Not long ago, these types of stories would have been waved off as nutty right-wing fever dreams about political correctness running off the rails. Few would have taken them seriously, and those wringing their hands about such scenarios would have been dismissed and ridiculed as blowhard weirdos. And yet, here we are.
This is the emerging reality, as dictated by a tiny cluster of elites:
No. Insane. pic.twitter.com/hYM6o9rIAN
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 14, 2021
The organization is literally called the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, and now they want the creepy term "chestfeeding" to replace the word that's embedded in their own name:
A worldwide organization of doctors called the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine urged the use of "gender-inclusive language" such as "chestfeeding," "parent’s milk" and "human milk feeding" in new guidelines. "ABM recognizes that not all people who give birth and lactate identify as female, and that some of these individuals identify as neither female nor male," said in a document posted July 29....The guidance comes after President Biden’s administration used the phrase "birthing people" instead of "mothers" in a 2022 budget proposal, and other medical groups, Democratic politicians and universities employ such language.
This comes on the heels of the American Medical Association urging the banishment of biological sex being listed on public birth certificates, and (as the story quote above notes), the Biden administration replacing mothers with "birthing people" in a budget document. The CDC has also referred to pregnant women as "pregnant people" in official guidance:
Pregnant?and recently pregnant?people are?more likely to get severely?ill from #COVID19, although the overall risk is low. If you are pregnant, visit CDC’s webpage to learn what you need to know to stay healthy and avoid getting sick: https://t.co/ONijYAs38H. pic.twitter.com/OM7X2katKU
— CDC (@CDCgov) August 15, 2021
To give you a sense of how radically and quickly the rules and norms are being changed by a tiny group of activists, it wasn't long ago at all (2018) when President Trump was being attacked in the press over his views on breastfeeding – and not because he used that universally-accepted term. I fully recognize that there are some people who identify as men who have uteruses, get pregnant, give birth, and feed their babies with lactated milk (if that term is still allowed). One study out of UCLA estimated that 0.6 percent of the US population identifies as transgender. If that's roughly accurate, and if there's an approximately equal percentage of trans men and trans women, the universe of people who were born biologically female but now identify as men – yet who are, after surgeries and other treatments, still capable of getting pregnant and giving birth – is less than 0.3 percent of the population (I recognize that some other percentage of the population may lie elsewhere on the 'non-binary' scale). Of this group, only some have ever been, or will ever be, pregnant. And within that smaller group, surely only some would insist on being referred to something other than a "mother," or would find accurate terms like breastfeeding offensive. We are talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.
I believe that we should be kind and generous to others, as the Golden Rule commands. As a member of the LGBT community, I understand that language and norms are sometimes deliberately deployed to "otherize" marginalized people or communities, and we should all strive to respect the dignity and wishes of our fellow human beings – on matters of identity, and more broadly. Extending that kindness and dignity, however, does not require our society to reinvent the English language, or abandon accurate medical terms, (ostensibly) in order to cater to the sensitivities of an extremely tiny group of people. Rather than engaging in large-scale erasure of women and womanhood, we can treat individual cases differently as personal preferences arise, without jettisoning linguistic and biological norms. Doing away with the plain meaning of language and words is not the answer. The whole project is deeply ludicrous and actually feels rather cultish. Indeed, the politicizing of medicine by woke activists is a poison that's aggressively attacking the very process of medical education:
During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class. “I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.” His offense: using the term “pregnant women.” “I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.” It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.” Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”
When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.” In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation. The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes...[one] medical school hosts an online forum in which students correct their instructors for using terms like “male” and “female” or “breastfeed” instead of “chestfeed.” Students can lodge their complaints in real time during lectures. After one class, Lauren says, she heard that a professor was so upset by students calling her out for using “male” and “female” that she started crying. Then there are the petitions. At the beginning of the year, students circulated a number of petitions designed to, as Lauren puts it, “name and shame” instructors for “wrongspeak.”
There is kindness, open-mindedness, politeness and inclusivity. And then there is whatever this is. Parting thought: Moving forward, if this madness intensifies, might there be a way for patients seeking out physicians to determine if a prospective care-giver believes that biological sex is a meaningless construction, or that terms like "breastfeeding" or "pregnant women" are offensive? I'd imagine some number of Americans would prefer to receive care from such an individual. I'd wager that many more would opt for avoidance.
