What with so many other mainstream media outlets, Democrat politicos, and left-wing groups (but I repeat myself) updating their rule and stylebooks (and massively bloated federal spending proposals) to reflect their warped belief that it’s “exclusionary” to use gender-specific terms to refer to women (like her, she, etc.), it was only a matter of time before the wokesters at the Washington Post caught up with them.
Last Friday, their Instagram guy Travis Lyles excitedly tweeted out the announcement that the paper “officially updated its stylebook guidance on how we reference pregnancy and pregnant individuals in our writing to be more inclusive” and included with it the “applause” emoji as well as a screengrab of the updated guidance.
“While biology dictates who can become pregnant, it does not always reflect gender identity. If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary,” the guidance read.
“However,” they noted, “we must take care that our efforts to be more inclusive do not come at the expense of other marginalized groups, such as women, and add to a feeling of exclusion.”
Context was then provided to give further guidance as to when they felt it was appropriate to use the term “pregnant women” versus “pregnant individuals.”
“If you are dealing with a situation in which you know the people identify as women, then you can appropriately use the phrase pregnant woman or pregnant women,” they advised.
On the other hand, they claimed other situations merited the use of more supposedly inclusive terms to reflect that “transgender men and people who are nonbinary can also become pregnant.”
“If a shorter phrase is needed,” they suggested, “especially in headlines, the phrase pregnant individuals may be used (or even pregnant people if space is really tight), but we should be careful about it becoming the de facto usage because it can come across as exclusionary towards women, who are already marginalized …”
I’d like to be able to include the original tweet Lyles sent out, but I can’t because it’s been deleted for some odd reason, presumably because the Washington Post wanted to keep this information on the down-low because “Democracy dies in darkness” and stuff. Unfortunately for him and his employer, the Internet is forever. Here’s the archived version and a screengrab of it is below:
Washington Post’s Instagram guy deleted this tweet for some reason. pic.twitter.com/oxnlX9Sgpx
— Sister Toldjah 😁 (@sistertoldjah) October 4, 2021
It’s amusing in a bit of a perverse way that the paper thinks they can have it both ways on this. On one hand, they don’t want to seem like they are excluding women on stories about pregnancy but on the other, they advocate doing that very thing by absurdly arguing that men can get pregnant, too, and saying those notations should be reflected in their “reporting.”
No, men cannot get pregnant. Even if one identifies as a transgender man, that person was born with the equipment necessary to get pregnant and carry a baby to term. It’s not just insulting to women to suggest otherwise, it’s an insult to the intelligence of everyone who knows better and refuses to bow down to the radical redefining of gender terminology.
Women are not “bodies with vaginas.” They are not “theys” or “theirs.” They are not simply “menstruating people.”
Women are women, and a growing number of them on the right and left are fighting back against what effectively will be an erasure of who they are and their hard-fought-for rights as we know them if this nonsense continues.
The Washington Post can try to have their cake and eat it, too, on this one, but it won’t work. The tide is slowly changing on this issue, in my opinion, as even women who normally don’t get involved much in political arguments aren’t sitting on the sidelines anymore because they understand what’s at stake not just for current generations but future generations of women as well if they don’t speak up now.
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