Washington Post: Pregnant Women Are No Longer Pregnant Women, They Are "Pregnant People"
I’m guessing that most instances until recently had a comma between the words, such as in, say, “When she was pregnant, people were solicitous.”
Marx’s theory was that the working class will win because there are so many of them. The new view reverses that: that the deranged, confused, and disagreeable must win because there are so few of them.
7 comments
First of all, pregnant women are pregnant people. Putting the emphasis on her personhood might - it might - get mouth breathers to start recognizing women are human beings.
"...the deranged, confused, and disagreeable must win because there are so few of them"
This poster doesn't recognize what is and is not dangerous to his continued freedom. For example, he sees the evolution of languages as dangerous but doesn't appear to pay too much attention to the fact that, with the GOP at least, the inmates are running the asylum.
This board alone hosts a rogues' gallery of legislators who have made racist sexist, xenophobic statements on the Floor to be forever memorialized in the public record. These examples of deranged, confused, and extremely disagreeable men and women were elected to office by people who admired those very qualities in them.
They always were people, is that too hard for you to grasp? There are only a few transmen who still have working uteruses, no reason they shouldn’t be included, if they manage to reproduce. Good on you for calling someone’s mother “deranged, confused, and disagreeable”! (/paint blistering sarcasm)
Floating a couple possibilities here:
Some people got unreasonably weird with the phrase “trigger warning”, and even that phrase becoming common use didn’t help much. That died down after it was mostly replaced with “content warning”. In that vein, perhaps replacing it with something like “those who are pregnant” or “one/anyone/someone/somebody who is pregnant” might help? And use only “pregnant person/people” only if talking about nonbinary people specifically or it would be otherwise cumbersome, and maybe still use “pregnant man/woman” when talking about a specific, known person of binary gender? That’s a bit more complicated but more subtle, and less likely to raise the hackles of cis women whose identity as a woman is strongly tied to their “exclusive” breeding capabilities (some fundies and most TERFs). It might simply be the wrong turn of phrase for this time, even if the reasons for this are petty reactionary ones.
Alternately: Throw it back in their faces. “Yes, once they become pregnant women stop being people and become baby vessels” (or “meat sacks” if you want to be particularly mean). Might get some to reconsider just a tiny bit, though don’t be surprised if they sometimes agree. “When you become pregnant, your life is no longer your own” is a common refrain among anti-abortionists, after all.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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