CNN Health has an article up today titled “The case for saying ‘pregnant people’ and other gender-inclusive phrases.” This is not an opinion piece but a news article but it reads like a piece of propaganda.
The use of phrases such as “pregnant people” or “penis owners” in cultural or political discourse is sometimes met with confusion, or even anger.
Why use these terms when, as some people ask, “only women can get pregnant” or when “only men have penises?”
If you’ve already guessed that things get worse from here, you’re right. Things get worse when the article attempts to define sex as something assigned at brith.
A person’s sex is what they were assigned at birth based on biological characteristics of maleness or femaleness as indicated by chromosomes, gonads, hormones and genitals.
The inclusion of the phrase “assigned at birth” makes it sound like this is something a doctor decided on and then announced. In fact, people were born male and female long before there were doctors attending births or any knowledge of chromosomes. Nearly all children, with the exception of a tiny fraction who are born intersex, are born either male or female.
The whole idea that sex is “assigned at birth” is pretty nonsensical given that many American women have ultrasounds as a part of prenatal care. The doctor or nurse performing the ultrasound can often determine the sex of the baby months before birth. Would this be sex assigned in the womb? But the article really falls apart when it attempts to explain why it’s so important for doctors to use the newspeak.
In the context of health care, “it’s not just a matter of (being) inclusive or polite, it’s a matter of medical accuracy,” Baron said.
That applies to various medical scenarios, including something as simple as the prescription of antibiotics, which can diminish the effectiveness of birth control. If someone who was assigned female at birth, yet presents as a man, is on birth control and hormones and is given antibiotics because the doctor assumed the patient has a penis based on their appearance and identity, the patient could unwillingly end up pregnant.
Labeling people by what anatomy or biological functions they have allows medical professionals to “be more inclusive and consider those clinical impacts,” Miller added.
I had to read this section over three times because I was sure I was missing something. First, the article says it’s important to be medically accurate which is fine. I agree with that. It also given an example where it would matter to know that a trans man (someone presenting as a man) is in fact a biological woman. Okay, I can see how that would matter too. Finally the twist is that labeling people by the “anatomy” they have is “more inclusive.”
Say what now?
Isn’t calling people men and women a pretty comprehensive way to label them by their anatomy? I think it is. So if a person comes in dressed as a man and offering a man’s name but that person turns out to be a women, how does the term “pregnant people” help us? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for the patient to identify themselves as a woman who presents as a man, i.e. a trans man. The only situation in which I could envision a problem is when the trans person refuses to properly identify their sex to their doctor. Why would someone do this? If they did do it, aren’t they the problem?
Again, the fact that this article which is clearly all in on the trans ideology is saying all of this really threw me off. It wasn’t until I saw that Jesse Singal was having the same struggle session with this article that I realized it wasn’t just me.
5/ Wow it sounds like listing biological sex in medical records — the thing activists have in many cases adovcated *against* — is super important! pic.twitter.com/tZqcU1fEsW
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 6, 2024
7/ This entire article is accidentally a strong argument for why terms like “male” and “female” are immensely useful, regardless of someone’s gender identity, for describing their biological sex.
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 6, 2024
I completely agree. This article didn’t set out to be an argument for including a patient’s actual sex on medical forms rather than just their gender identity, but that’s what it is. Sex matters. It matters in sports, in dating, in prisons and in hospitals to list just a few situations. We’re not going to get around all of this by using language like “pregnant people” which is meant to obscure rather than elucidate.