How inclusive language dismembers women
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 by 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 Melinda Byerley’s “uterus-holding individuals” also tend to be the cervix-havers and menstruators and gestators and birthing parents and chestfeeders of the world. These are not six distinct groups of people but a single group whose shared interests and experiences are being denied. Gender-neutral language chops a woman’s lifespan into disjointed stages, destroying the basis for solidarity across generations of women and erases 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, an experience that reverberates across her entire life.
Like men, women experience our lives as full human beings. Our lives are bound up in our sex and it’s 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: over abortion and reproductive autonomy, pregnancy and childbirth, surrogacy and prostitution, 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.
