The Power of Words

When words disappear, the world changes

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.

Recently, we watched a documentary about the American comedian George Carlin. He’s been around a long time and can be quite polarizing; you either love him or hate him. My Significant Other informed me that watching this had been “torture”, while I was laughing out loud.

One of the well-known things about Mr. Carlin is his monologue entitled “7 words you can’t say on TV”.  Ultimately, broadcasting this routine ended up being judged by the US Supreme Court, which looked at this from a First Amendment (free speech) standpoint. By a majority decision the Supreme Court decided that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did have the right to put restrictions on what could be broadcast over the public airwaves in an attempt to avoid any harm that might occur from say, children listening to adult material.

Even in countries that have a history and a legal system that backs up a citizen's right to say whatever they want to say (and many countries lack any protections around speech), common sense dictates social restrictions. For example, every sane person knows that it’s not a joke to yell “fire!” in crowded theater unless there is actually a fire. Only a twisted mind would take pleasure in the panic and possible physical harms that could ensue from a large group of people all desperately seeking an exit.

Altering language does not alter facts, but it can confuse them

In the spirit of “no debate” and “settled science” (sic) that are foundational to the trans agenda, the coerced changes in language that the adherents of gender ideology insist we all follow, tell their own lies.

For starters the prefix “cis” is now everywhere that polite people gather. The purpose of cis is to enforce the belief that the other prefix “trans” is valid and real. This is its only purpose. I refuse to use the term cis because by using this modifier it implies there is more than one category of women and nope, there isn't. You can't "identify" your way into a biological reality.  Consequently, all the confusing rhetoric around the 0.018% of the population born with a DSD (often referred to as “intersex”) is both irrelevant and immaterial to mammalian evolution and our binary sexed, dimorphic reality. 

Trans is a state of mind and cis is irrelevant to this. To state that you are cis, implies that someone else can be trans, which in the case of women means that biological men, most of whom retain their male genitalia, have the right to be in the single sex spaces that were set up to safeguard women (from men). It means that men can win women only awards, sporting competitions and be the first “woman” in positions of power and influence, such as Rachel (born Richard) Levine who is the first “woman” four-star Admiral in the US Navy. The next (real) woman to achieve this will forever be erased from the history books as she will be second.

Birth and breastfeeding: real women only need apply

Everyone reading this probably knows that birth and breastfeeding are my thing. They are my passion and supporting women transforming into mothers is my greatest pleasure. There is no greater change in a woman’s life than becoming a mother. This does not mean, of course that motherhood is every woman’s destiny; that the only fulfilling thing a woman can do is to be a mother. Far from it, I support women to do whatever they choose to do with their lives, and I know many women who do not have children for whatever reason. But here I am talking about women who are mothers.

Contrary to the edicts of gender ideology, only women can give birth and breastfeed. Every culture in the world, for the entire history of civilization, has words that are universally understood by everyone to mean “woman”, “mother” and “breastfeeding”. This is not surprising as this is the very foundation of our species and until fairly recently, the key to surviving infancy. A baby whose mother died or who could not feed him most likely died too. A mother was not just important, she was vital.

Used with permission of the artist

Now of course, it seems no longer to be true as seemingly men can get pregnant, have babies and “chestfeed” them. Except they can’t and every “man” who has a baby is actually a deluded woman with an identity crisis. “Birthing people” and even “pregnant people” are all women; 100% of them. In an ill-gotten attempt at “inclusivity”, actual women have been erased. Parenthood may be gender free, but birth and breastfeeding are sexed activities that rely on women getting the support they need to avoid any problems and for the experience to go well for mother and baby. The information and support that any non-mother parent needs is very different.

It’s bad enough when individuals have problems like this, but when this becomes fully incorporated on an institutional/governmental level, it hurts and damages real people. For example, during the height of the Covid 19 pandemic, hospitals and NICUs restricted visiting to one “parent”.

It should be obvious to everyone that when you are talking about babies, “parents” are not all equal. Only a baby’s mother needs access to her baby so that she can establish a breast milk supply and initiate breastfeeding. Yes, fathers (and other co-parents) will be under stress too, but their absence will not have the sort of physical impact on their baby that not having a mother nearby will have. The only adult who has a preexisting relationship with a baby is the woman who birthed him or her, but using the word “parent” obfuscates that fact.

Gender ideology is riddled with harmful euphemisms

A basic glossary of gender ideology includes terms like “top surgery”, “transgendered” and “gender affirming care/treatment”.

For those just waking up from a long sleep, “top surgery” is the elective double mastectomy of healthy breasts. I repeat, “top surgery” is girls as young as 13 having their healthy breasts amputated so they can pretend they are really boys.

Except of course, they aren’t. And when they finally mature into the women they were always destined to be, many of them are like the woman featured in this case study who bitterly regrets that she can never breastfeed a baby.

Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, Miami, Florida, USA based surgeon touts for business mainly over TikTok. She claims amongst many false assertions, that hardly anyone regrets their own self-mutilation (well she calls it “teetus deletus” because she’s so clever and hip you know), despite online detransitioners groups of 40,000+ and growing daily. Of course, the common side effects of this surgery are nowhere to be seen on her website. So, girls are not going to realize that chronic pain and weeping nipples are their future.

This young girl is erroneously called “male”.

I’m surprised she doesn’t use Edith Piaf in her advertising since she wrote the well-known song “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“No, I do not regret anything”). I don’t know about you, but at age 13 there was no way my brain was equipped to make life changing medical decisions that could not be undone and that would cause me permanent harm.

All those women with breast cancer mourning the loss of their bodily integrity must be shaking their heads in amazement at girls gleefully celebrating a loss that can never be compensated.

Originally “transsexuals” (who were nearly 100% men) were considered to have a mental disorder since doctors used to realize that humans cannot change their sex. Over time, following a meandering path, definitions have changed and ‘depathologized’ what is clearly disordered thinking so that now we have every variety of adult sexual paraphilia and distressed teenager claiming to have been born in the wrong body regarded as mentally sound, but suffering from the treatable condition of “gender dysphoria” and identifying as transgender.

I have previously written about gender dysphoria and its problems. The main problem with current treatment protocols is that they don’t work because there is no ‘cure’ to be found for incongruent thoughts by way of surgical and drug protocols. There’s no magic pill that will save an anorexic person from starving to death; no surgery that will make them realize their skeletal frame is not fat by any measure. No responsible doctor would prescribe diet pills and a gym membership to someone who had stopped eating. But let a child complain that they don’t “feel like” a boy or a girl (when they are) and they will be instantly pushed onto the trans express.  If their parents do not feel this is the right decision, they will be told (often in front of their child) that their child will commit suicide without this intervention, which is a totally false claim.

The trans identity is a performance art lifestyle, using artifice in the name of authenticity and requiring all of us to be on board for this to work. The real reasons for this erroneous mindset are deliberately not explored; one of the reasons is that there are too many profits to be lost from those who are exploiting delusional people.

“Gender affirming treatment” hides a terrible truth. We live in our sexed bodies for our entire journey on this planet and there is no escaping what this means for each of us. To be born a boy or a girl shapes our destiny in every way, big and small forever.

In today’s world, “gender affirming treatment” is code for undergoing procedures that will make healthy bodies sick and turn those people into lifelong medical patients. The purpose of any cosmetic surgery (which is what all of this is as it is not fixing an existing illness or deformity), is to improve a person’s life, not to make them irreparably sicker. When done to children who lack the capacity to give their informed consent (which is ALL children), it is a form of child abuse.

I’ve already written about the lies that parents tell their children, but as I said there, “The lie that you can change/choose your sex is so harmful to children that any qualms over Santa pale into insignificance.”

It seems obvious to us believers in biology that many parents “supporting” their “trans kids” are really just very happy being special, attention gathering parents, and looking at the life of one prominent boy masquerading as a girl provides a cautionary tale. Jazz Jennings grew up in front of a worldwide TV audience and now at 22 years old has severe mental health and physical problems (that are still being broadcast to the world, which makes me wonder if his parents care for him at all).

Prior to puberty, all children’s bodies are fairly similar. This is the ‘easy’ bit of a trans childhood. Grow or cut hair, dress in gendered clothes and it’s good to go. The real problems begin in puberty as the entire purpose of puberty is to ready the body and the mind for adulthood and for the reproduction this implies. Far more than the secondary sex characteristics develop then; that’s when our brains mature too.

The effects of the combination of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatment is sterility. There is no ‘reset’ button as puberty is a time sensitive period in human development and if this is overridden, it isn’t going to gear up ten years later as a result of detransitioning. Jazz does not have the brain of a typical 22 year old because his brain development was prevented from a normal course of maturation. He will never be a biological parent, he will never have a pleasurable sex life and he will never experience an orgasm.

Jazz’s expected adulthood was erased by “gender affirming treatment”.

In the name of inclusion, women and mothers are sidelined and erased in breastfeeding support groups 

The Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA), La Leche League International (LLLI), the UK National Health Service (NHS), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are but four of the many groups/institutions that have rallied to the trans cause of male lactation and the “exclusionary” women who have dominated the lactation field, well since forever really. What about all those men having babies who feel left out of the mother label? Many other former support groups for mothers, as well as individual practitioners have also jumped onboard the Rainbow Express so busy celebrating non-men who don’t want to be called mothers and men claiming motherhood for themselves that the over 99% of us born women and proud of being mothers are crowded out of our own language.

I have already written specifically about men “breastfeeding” and my angle here is to look at this from another perspective. If men (both biological and identifying as) are doing the breastfeeding, where does that leave the women?

Erased actually. And if “parent” is the go to word, well then you can discard all those excess mothers while you are at it.

That’s been LLLI’s approach anyway. For those LLL Leaders who have become alarmed at the loss of women and mothers from LLL publications and websites and complained about this, there is a standard response from the LLL Board. According to them, they are not erasing mothers at all, but are using “a variety of terms” for mother under their inclusivity policy. You know, to include all those non-women having babies.   

I have written here and here about the effects of these policies on Leaders. This post discusses what happens to women when you use gender free language in maternity care and this post explores what happens when you redefine the word “everyone” as LLL has done.

In my early years as a Leader, I never thought twice about helping “everyone” who wanted to breastfeed because the shared social understanding of this was every woman who needed support. But “everyone” now means literally everyone.

Currently, Leaders are being told by LLL that LLLI policy clearly states we need to support anyone who comes to us for breastfeeding support. Apparently, it is discriminatory to not support trans women to breastfeed a child just because they were born men. Confusedly, Leaders are also reassured they need not help with anything other than the normal course of breastfeeding. Which of course, is nonexistent for both natal males and females who have had their breasts amputated. Stating this however, can get you bullied out of leadership.

To which my reply is, who cares about discriminating against an adult when you are trying to prevent harm to a baby? Who has choices and agency, some dude in a dress or a non-verbal baby? Where is that baby’s mother and why is she not doing the breastfeeding? Why is it acceptable to create trauma in a baby by separating him/her from their mother to appease the “distress” of an adult attempting to do the impossible?   

What happened to the safeguarding of the mother/baby dyad, which is the foundation for every human society and culture? Why has this lost its preeminence to the desires of men who claim to be women and women who claim to be men?

From a baby’s perspective, their whole world is wrapped up in the body of their mother. Erase her and you erase a baby’s universe. Changing a baby’s world to suit the feelings of adults with no regard to a baby’s wellbeing is wrong.

Used with the permission of the artist