Good God, people. I only slept for four hours (dog woke me), and I come back to find this, whatever-this-is … I don’t know whether to call it a discussion or not.
I will now throw some gasoline on the fire: my preferred usage in global situations is “pregnant women.” The fact that that term may not strictly apply in every physiological instance, doesn’t IMHO justify broadening the terminology so as to be always inclusive of a numerically small, anomalous* group.
When referring to specific anomalous instances, by all means, be specifically, physiologically descriptive, e.g., “pregnant man,” “pregnant transplanted uterus,” whatever. But in general, throughout the history of human beings, it’s women who have been pregnant. Quibble over the definition of “women,” if you must.
“Pregnant patients,” okay. But to me pregnant people sounds weird.
*anomalous–deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected.
ETA: It’s funny. You never know what topic is going to stir up the troops. Interesting ride. Thanks.
Even if we leave out LGBTQ, the term pregnant women is needlessly redundant and in no way more specific, and even problematic and sexist. Pregnant is the only terms that is needed to define the sub-classification after that we are talking about a person (unless we are talking about an animal). Additionally women are people and for far too long people tended to refer to the male subset and women or females would refer to the female. It’s even worse when talking about abortion and someone says people who have abortions… and someone tried to (falsely) correct them by saying ‘women’ who have had abortions. No shit Sherlock, but the issues is not that they are women but they are people and deserve the same rights and respect, not some sub-class.
That’s fine. In most contexts, you are close enough and your audience will understand you. And i predict that over time, and as you encounter it more and more, “pregnant people” will sound less weird to you.
Indeed there’s a tremendous amount of word calisthenics going on to be trans inclusive regarding pregnancy but if you’re pregnant it’s obvious you were born female.
Hardly calisthenics. I bet Shakespeare would have understood “pregnant person” just fine.
But see what i said in the other thread. It’s rude in most contexts to point out that a trans person was thought to be some other gender when they were born.
I do think it’s funny that it’s no one in this thread has suggested “policing language” to be trans inclusive. But several seem to want to police language to be trans exclusive. You might want to step back and think about whether you really want to do that.
At the risk of obviously closing the barn door long after the horse has departed, this thread is closed. The discussion is accomplishing nothing except to make people frustrated and angry.
