When a thousand or so academics arrived at a large social science conference in an Australian capital city a couple of years ago, they soon discovered that the toilets in the convention centre were designated ‘All-gender’.
Some of the women who felt uncomfortable sharing toilets with men had to hold on all day. When asked, the centre’s attendants said the conference organisers had made the decision so labels on toilet doors were changed for the duration.
I would like to think that the conference organisers were well-intentioned, attempting only to provide safe and comfortable conditions for the handful of trans and non-binary participants, which is all to the good, but over-reached by eliminating separate toilets. Yet it seems more likely they were performing their solidarity with marginalized groups, the kind of performance demanded by zealots of gender ideology and at the expense of other groups.
The thing is, some of the academics at the conference had arrived from Indonesia and Malaysia wearing hijabs. The hijab symbolizes modesty and the privacy of the body, as well as the wearer’s faith. Now their Australian hosts were asking them to share a space for intimate bodily functions with men.
I can imagine the reaction of the organising committee members, or at least the gender ideology enforcers among them, had one member suggested it may not be a good idea to have all-gender toilets when Muslim women would be attending and, indeed, when many other women feel uncomfortable and unsafe in them. The dissenter would perhaps have been accused of wanting to reproduce bioessentialist, cisnormative spatial regulation of embodied identities.
In truth, this rebel would have been arguing against the blatant cultural imperialism of privileged white Australians imposing their ideological beliefs on other societies, of ignoring the shame and embarrassment that Muslim women may experience were they forced to share toilets with men.
As it turned out, the women wearing hijabs, along with all the other women who felt uncomfortable, could be found clustered around the one women’s toilet that, for those in the know, could be found at the outer reaches of the conference centre.
Civilising mission
The members of the organising committee are among those at universities who for decades have trained themselves to detect and expose the operations of Western power in the Global South and the subtle ways privileged groups compel minorities to conform to elite norms.
Hell, it’s likely some of these people gave papers on the topic at the conference.
Yet when confronted with women from Muslim societies who hold culturally and religiously grounded expectations of bodily privacy and separation of the sexes, many of these same people and their institutions suddenly rediscover the civilising mission. The message becomes: enlightened people no longer believe in that separation, and those who do must learn that gender has superseded sex.
The language of inclusion becomes coercive when inclusion for one group is exclusion and punishment for another (reference the Giggle vs Tickle case). In this case, the excluded were women from less powerful cultures visiting a wealthy, white, Western country. Their discomfort was rendered invisible because the hierarchy of marginalized groups had already been decided. Affluent Western professionals congratulate themselves on their sensitivity while compelling women from the Global South to leave their outdated beliefs about modesty and bodily difference at home.
However, it is not as simple as that.
A person with a cervix
American non-government organisations have been actively spreading ‘gender-neutral’ language and associated ideology into global public health programs. Promoting respect for differences in sexual and gender orientation in the Global South is one thing, but the imposition of genderist language and the practices that go with it is often experienced as cultural and linguistic imperialism.
Over 250 breastfeeding counsellors from around the world wrote to the executive of the large US charity La Leche League USA, which advocates for and assists breast-feeding mothers, complaining that the imposition of gender-based language sends the message that ‘your country is not as important as the U.S. and those in Western countries that have been influenced by U.S. culture.’
Postcolonial and Global South feminist traditions have long warned against Western activists who treat as universal their own moral and linguistic assumptions while dismissing the cultural norms of non-Western women. It’s precisely the kind of ‘gendered Orientalism’ visible on the toilet doors of the social science conference.
The ten experts were prompted by the use in a Lancet cover story of the term ‘bodies with vaginas’ instead of ‘women’ and went on to list other desexed terms now in common use in maternity and breastfeeding: ‘birth persons’ in place of birthing mothers; ‘chestfeeding’ instead of breastfeeding; ‘chest tissue’ instead of breasts; and, in addition to ‘bodies with vaginas’, ‘cervix havers’ and ‘vulva owners’ for women.
These healthcare professionals explain how the use of desexed language contravenes the plain language principle of health communication. Women in the Global South, along with women in Western countries with low literacy, with an intellectual disability, or from communities where English is not the first language, are confused by terms such as ‘chestfeeding’ or ‘person with a cervix’ and may be left without information vital to their health and that of their babies. In fact, pretty much everyone is bewildered by them.
They also point out that these terms dehumanize women and mothers by using body parts to describe them. Language ‘that respects childbearing women is imperative given the prevalence of obstetric violence.’ Using ‘parents’ in place of ‘mothers’ renders women invisible, diminishing the unique experiences, needs and rights of pregnant and breastfeeding women.
Replacing breastfeeding with ‘human milk feeding’ or ‘body feeding’ disembodies the act of breastfeeding, characterizing it as a process of milk transfer. In addition to instrumentalising the mother-baby relationship, the mechanical language of ‘body feeding’ breaks down the wall between natural breastfeeding and the use of bottled milk, something formula manufacturers have been attempting for decades, especially in poor countries, and immortalised in the ‘Nestlé Kills Babies’ campaign. (I say ‘immortalised’, although the company appears to have had the once-ubiquitous phrase purged from Google searches.)
The colonisation of motherhood and breastfeeding by trans zealots has generated strong pushback from breastfeeding support workers, although many are pressured and bullied into silence (see my previous post). The co-founder of La Leche League, Marian Tompson, resigned because of the takeover, expressing her anger at the charity for accepting men ‘who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding.’
‘For whatever reason.’ That is another topic.