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Using gender-neutral language to talk about sex-based oppression is not neutral. It actively obscures what’s happening, to whom, and why.
Advocates for “inclusive” language argue there’s no cost to being "respectful" and avoiding sex-based terminology, but that’s just not true—and it begs the question: respectful to whom?
Gender-neutral language dismembers women and girls’ bodies, reducing us to body parts and functions. Gender-neutral language makes the lives of women and girls—who are often marginalized to begin with in a world that still views men as the default human—harder to see and value.
It’s not a coincidence that uterus-holding individuals also tend to be the vagina- and cervix-havers and menstruators and gestators and birthing parents and chestfeeders of the world—
—yet gender-neutral language chops a woman’s lifespan into disjointed stages, destroying the basis for solidarity across generations of women and undermining the continuity of the individual across time.
The "uterus-haver" whose path to an abortion is blocked is the girl whose childhood is terminated by becoming a mother or the woman who dies from a back-alley abortion. The “menstruator” is a girl who—in many developing countries—has to drop out of school once her period starts.
Like men, women experience our lives as full human beings. Our lives are bound up in our sex and its our lives that are at stake in the global struggle for reproductive and sexual autonomy.
Women and girls are not random mashups of body parts and reproductive and sexual services.
Thinking and talking about women and girls in this way erases our humanity from some of the most vital and heated debates of our time:
Thinking and talking about women and girls in this way erases our humanity from some of the most vital and heated debates of our time:
over abortion & reproductive autonomy, pregnancy & childbirth, surrogacy & prostitution (who has a right to buy a woman’s body is a wholly different question than the sale of sexual & reproductive services), and peddling lifelong medicalization in the form of gender identity.
The reality here is anything but neutral and the language we use—when we write women and girls out of the picture—is anything but inclusive.
