First, they came for the manholes and we calmly stood back and let them do it in the interests of diversity and inclusion. What harm could there possibly be in calling a hole that might equally be used by a woman a personhole?
So we let them change it even though the numbers of persons that climb down personholes to go fossicking around in the sewers and drains to clean and fix things down there, still remain predominantly male and manhole was of course nothing more than one of the many generic uses of the word “man”. But we went along with it because it seemed harmless enough at the time.
None of us was totally wedded to manholes anyway. I mean who cares if it’s a manhole or a personhole? Either works for me. And there will always be people around with very little to do with their time, whose experience of life is tragically limited and although they are neither a manhole or womanhole user themselves, the fact that either can exist traumatises their thinking. Those same people (be they manholers, womanholers or personholers) seldom have a deeply studied understanding of language, history or etymology. Indeed, their knowledge is often very limited. They just know that gender is important because loads of strange noisy people keep saying so.
I have a manhole in my garden and two more manholes in the house. I’ve never seen a woman use any of them and none of my many female visitors has any intention whatsoever of ever going down or up any of them no matter what I call them. They simply don’t believe my assertions that they will find a fortune in a bucket of gold at the end of the ducting if they crawl to the end. Further, the name, be it manhole, womanhole or personhole, does nothing whatsoever to make it more appealing to anybody. The next person to use one, regardless of the name, is almost 100% guaranteed to be a bloke who has to get in there to do something shitty that most women still don’t much like to do.
Despite the convincing evidence that the other gender has no interest at all in our manholes, it seems we’ve lost our manholes for good, and they’re among many simple “gender” type words that are unacceptable these days as the lunacy around gender reaches padded cell levels.
So face it, we went from a harmless manhole to a gender-neutral personhole that’s hardly ever used by a female, and now we have a cacophony of ludicrous terminology that we should or shouldn’t use in the interests of diversity and inclusion.
“Birthing person” for mother? – nah – bridge too far for too little gain. But why?
“A Harvard Medical School department Twitter account referred to women as “birthing people” in a tweet, and claimed that “not all who give birth” are women.”
Right. Not all who give birth are women. Anybody care to explain how that actually works in biology? If your doctor trained at Harvard, you might like to check if they share the view that “not all who give birth are women”. If you can get somebody to answer that question, you might get a list of exactly what “others who give birth” might be and how they might achieve the miracle of birth without having all the necessary bits to do it. To my knowledge, there’s not a queue of persons with penises lining up pregnant and delivering children regardless of what they call themselves.
As we often say on The BFD, explaining is losing, and Harvard tried to explain:
“A Harvard Med Postgraduate Twitter account posted a follow-up tweet, explaining why such verbiage was used. The webinar panelists used the term ‘birthing person’ to include those who identify as non-binary or transgender because not all who give birth identify as ‘women’ or ‘girls.”
Clear as mud. Great to see that the future of medical studies at one of the foremost Ivy League universities in the USA is secure and following the science. Where are the feminists on this stuff? I mean seriously. Why are the feminists saying nothing as women are demeaned by this hypocritical virtue signalling nonsense?
Birthing persons. What next?