Veiling women the West way.

The Taliban in Afghanistan doesn’t muck around. When it wants to veil and suppress women, it just demands it. Everyone knows who the women are and aren’t - there are no “what is a woman” questions. If women in Afghanistan had the luxury of identifying out of being women, possibly they’d be doing it in their droves right now. Conversely, I’d say that these days there are very few men in Afghanistan identifying into being a woman. Perhaps some elite degenerates get away with it in secret, but elite degenerates tend to get away with many things.

The West has now created its own version of veiling women. Unlike the Taliban, and other similarly repressive regimes, the West is being more covert about it. Rather than a physical veil, it’s a veil of obscurity via the erasure of women’s words in our language. Words create pictures in our mind’s eye, so when the words used for women are obscure and unclear, the pictures of us in the mind’s eye become the same. How can women and girls be fully seen if we’re veiled by linguistic obscurity? If you think I’m wrong, try and picture something you don’t have a clear word for, and see how easy that is.

New Zealand’s public service liberally uses variations of the below few examples of veiled references to women and girls, simply because men who claim to be women, and vice versa, desire it -

Bodies with vaginas

Menstruating individuals/people

Bodies that bleed

Uterus havers

Pregnant people

Birthing parent

Breastfeeding families – yep, this is how mothers who breastfeed can be referred to.

People who experience menopause

Whānau - Māori word for family (as used by NZ’s Midwifery Council in their revised Scope of Practice, because families now get pregnant, apparently). Whānau has a broader meaning in Māori language than in English.

The absurdity extends far beyond the mere handful above, though. UK midwife, Milli Hill, has written 54 blogpieces on the nonsense terms with which women and girls are referred to. Her blog is for paid subscribers only, but the record is there, and much of it applies to NZ as well.

Recently, Health NZ issued a media release titled “Health New Zealand offers increased community-based maternity services in Southern district”, in which they managed to not say the word ‘woman’ once, but instead referred to people, pregnant people, and whānau. For what? To appease the ridiculously minuscule number of women who claim to be men and become pregnant, as well as appeasing men who claim to be women, but don’t like being reminded they can’t have babies. Health NZ’s solution is to pander to the minority (and they’re not alone) and slap a woke-fix on those clashes with reality by veiling women with the word ‘people’.

Midwife Deb Hayes, who has been at the forefront of challenging the NZ Midwifery Council’s attempts to erase the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ from their revised Scope of Practice, says that when she reads the term ‘uterus haver’ she sees in her mind’s eye a uterus suspended in isolation, not a woman. I daresay that’s exactly how many of us see it, too. Neither should the mistake be made of thinking that phrases like “women and people with a uterus” are okay, because the term “people with a uterus” only serves to make the word ‘woman’ a tag-on.

It’s beyond rational explanation why the Midwifery Council is determined to veil women and mothers with indirect references to them, instead of making them front and centre with clear language. This issue has gone all the way to Parliament, and although the Midwifery Council has made some small grudging changes to the wording of the Scope, the issue is ongoing and not done with yet.

Visibility for anything or anyone requires words with meanings which are largely agreed upon and widely understood in the main. As a basic rule, public communications should be understandable for most of the people most of the time. But our public service, and many organisations, are now routinely using veiled references for women instead of specific words.

Not so much for men, naturally. Men don’t tend to give away stuff that’s intrinsic to them so easily, hence they’re not giving up their language for women who claim to be men. Well, not yet, anyway. Of course, it’s notable that women who claim to be men are, strangely, not haranguing men’s organisations to veil men with obscure language.

Veiling women in language in the West requires the collusion of women, and there are all too many falling over themselves in their rush to join the pity-party for men who claim they’re women. Why so many ostensibly intelligent and educated women are doing this is a mystery, but at least part of it can be put down to the indoctrination of gender ideology at school and university, and the absence of any material to counter it. I don’t think there’s much doubt we can thank transactivists for instigating this hugely harmful strike against women’s language and learning.

Language is arguably the most important tool we have in life. We use it to convey information and ideas, and from that we create everything. Or, it can be used to dismantle and destroy. A reader of this blog told me how she remembers a senior lecturer at Massey University, Marian Court, imparting the wisdom that we need to be cognisant of how we word the world.

So true!

Unlike how the Taliban enforces the subjugation of women, language is the tool being used by parts of the West to force-veil us. First, we get veiled, then gagged, and consequently our participation in public life gets curtailed by those things. All in a covert creeping way, done in the manner of an insidious miasma.

Stopping it won’t be a pushover, but if we value ourselves and the freedoms won for us by our female forbears, we must fight to retain women’s language. If we lose our words we lose our visibility, and weaken our ability to even engage in a fight.

All in all, this is just a brief commentary about a matter which has far-reaching implications - with nothing to prevent the same tactic being used on other groups, if allowed to continue. Our language is something worth fighting for.

• ‘Man gives birth’ doco requires major denial of reality - by Graham Adams.

  A woman who claims to be a man is celebrated by the mainstream media for

  doing what many women do - having a baby.

• Health New Zealand seems allergic to using the word 'woman' - but not the word 'man'.

  A year ago, Karen Guilliland, the ex-CEO of the College of Midwives (not to be confused with the Midwifery Council), and others wrote to Health NZ about the language they used for women, compared to the language they use for men.

• More Public Consultation on Midwifery! (& a Thistoll-Note)

  There have been a few recent ‘political’ manoeuvres by the Midwifery Council on the issue of their revised Scope of Practice, but nothing that has been written up yet, so this remains the latest.