Mick Hartley

A couple of days back we heard about Milli Hill, author and founder of the Positive Birth Movement, who was abused and "cancelled" for suggesting that obstetric violence in childbirth was committed against women rather than against “birthing people”.

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph – If we can’t use the word ‘woman’ about childbirth, we’re in trouble.

A tiny number of transmen give birth. No one disputes this and Hill certainly doesn’t. Yet for her insistence on not leaving women out of the picture she has been vilified, called poisonous, toxic and of course transphobic. The charity Birthrights dropped her, saying it was proud to be inclusive and would no longer work with anyone “who speak(s) or act(s)  in a discriminatory way”. Hill was called an “exclusionary white feminist”, subjected to a torrent of hate mail and demands for her books to be boycotted. 

Every week another woman heads for the ducking stool while being bullied and having their livelihood threatened. It doesn’t matter if you make wonderful embroidery or you work to make women feel more confident when giving birth or you insist that biology is real. For all these things you will be threatened.  

This is now a kind of hysteria which exists largely on social media but which charities and schools and many institutions run scared of. 

Every week I get emails from teaching assistants, nurses, trainee psychotherapists, even endocrinologists – who may know a thing or two about the effect of hormones – distraught that they may lose jobs if they challenge gender ideology and its ever more reductive language.  

A baby’s sex is not “assigned” at birth, it is observed, and there are rare cases of intersex babies being born who may have a difficult journey growing up, but this is nothing to do with the trans debate.  

This creeping diminution of the word woman into body parts: “cervix-haver” and “menstruator” and mother into “birthing person” and breast-feeding into “chest-feeding”, matters. 

This is done in the name of inclusivity for the small percentage of people who do not identify with their biological sex. Yet if anyone wants to have a baby, they will find they do unfortunately need a uterus. There may well be 150 genders – who actually cares? – but reproduction depends on the messy bodies of the female sex.  

It is our right to name and define our experiences and our boundaries. Women have fought long and hard – not to labour in stirrups, not to be denied pain relief, not to be cut and stitched against our will, to be treated as people not just womb-owners. I am sorry if that is too graphic for you, but shoving another being out of your body is not a walk in the park. 

Feminism is a pushback against the power of men to tell us what’s what – to say that our perception matters. As Andrea Dworkin said, the power of naming is “a great and sublime power”. 

Why then are we expected to tolerate this power grab in the name of inclusion? Hill asks for dialogue. But there is none, just another denunciation. She joins the merry bunch of heretics who will not be silenced. Welcome.

Inclusivity on trans terms means exclusion for women. That's no accident.