Yesterday, JK Rowling posted a tongue-in-cheek commemoration of Mother’s Day on X: “Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilised resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses”.
Every single word that Rowling used in that (quite frankly, hilarious) post has been used in all seriousness by trans activists and their allies, with people sternly told off for failing to adhere to it.
Plenty of other ludicrous words have been used too. Last year, the General Medical Council removed the word “mother” from its maternity guidance, because a tiny number of women that identify as transmen have had babies and insisted that they are the child’s father.
Once they’ve given birth, they will be “chestfeeding”.
In 2022, one publisher used the deeply offensive term “womb carriers” when describing how women were “sterilized against their will” in the 1970s. The whole absurdity is capped off by the Orwellian phrase “her penis”, deployed by newspapers to describe the offences of male prisoners identifying as women.
Perhaps I should stop describing myself as a lesbian and opt for “non-man attracted to non-men” instead. After all, that’s how leading American university John Hopkins briefly defined the word – though a gay man was defined simply as “a man” attracted to “other men”. Funny that.
