Standing for Women & Girls: Why I Use Female Language & Resist Gender Ideology

When I was a small child, I was as Mormon (LDS) as they come. I was certain I had the Truth (with a capital T) and the religious community around me assured me that I did. My family was pretty “letter of the law” Mormon (in contrast to some families that live/d a less extreme “spirit of the law” approach). 

I remember in middle school having religious conversations with my good friend who was Muslim. We were both certain that we had the truth and there was just no ability for either of us to compromise on truth. The beauty of our child minds, however, was that we could still love and accept each other regardless. 

As a teenager, I ended up questioning my religious beliefs for various reasons, which was a major existential crisis for me and led to me questioning the whole world (which I generally haven’t stopped doing, now minus the teenage angst and with a whole lot more wisdom and peace).

The moment I emotionally and physically left the Mormon church was the moment that I realized just how dangerous dogmatic approaches to life can be. I dealt with family members who just couldn’t get over the fact that I was willingly leaving the One True Church behind to embrace…what? (I’ll tell that story one day…)

And thus began my dark and then beautiful entanglement in Uncertainty and Mystery. And the releasing of my need to always have something in my life that resembles Absolute Truth.

Because I no longer believed that such a thing existed.

As I grew older and I fell in love with anthropology (deepening my childhood love of cultures), I deeply internalized the understanding that culture is a complicated lens that helps us big-brained mammals make some sense of a mysterious universe that seems to sometimes just be utter chaos.

And that when you stack biology and culture next to one another, the parts that are very biological have a huge impact on our lives, but culture often has an even bigger impact (yes, even and most especially on our bodies).

When you listen to these various cultures’ stories (as we all should do in a globalized world), you realize that everyone thinks they have the ultimate truth on the nature of the universe. Which means that none of us do (though I do believe that we all have significant pieces of useful truths).

Some cultures build complexity into their stories to reflect this idea.

But western cultures certainly do not. Ours is the story of progress at all costs. Ours is the story of how brilliant we are because we won the race to the Industrial Revolution. And science. And technology. And medicine. And Christianity. And art. And all the things.

We’re quite proud of ourselves, and it’s true that we have a lot to be proud of. Antibiotics have radically changed how we handle serious infections that could have killed someone in the past. (Though I fear we may lose them due to our overuse of them…) The internet has radically changed our ability to freely share information across cultures to combine worldviews, ideas, science, and indigenous lifeways to better inform and improve our dysfunctional cultural practices. (And the internet is also a dumpster fire…)

Thank the gods for emergency medicine and some aspects of science that have allowed us to better understand this mystery around us in some specific and very useful ways. 

But, most of us don’t see that we are always blinded by the fact that we are viewing the world through a cultural lens. Yes, even when it comes to science (there is no such thing as any human ever being purely objective or unbiased, as we aren’t separate from nature or life). 

And, for better or worse, this also applies to our social justice culture.

I was involved in the social justice movement for many years and was one of the first people I knew to post videos on MySpace about tiny children (all boys) who clearly had some issues with their biological sex. I was heartbroken for them.

But I didn’t see where this was leading… (who could have?)

I got a degree in sociology, anthropology, and women & gender studies. I studied the many waves of feminism. I came out as “queer.” I loved evolutionary biology and fell deeper in love with evolutionary and cultural anthropology.

I helped revitalize and became the VP of the campus feminist club. I volunteered at the university’s women’s center. I volunteered at the local domestic violence shelter. I helped to form a local LGBTQ+ community group for our small town (and spent many evenings listening to gender-confused youth). I joined marches, protests, and activism work in-person and online. I was involved in the reproductive justice movement and helped to co-found an abortion fund.

I also was a birth photographer, attended home births, and wrote passionate research essays about issues affecting women, such as the history of childbirth in the US and female genital mutilation. I’d given birth to both of my babies at home (one with midwives, one intentionally freebirthed). I had run a natural family meet-up group in my town. I’d also co-owned a bookstore for a decade, and stocked it full of gentle parenting, natural living, holistic nutrition books.

I walked into the halls of academia knowing that they weren’t the foremost authority on life. I knew that anthropologists were often very misguided. (That was hammered home to me when I sat through a lecture given by an anthropologist who studied birth and her conclusion was that women had lost their birthing instincts, which made midwives and doctors necessary. As I had just given birth unassisted a couple years before, I knew that she was absolutely wrong based on my own experience and the many stories of other women who had also given birth unassisted, guided by their mammalian instincts.)

And yet… I bought into the social justice narrative because I was naturally a DEEPLY EMPATHETIC person who just wanted to love and care for and protect every person and being that I possibly could. And I wanted the whole world to hear about what was wrong so they would care too.

Fast forward to a few years ago, when things in the social justice culture started to shift quickly. This impacted the birth worker world in ways that I don’t think has spread to other fields in quite the same way (though it is now swiftly spreading everywhere at an alarming rate).

At first, we were just asked to include “birthing person” whenever we also said “woman.” And that I could handle. I wanted to be inclusive and kind.

But shortly thereafter, woman and all female language was no longer permissible unless we were talking about a specific person who had told us that she identified as a woman. 

Suddenly, we were doing the sacred work of our ancestors from the past 100s of thousands of years…being With Woman. But we were no longer allowed to talk about actual women. Those that continue/d to use female language were dismissed as pathetically uneducated at best and transphobic-needing-to-be-cancelled at worst.

The social justice world became an angry culture of women attacking each other over petty shit that didn’t actually achieve the goal of freeing women worldwide from the horrible experiences they walk through every single second of every single day simply based on the fact that they are BIOLOGICALLY FEMALE.

When my own daughter got caught up in this world, I got an entirely different view of what was going on with the young people in the social justice movement. The political suddenly truly became the personal.

Luckily for me, I intentionally raised my daughter to love her body no matter what (in resistance to the problematic messaging I had received as a young girl). I raised her with a healthy skepticism of Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex. And that created cognitive dissonance for her in a culture that was trying to convince her that her body was wrong and the only solution was to turn to the Gods of Medicine who could transform her body through pharmaceuticals and surgery into something that “matched” whatever was going on in her mind.

One day I came across some words online that created cognitive dissonance for me, as well. And this was right at the same time that my daughter was having her own realizations about this toxic culture she had become so tangled up in. (The synchronicity of this timing isn’t lost on me… It truly was a miracle.)

Together, we emotionally and mentally walked out of it as mother and daughter. Slowly coming to terms with this new perspective that the social justice movement wasn’t the healthy movement it was advertising itself to be. 

But, we were both terrified to say anything to anyone. Because we had watched as others (*ahem* women) had been torched for even offering any kind of healthy skepticism, critiques, biological arguments, or discussions on lack of long term scientific evidence or research.

So we sat in silence, as many women do (and have done for millennia).

I continued to voraciously research, read, listen, follow other progressives who were dissenting, and, above all, listen to my heart and gut. 

I watched as midwives began to censor themselves. Doulas. Birth workers of all kinds. Women’s health professionals. Therapists. Coaches. Professors.

I quietly agonized my way through a semester of midwifery school, in which we weren’t allowed to use “gendered language”. I watched as my fellow students and teachers policed each other’s language, using shame to induce conformity. (In many ways, this was the last straw for me.)

I started to recognize (with my highly sensitive person superpowers) the low level panic in many women’s demeanors online. The coded language they would use. The torment they were feeling over speaking their truth versus keeping their businesses afloat and feeding their children.

I cautiously started to talk to friends about this, and held space as they expressed their panic around how to resolve the intensity of what they felt in their hearts with the pressure to conform and obey.

Suddenly, we were in a movement that attacked women, silenced women, and made them choose between feeding their families and speaking their minds.

In a world where…

• 1-in-3 women have been the victims of violent and/or sexualized assault.

• 1-in-4 adolescent girls have been the victims of violent and/or sexualized assault.

• In 2020, every 11 minutes a girl or woman was killed in her home around the world.

• Violence against girls and women are the highest in countries with the lowest GDP.

• Every day 800 women die from preventable issues in pregnancy and childbirth (and 99% of these deaths occur in countries with the most poverty).

• 4.8 million adults are trafficked for sexual exploitation and 71% of this number is composed of women.

• 1 million children are trafficked for sexual exploitation.

• Up to 10 million children are victims of sexual exploitation.

• Female infanticide continues to be a method in some countries of reducing many, many unwanted children based purely on their biological sex.

• The One Child Policy in China selectively aborted millions of female fetuses due to a biological sex cultural bias.

• 200 million girls and women are living with mutilated genitals due to violent cultural practices of female genital mutilation.

• 1-in-4 women experience sexual and/or physical violence during pregnancy.

• 150 million girls worldwide experience sexual violence every year.

• Honor killings affect girls and women disproportionately and account for well over 5,000 deaths every year.

• Every single day 137 women are murdered by their partners or family members.

• 15 million girls are married before they’re 18…every single year (that’s 28 every minute).

• At least ⅓ of women worldwide have experienced a traumatic birth in the form of obstetric violence (and this number doesn’t account for other kinds of reproductive experiences either).

And the list goes on and on and on.

Friends, as easy as it can be to mentally tune out the call to make the world safe for women and girls (because how many times have we heard that one…)... THE WORK IS NOT DONE.

And this work isn’t going to be done for generations to come. Maybe not for another 1,000 years or more. I’m dead serious. There is SO MUCH left to be done and undone.

When we stop focusing on protecting women and girls, protecting the highly unique and vulnerable mother-baby unit, lifting up women around the world so they can reclaim their autonomy and personal power, supporting legislative and cultural changes that protect women’s unique biological vulnerabilities… We lose our ability to make things happen for women.

When we pretend as though female biological sex isn’t real and doesn’t have real world implications, we add to the violence and subtract from our ability to actually make the world safe for all the female humans who live here.

I believe in the innate wisdom and beauty of the biologically female human body. I believe in protecting that at all costs. I am always skeptical of industries that tell women and girls that they are not innately magical and powerful just as they are in that moment. I do not believe in the medicalization of children who inhabit healthy bodies (and who clearly need more than what is currently being offered to them). 

I have stepped away from the social justice movement as I can see that it has become a toxic echo chamber. I still very much love the people that I worked with in those spaces. They are loving and empathetic people. I have compassion for the trans-identified people in those spaces - they hold a lot of hurt in their bodies and minds. I also have deep compassion for the de-transitioners who are growing in number with no mainstream communities who will back them up or offer them support (and who are attacked by the “queer” community and the medical community at alarming levels).

My critique is NOT about individuals (who are really just exhibiting coping mechanisms to deal with a toxic world), but instead toxic systems that steal our attention and promote unhealthy ways of being in relationship with ourselves.

I’ve discovered that most of the narrative used by gender activists is based on significantly flawed anthropology and really strange science (that’s most of the time not even science). (If you want to dive into the supposed “racism” component and dig deep into the pre/history of this stuff, check out this masterclass given by a brilliant woman I deeply admire.)

But, crazy enough, activism has government officials, professors, administrators, business owners, midwives, doulas, therapists, and the most important people of all, MOTHERS, in terror. Anyone who even starts to ask questions gets immediately canceled, labeled a pro-Trump conservative, or a TERF (google it if you’re not familiar). 

Funny enough, I’m none of those things. I still consider myself cautiously progressive (and absolutely not conservative). I think that Trump is a prime example of a disturbing form of elitism and degenerate masculinity that is dangerous to women and girls (but so are 99.99% of all politicians, women included). 

But I also consider myself politically homeless at this point, and disenchanted with a political circus that will never ever protect and value the most vulnerable people in our society: women living in poverty with children and the mother-baby dyad. 

And so, after years of gaining personal confidence (riding on the coattails of a decade plus of severe social anxiety), I am casting aside my need for self-protection on this topic. 

BECAUSE MOTHERS, GIRLS, AND CHILDREN MATTER. 

No one cultural dogma captures the complexity and beauty of the female experience, because we live in a male-dominated world (and have for thousands of years). And so I steep myself in the pre-patriarchal, pre-civilized world’s myths and stories. I walk the path of a student traditional midwife/birth attendant and rewilding mentor committed to protecting women and babies… in-person and through online education and advocacy. 

And I very proudly use the words Woman, Women, and Female. Because I believe it matters. Because I’m exhausted by female erasure culture. And because I want others (not just conservatives) to be brave enough to stand with me and stop this nonsense - to at last collectively protect our children and sisters.

Women are often only brave when they are in brave community with each other (because we are social beings). And so, even though I’m nervous as I publish this and I will likely spend the next 24 hours doing a lot of mental self-talk to overcome the knee-jerk panic about what I’ve done, bracing myself (and also supportively breathing) for the unfollows, unsubscribes, and hurtful comments…

I’m still doing it.

I will stand for women until my very last breath.

Will you join me in being brave? Our global sisters who don’t have the privileges that we do need us to stand with them. Think of the woman or girl somewhere in the world who feels lost, unloved, unprotected, exploited, unvalued, and then…

Bravely stand for women everywhere.