The introduction of gender-neutral words and terms to replace female-specific ones risks ‘eradicating the language of biological sex’, a columnist has warned.
Writing in The Times, Janice Turner said that the recent orders passed by President Joe Biden which affirm the self-declaration of gender threatens “the very future of women’s rights”.
She added: “In a stroke of the pen, with zero debate or legislative scrutiny, biological sex as a discrete political and legal concept has gone.”
Sex and gender
Turner addressed the increasingly blurred line between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and how this had been adopted by pro-trans organisations like Amnesty International and the United Nations.
Biological sex is not some abstract idea or inner feeling
She stated: “That these two words are constantly conflated is not an accidental linguistic slippage but part of a deliberate decades-long push by trans rights groups to erase biological sex from language and law.”
“Biological sex is not some abstract idea or inner feeling”.
Reality
Turner also cited several instances where companies or institutions are undermining “the reality of our own lives”, by suggesting that men who say they are women are actually biological females.
Amongst these was Tampax, which was strongly criticised after bizarrely claiming that men can have periods, and neonatal death charity Sands who referred to mothers as “birthing parents”.
Referring to surrogacy agencies which now call mothers ‘gestational carriers’, Turner said such language makes women “a mere vessel”, deprived of rights or feelings.
She continued: “Gender-neutral speech doesn’t make biology go away: it just removes the analytical tools to understand and address it.”
‘Complicit supine authorities’
Fellow columnist Lionel Shriver joined Turner in blasting the change in terminology.
Commenting on Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust’s recent move towards rebranding breastfeeding as “chestfeeding”, Shriver lamented: “For medical professionals to misidentify this aspect of the anatomy can only make patients worry about the quality of their education.”
She added that the Trust had been driven to its actions by “a handful of trans activists, in complicity with supine authorities desperate to appear upstanding in ultra-contemporary terms”.
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