“Womb carriers”, “bodies with vaginas”, and the importance of the word women
I am not a feminist, let alone a radical one. And yet I increasingly identify with TERF’s (Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminists) in feeling unnerved by the new vocabulary currently being mainstreamed by the trans lobby.
The most recent example came from Verso Books, the world’s most successful far-left publishing company, which used the term “womb-carriers”.
There are plenty of newly coined and equally disturbing gender-neutral alternatives to the now outmoded terms women and mothers: bleeders, individual who menstruates, chestfeeder, person with a cervix, birthing parent…
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) commemorated the passing of the awful Ruth Bader Ginsburg by sharing one of her quotes about abortion, but altered the wording to remove any mention of the W word:
While the social media accounts of left-wing booksellers and advocacy groups may be a rather niche concern, this language is seeping through our entire culture, including the medical establishment.
The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, utilised the phrase “bodies with vaginas” on its front cover.
This ‘trans inclusive’ language is reminiscent of Meatholes — the title of the internet’s most abusively misogynistic porn website. In both, women are reduced to their anatomical parts and biological functions. It's entirely unsurprising that Andrew Anglin, the internet's most prolific misogynist, has repeatedly adopted this language, referring to Elon Musk’s ex-wife as an “ugly old body with a vagina” and to the novelist Margaret Atwood as a “bio front hole individual” (front hole is the ‘trans-inclusive’ version of the word vagina).
“I’ve been referring to women as ‘bodies with vaginas’ for years” Anglin writes on The Daily Stormer. “We in the incel community love to see this kind of mainstreaming of our ideas.”
“I am willing to support the Democrat Party in any way I can”, Anglin claims in another post, “to proceed in their valiant and noble efforts to completely dehumanize these creatures” — by which he means women.
It says something that Anglin’s own various neologisms (“biological vaginal entity”) are no more offensive than those of the trans lobby. We are either willing to say the word women or we dehumanise women.