Skip to content

Well, yes

The Royal College of Midwives referred to mothers as “postnatal people” in new guidance before issuing an apology hours later for “erasing” women.

The RCM published “safer sleep” guidance for those sharing a bed with their newborns and for helping them get to sleep.

However, the guidance, published on Wednesday evening, makes no reference to “women” or “mothers”, instead referring to “postnatal people”.

The publication sparked a backlash on social media, and by Thursday morning it had been removed from the RCM website.

This floated around yesterday and the usual people were shouting about how we’ve got to be inclusive and all that. Transmen do give birth! So, language must be welcoming to them!

Well, yes, some transmen do. Freddie McConnell. Umm, Freddie McConnell. Umm, anyone else?

The point being not that Freddie is the only one. Rather, it’s an event of such vanishing infrequency that no, we don’t in fact have to change the entire language to accommodate them.

I’d not want to have to put money on this but I’d put the frequency up there with folks being stuck by lightning say. Meaning that the vast, vast, majority of people being addressed are in fact that traditional, see themselves as female, mothers thing. And while they might be only a little pissed at being referred to as “postnatal people” a little bit in a lot adds up to more than pissing off Freddie.

That’s if we’re being reasonable about it of course.

If we’re going to be accurate about it the correct answer is “Fuck off Freddie.”

8 thoughts on “Well, yes”

  1. Well, yes, some transmen do.

    You mean “mentally ill self-hating women” surely? Such people will never be happy, unless they learn to accept the physical reality of their bodies.

  2. This is the usual run it up the flagpole stuff. They got saluted alright. It’s not the Freddie McConnells making the fuss, rather the usual activists who want to exercise control over everyone else and the cowardly HR organisations who seem to be the first to fall in line with whatever idiocy is in the air at any given moment. The vanishing small minority of transmen are simply a useful stick to beat us with.

    We do not have to be inclusive. The Freddie McConnells of this world can do as they please and all that we need to do is be polite should we encounter them. That’s it. We are under no obligation to them whatsoever, least of all to twist our language out of shape and meaning.

  3. I suppose that the beam in the eye of the Royal College of Midwives prevents them from noticing that words like ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ are not the only ones that explicitly denote sex.

    The consequences of sanitising the dictionary is that you quickly end up in obfuscation or in nonsense formulations like ‘postnatal people’. Even the most fragile and sensitive individuals with retro-fitted private parts can come to terms with the reality that they had mothers and that this reality is common to us all.

  4. Longrider said: It’s not the Freddie McConnells making the fuss

    She made a fuss about wanting to be listed as the “father” on her child’s birth certificate, wasted taxpayers money on her ridiculous lawsuit against the General Register Office, claiming “discrimination” that breached her “human rights”.

    So I agree with MC. The thing about Freddie McConnell is that she’s a woman. Her getting pregnant and then giving birth is convincing evidence of that.

    She can call herself a man if it amuses her, and obviously it does. She’s “legally” a man, and there’s one school of thought that says we should render unto Caesar. I have a slightly different theological proposition: fuck Caesar and set about him with furious lions. It’s bad enough when the State steals your hard-earned, but you don’t need to let them turn you into an emasculated liar too. Your sanity and probity are worth more than money.

    TMB said: The consequences of sanitising the dictionary is that you quickly end up in obfuscation or in nonsense formulations like ‘postnatal people’.

    It’s worse than that. When words lose meaning, the software of human civilisation becomes irreparably corrupted. We’re facing total epistemological failure – a land of confusion, inhabited by weird, doughy looking bugpeople who don’t even know what sex they are.

    A fatwa on that. We want men to be real men, women to be real women, and squirrel-suited sex fiends to be real squirrel-suited sex fiends. I have spoken.

  5. Just thinking of a niece of mine, young Julia. While she’s more woke than me – that wouldn’t be hard – I don’t think she has any objection at all to being called the mother of younger Robbie.

  6. Do they call them “postnatal people” when they translate the stuff into Urdu, Arabic, and such?

    P.S. I recently received an NHS invitation to be flu-jabbed. It was translated into a near endless list of the languages of the backward world, but not Frog, Kraut, Cloggie, Scandowegian, Nipponese, Tally, or Murrcan. Vot meanz? Do we expect everyone civilised to be able to read English these days? Isn’t that a bit close to racist?

    P.S. Perhaps the oddest was Yiddish but written in what I suppose was Hebrew script. I’d have guessed that Yiddishers usually used the German style of the Latin alphabet but maybe not?

    P.P.S. At least it made me look up Twi. Ghana, you know.

  7. Tim,the frequency is down there with people being struck by lightning *twice* – it is significantly lower than people being struck by lightning once, or even surviving being struck by lightning.

  8. Demonstrative of RCM’s wokeness:

    Women and wokeness

    With sexual equality, females will be appointed over males as they will tend to be easier to work with, having higher Conscientiousness and higher Agreeableness. They will be what Bruce Charlton has called the “Head Girl” types, the kinds of popular and academically high-achieving, though conformist, females who are appointed head prefects at British girls’ secondary schools … The growth in the presence of these kinds of women at universities has fundamentally changed the culture of academia, rendering it less focused on the unbridled pursuit of truth.
    https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/lockdown-wasnt-worth-it

    @Longrider, December 3, 2021 at 8:27 am
    I agree

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *