Behold, a Birthing Person!

I’ll paint you a scenario: you make a true statement. It’s one backed up by facts. It immediately provokes a response from leftists on social media who accuse you of lying.

When Cori Bush, Cory Booker, and a number of other Democrat representatives took to the House floor on Mother’s Day, they used the term “birthing people.” It’s an absurd term, and I drew attention to it by tweeting the words “Stop trying to make ‘birthing people’ happen.”

Immediately, I faced a barrage of responses accusing me of making up the term, with claims that no one seriously uses the term “birthing people.” Obviously, the term is absurd. It dehumanizes and erases women, I’d argue. Why would anyone in their right mind use it? And if they did, they’re clearly in their wrong mind. And they’re on the fringe with no political clout. Right?

I respond that the term is being used by members of Congress. Democrats used it in their references to women in the House of Representatives. Cori Bush used it. Cory Booker used it. All these people used it, unironically, to refer to pregnant women and mothers. It’s absurd, and I pointed it out.

Either through disingenuousness or something else, my detractors ignored or missed the original context of my tweets and jumped to the conclusion that I was creating an issue out of thin air.

Faced with the reality of the facts presented before them - that prominent political figures are using the term to refer to women - my woke hecklers then responded that there’s nothing wrong with the term in the first place.

When you have prominent politicians attempting to normalize a term that alters common language to appease a small group of people, while simultaneously obtaining social credit for their virtue signaling, it’s a problem.

People will say it’s not a big deal. They’ll argue that the term “birthing person” is inclusive, and that its use doesn’t hurt anyone who chooses not to use it. The same could be said for mandatory pronouns, which were once optional when they were being proposed by the fringe left for the sake of inclusivity. And now they’re normalized. Misgender someone at your own peril.

The normalization of words alien to their own meaning is a butchery of the English language intended to appease a fraction of a percentage of the population hypersensitive about their identity. 

When everyday people respond with attempts to disassemble the false justifications, the woke respond with obfuscation and pretend not to know what you’re trying to say. Acting as if common sense is uncommon, or nonexistent, the disingenuous wokester asks for specifics and atomizes the argument. After all, how is the term “birthing people” dehumanizing?

The conversation devolves into granularity, which the woke use to try to convince people into thinking that the term isn’t actually bad. And even if it is, who cares? It’s for the sake of inclusivity, after all. And what’s wrong with making people not feel excluded?

And when their arguments fail, the woke simply resort to calling you a bigot. How dare you let a minor inconvenience take precedence over the inclusion of others.

Yuri Bezmenov, the former KGB agent who outlined the tactics of the social justice left in the 1980s, called it “word pollution” whereby the default meaning of words and colloquialisms are gradually replaced by Orwellian surrogates, partly or completely opposite to reality.

“Man” and “woman” used to be biological terms that referred to males and females, respectively. With the introduction of gender, they have become separated from their original meaning and now refer to the more atomized concept of gender identity. Man and woman are just one of an infinite number of genders.

To that end, people are reverting to the terms “male” and “female” in place of “man” and “woman.” Terms like “biological man” and “biological woman” are also used. Unlike woke social constructions, words used to define men and women exist out of necessity - in the same vein that fire is fire and stone is stone. There’s nothing abstract about “man” and “woman.”

Old-school feminists would argue, and still do, that referring to people by their biological sex is dehumanizing to their personhood. A person is either a man or a woman. Unlike animals, he or she should not be referred to as a “male” or a “female” except in medical terms.

The introduction of gender means that a “trans woman” is now a “real woman” and that womanhood is apparently defined by wearing a dress and the amount of makeup you can put on your face, as if women wake up every morning having to decide to be women before they step into the shower.

Due to the woke escalator, even terms like “male” or “female” are now considered exclusionary, because some people choose to identify as males or females even against biological reality.

Enter the gender-neutral term “birthing person.” No longer are women the only ones capable of having children -- it’s birthing persons. Men who identify as women and women who identify as men, and anyone in between or outside the gender binary, are also birthing persons and not simply “mothers” anymore, provided they can conceive and give birth.

The proponents of “birthing person” claim that terms like “mother” and “father” are remnants of the gender binary - of the patriarchal, cisgender-essentialist, White supremacist kyriarchy. And in a world where non-binary genders exist, “mothers” and “fathers” are obsolete. And to appeal to people who live outside the gender binary, non-binary terms like “birthing person” are pushed through.

“Birthing persons” can be seen as a more politically acceptable alternative to terms like “front holes” and “uterus carrier” - used by well-meaning, but ultimately woke medical professionals. The public might not accept “front hole,” but it’ll certainly go along with “birthing person” if it makes a few people feel included - even if it dehumanizes billions of women.

Not content with arguing for the term’s use, proponents of “birthing person” claim that the term is “medically accurate” as a means to qualify its use. Many things are technically or medically accurate, but that doesn’t mean their use should be encouraged. Referring to people by the numbers on their social security ID or birth certificate may also be accurate but hardly humanizing.

With wokeness comes detachment from humanity - all in the name of inclusivity.

The only way to dismantle these arguments isn’t to abide by their logic. One must dismiss entirely the pretense of “inclusivity” and “equity” and describe them for what they are: inhumanity.

Inclusivity and equity must be seen as dirty words because, in the context of politics, they are. These concepts reduce humanity’s individuality and characteristics to numbers and details on a piece of paper - for women of color to become nothing more than “black birthing bodies,” and for men to be “black and brown bodies” in some imaginary army of race-conscious revolutionaries.

Words mean something, and no amount of gaslighting should change that, lest we risk losing our own humanity.