Women being erased from online pregnancy literature

As I read popular parenting and pregnancy websites such as Parents and Verywell Family, however, I discovered something strange: Many of these publications are making a deliberate effort to scrub words such as “woman” and “mother” from newly published articles, in favor of something called “gender-inclusive language.” Even venerable scientific publications such as the Lancet and Science are falling in with this trend, or else issuing caveats about how, “unless otherwise specified, the terms women and men refer to ciswomen and cismen”—which is to say, biological females and males respectively.

Many older webpages on pregnancy sites likewise have been retroactively edited to remove feminine-gendered language altogether. Terms such as “pregnant woman” are replaced with “pregnant person,” and “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding” (a particularly senseless redirection, since men, too, have breast tissue and not chest tissue). One also finds plenty of other similarly awkward phrases, such as “uterus owner,” “menstruator,” “front hole” (i.e., vagina), and “opening of the genitals” (i.e., vulva). Some of the efforts at inclusive language involve no fundamental difference in meaning—“monthly bleeding” in place of “menses,” or “hardening or stiffening of erectile tissue” instead of “erection”—but simply involve replacing well-understood words with longer, more confusing synonyms.

I have seven brothers and no sisters. I’ve never felt constrained by being a woman. I’m good at math, and have no problem asking for a raise. My wonderful husband and I have a respectful, egalitarian relationship. Yet from age 13 or 14, when my younger brothers started being able to easily beat me in our frequent fistfights, I was always acutely aware of the obvious biological differences between men and women. Two decades later, at a time in my life when I have never felt more essentially female, more debilitated by a physical condition directly attributable to my biological sex, more in need of clear, informative language describing what I’m going through, journalists and medical authorities are hard at work seeking to obfuscate the differences between male and female bodies.