No matter how determined we are to be inclusive, there are some limits to what different humans can do. And for a person with a penis, having a baby is one such limit.
A fact you’d imagine a midwife would know better than most. But the reality, it seems, is rather different.
So much so that a midwifery course at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland was recently outed by whistleblowing students for attempting to teach them how to catheterise a penis.
Students were told their module on catheterisation — a procedure sometimes done during labour to drain the bladder — had been fully updated, because they ‘may be caring for a pregnant or birthing person who is transitioning from male to female and may still have external male genitalia’.
That’s right: a highly experienced midwifery lecturer with a PhD taught students that a male person could give birth.
Again and again, through my work as a writer and campaigner for women’s rights in childbirth, I have been approached with frankly dystopian stories showing how in thrall to trans rights midwifery has become.
For example, at one university, I’m reliably informed a visiting lecturer has told students they must refer to ‘birthing people’ rather than ‘women’ in their essays, or face their work ‘being looked upon less favourably’.
Other student midwives, from various courses, have told me they have been instructed to use the terms ‘childbearing individual’ or ‘pregnant people’ to be more ‘inclusive’.
This suggests a baffling lack of biological awareness. But it’s not only lobby groups or niche communities on social media who appear to be erasing women from issues concerning their own bodies — you will also see major birth and breastfeeding organisations, and even NHS trusts, falling over themselves to write posts and even policy documents that don’t mention women at all.
However, though the sex reassignment surgery industry is projected to be worth £1.2billion by 2026, the numbers of trans men giving birth are very low. In my own research I have heard of fewer than ten cases in the UK in the past five years.
So the chance of your average midwife ever encountering a pregnant person with a surgically constructed penis are smaller than minuscule.
Yet huge amounts of time and energy, not to mention money, are being put into resources to teach midwives about ‘inclusive language’.
None of this, sadly, surprises me. Back in November 2020, I questioned the term ‘birthing people’ in a social media post and was subjected to terrifying online attacks calling me a ‘terf’ — meaning a ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’ — ‘toxic’ and a ‘dangerous piece of s***’.
There were calls to destroy my books, and I was publicly ostracised by leading figures and organisations from the world of childbirth.
It’s always amazing to me that midwives and antenatal teachers, often known for being firmly against the medicalisation of childbirth, are at the same time so captured by an ideology that supports puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgery to remove body parts in young people distressed about their relationship to their sexed bodies.