalists feigning ignorance as to sexual dimorphism in humans, copious media outlets are pushing the erasure of women including Teen Vogue which on 6 May referred to women as “pregnant people.” Since last week, however, Teen Vogue has embraced this “regressive” notion that women and girls get pregnant—not men. So too have Rewire, Bustle, Autostraddle, Forbes, Everyday Feminism, and Raw Story committed themselves to pretend that anyone can get pregnant. And some traffic in pure propaganda such as Marie Clare which took Harry and Meghan’s reference to “pregnant women” and then purposefully misrepresented their words—using reported speech to state that they said “pregnant people”— proving the media’s power to lie in order to buttress an even greater lie.

From NARAL Pro-Choice America to Planned Parenthood, the American Medical Association, the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA), city and state health departments, activists claiming “queer” identities, and woke bro dude “allies” claiming to be leftists and feminists, the word “women” over the past decade has been slowly disappeared from discussions of abortion and pregnancy. And these above government bodies and organisations have had a script for this all along coming straight from media outlets and journalism

Last year, Sara Dahlen, a doctor and PhD student at Kings College addressed this very subject in “Do we need the word ‘woman’ in healthcare?” published in the Postgraduate Medical Journal asking: “Retaining scientific terminology specific to biological sex and human reproduction is vital: how else are we to speak of differences between females and males? Respecting and centring individual needs is important: how else are patients going to feel welcome to attend a clinic?” 

One week ago Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States maintaining that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to abortion. This decision is already transforming the landscape of women’s reproductive health in the US as many governors are declaring their states “safe haven” for those women and girls who wish to terminate their pregnancies. It’s almost laughable how California Governor Gavin Newsom signs into law a bill just last year, the California Momnibus Act, where the word woman appears only once concerning pregnancy while dominating the bill’s language are terms like “pregnant, birthing, and postpartum people” and “recipient who is pregnant.” 

The political 180-degree shift is enough to give anyone whiplash as a new wave of purity posturing has taken hold here with a most surreal twist—corporations are now stepping up, as Vox reports to cover out-of-state “reproductive care-related travel and otherwise support workers in need of such care” to include: Disney, Amazon, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Meta, Warner Brothers, Reddit, and Vox Media! Aside from the obvious problems of women now being left at the mercy of corporate America, many of these companies—including Vox Media—have been banging on about “pregnant persons” for years! 

Worse, Meta (Facebook) together with Twitter have been the politburo for approving “acceptable language” banning feminists for saying that men can never become women. And Facebook’s official fact-checker is the Atlantic Council, a lobby arm of NATO. Just like Facebook, many other companies and NGOs that have for years pretended not to know how to define female and that have trafficked in the erasure of women, are now coming out of the woodwork to look like all along they have supported women’s rights while offering to pay for out-of-state reproductive healthcare. Now that’s chutzpuh!

Make no mistake, dear reader, we are living in an era of an “all-inclusive” Zeitgeist where we are both bodiless and full of compassion for others who ironically want to take language away from us to use for themselves. Then when the political stakes shift— last week’s SCOTUS ruling—these same actors pretend that they were always our allies. It’s a political Sliding Doors which, as bad as that movie was, I’ll take any day over the current amnesia du jour. 

While this narrative of freeing ourselves of corporeal specificity might seem tempting, even liberatory to some, the untethering of body from somatic reality is quite perilous to women. More to the point, changing language simply doesn’t change reality. That is unless you’re Dorothy clicking your heels repeating thrice, “There’s no place like home.” The corollary for the decade’s long destruction of linguistic markers for women and girls is that now nothing is off-limits, nothing is sacred. If you dare try to assert a space where children are left outside the grasp of “drag queen story hour,” advocate the end of Lupron (hormone blockers) given to girls who simply enjoy climbing trees and hate being bullied for it, and if you believe that children have a right to play as they wish in defiance of gender stereotypes without this become yet another medical condition du jour, you will find yourself at the other end of a social and political pile-on where conformists to the ideology of the day ignorantly hold the banner of techno-medical tyranny as they proclaim themselves “progressive” hammering everyone around them into submission.

Today marks one week since Roe v Wade was upended and over the past week I’ve seen anger directed at largely the “wrong people.“ Don’t get angry at your Republican lawmakers, your local clergy, or even Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health. These folks have a hand in this reversal as much as the approach Ruth Bader Ginsberg took in seeking abortion protections under the Due Process Clause, a standing which the court decided last week was not absolute due to medical technology. Even the late Justice Ginsberg admitted that she believed the better legal avenue would have been to have approached the Court under the Equal Protection Clause which would have left the Court’s decision less vulnerable to future attacks. Roe v Wade was inevitably going to be overturned because of the weakness of the Due Process Clause upon which it was argued.

As the terms “cis” and TERF were being flung at journalists and politicians who dared to “mis-speak,” left-of-centre NGOs, universities, and governmental agencies were climbing over themselves to train their staff in the art of disappearing the word “woman” as they strived for recognition from the burgeoning woke and the social-media elite. The formula was easy enough: they pressed the Pavlovian lever by mouthing the appropriate non-cis-heteronormative pronouns as they awaited their social media kudos. There were also bountiful material rewards handed to these agencies including grants for training, conferences, awareness days, seminars, and in-house training. There is handsome funding of major media to ensure that the public will be “educated” about all things transgender, such  The Guardian’s “Genderqueer generation” subsidised by a one-year grant of $250,000 by the Open Society Foundation in 2019.

So, if you must be angry about why we now face a massively uphill battle to secure a new Supreme Court victory for access to abortion—in many respects, a far steeper fight than fifty years ago—that credit goes to the wokerati of the left and neoliberal elites who have pushed the flatearthy of “pregnant people” and “uterus-havers” for years while deftly disappearing “woman” from language and public spaces. After all, if you can't say—much less define—the word "women," then you have zero chance of defending women’s rights or access to reproductive healthcare. In good faith, that is.