There is a kerfuffle in the United Kingdom that pits feminists against trans-people, and it all deals with whether or not the United Nations is being inclusive enough by labeling mothers as “pregnant women.”
Recently, Britain proposed amendments to the United Nation’s International Covenant on Civil and Political rights that would change the clause that says “pregnant women” should be protected to “pregnant people” should be protected. The British government fears that not changing the term to an all inclusive one will “exclude transgender people who have given birth.” In other words, it will neglect to protect women who identify as men that are pregnant.
But feminists argue that this move is simply the transgender movement extending and embracing the patriarchal society and further removing women from the conversation.
Leading feminist writer Sarah Ditum heavily criticized the move, “This isn’t inclusion. This is making women unmentionable. Having a female body and knowing what that means for reproduction doesn’t make you ‘exclusionary’. Forcing us to decorously scrub out any reference to our sex on pain of being called bigots is an insult.”
This actually highlights a growing problem on the left between feminists and transgender activists. Feminists take offense to the transgender’s movement desire to remove all gender form the public sphere because it, well, removes women from the public sphere as well.
Earlier this year, a fight actually broke out at a skirmish between feminist leaders and transgenders leaders. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) is a British group that believes trans-women are not actually women and therefor should not be given the same legal protections as actual women. At a rally, that group got in a fist fight with trans-activists who opposed their mission.
But the desire by the British to change the U.N. Treaty seems rather silly, there have been only two known cases in the United Kingdom where children are born to women who transitioned to men but kept their reproductive organs.