Read this whole article. It’s a long, interesting, thoughtful, and compassionate view of the current trans movement.

Governments, companies and charities now talk of ‘people who menstruate’, ‘pregnant people’, ‘abortion seekers’ and ‘birthing parents’, where they would once simply have said ‘women’. As such, women are being erased.

 

The NHS explains that ‘the concept of virginity for people with vaginas has a complicated history’. Teen Vogue offers a ‘no-nonsense, 101 guide to masturbation for vagina owners’. Information campaigns from cancer charities tell ‘anyone with a cervix’ to get regular smear tests. An advert for Tampax enjoins the world to ‘celebrate the diversity of all people who bleed’.

 

This language depicts women as orifices, providers of genetic material and vessels for growing offspring. This is not just dehumanising: it also obscures the fact that these body parts and functions come as a package.

 

How much harder it would have been to argue for the vote for women, or for paid maternity leave, or to end the exemption that allowed men to rape their wives at will, if the only way to refer to the beneficiaries of such policies had been to list bodily secretions and sexual organs.