you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Lyssa 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

"How can someone be dysphoric, yet be okay with getting pregnant and even menstruating (as BC can easily stop this experience), yet the language itself is too triggering?"

This is exactly what I thought when I encountered "people with uteruses" when researching for the upcoming birth of my daughter. How can a trans man be ok with pushing a baby out of his/her vagina (and unlike others on here I am willing to call trans people by their pronouns out of courtesy unless they are abusive/fraudsters/insisting on referring to me as cis or a menstruator etc.) and not be ok with reading pregnancy literature referring to "women"? What is potentially more triggering for dysphoria: a word or the act of giving birth? If you think you're up to the latter you should be able to handle the former...

What is often neglected: All this "inclusive" language is inherently excluding for girls and women without words to describe their bodies either due to disabilities or a religious/traditional upbringing. Ask 10 random women on the street to describe exactly what the words vagina, vulva, uterus, cervix and ovaries refer to and be prepared for some very troubling answers... If pap smears were recommended for "people with cervixes" a lot of women would have no idea that this applies to them.

[–]Anna_Nym 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think like a lot of language reform movements, it's driven by the most extreme activists with little attempt to poll for population preferences. I've known trans men personally who hate the "people with periods" and other similar supposedly inclusive constructions because it emphasizes the most dysphoric aspects of their bodies. I've also known others who didn't hate the constructions, but thought it was unnecessary and saw how it erases women. (They also pointed out that most trans men do not have periods because of T)

But social justice has no way to theorize how to accommodate when an identity group doesn't have uniform opinion. And so we get the loudest, most performative norms.