For all its talk about “inclusion”, contemporary identity politics defaults to obliteration.
On the linguistic issue, the challenge of making society more affirming of people who do not identify with their birth sex has not seen the corresponding rise in terms such as “people with penises”, “sperm producers” or “upstanding urinators”. It is only women who are being erased and objectified in health literature in the name of progress.
In a similar vein, the AFLW holds a pride round to show solidarity with LGBTQ communities, even though the women’s competition is already a welcoming space for the gay and gender diverse.
Meanwhile, the men’s AFL has no pride round, and no players who have come out as gay. Not even one. This is not a criticism of the players themselves; their personal lives are precisely that. It is simply to flag, as Greg Baum did in a column last year, that AFL culture might be partly to blame.
Obviously, gender-neutral language is an ethical imperative in health information directed at the transgender community. But when the editors of Lancet last year headlined a cover story on the movement against menstrual shame with the quote, “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected,” they were, at best, oblivious to irony.
When, as Wendy Tuohy reported here on the weekend, federal bureaucrats repeatedly choked on the word “women” while drafting a guide about COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant and breastfeeding women, it’s clear they were more concerned about sounding politically correct than they were about getting correct health advice to the public.
Source: Birth-givers to pride jumpers: how progressive politics is going wrong