Wednesday, 31 August 2022

Gender-neutral language

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (18:31): (2104) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Women and concerns language being used to describe women. A report in the Australian newspaper on Monday by Rosemary Neill outlined multiple government-linked websites that are referring to women more as body parts than as women or mothers. The article describes the Health Direct website, which provides virtual health services for governments. When talking about issues of pregnancy, cervical cancer and birth the website uses the term ‘people’ or ‘a person with a cervix’. It talks about parents, not women and mothers. ‘Birthing parent’ remains a favourite of many, but thankfully was recently scrapped by the federal Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten, no less.

For the record, I am not a birthing vessel or a chamber for embryos or a body with a vagina. I was a breast feeder, not a chest feeder, and I am a female, a woman, a mother and a grandmother. I will not have my female status and birth degraded by a warped Marxist view of who I am. There is something ugly and disrespectful about referencing a body part such as a cervix or a vagina as a preferred description to ‘woman’, ‘mother’ or ‘female’. Only women can give birth. Only women can breastfeed naturally. Only women have female sex organs. Only women can be mothers. At the same time, only men can be fathers.

The ongoing effort by the radical left to assume these capacities for anything other than a woman is offensive to women—mothers, grandmothers, young girls and women looking forward to being mothers. This warping of the language is not inclusion; it is exclusion of the majority for a fractional minority. This is not about civil rights, human rights or equal rights. It is about the removal of rights. Gender-neutral language simply neuters women into body parts and generic terms. A female is defined as having two X sex chromosomes. A woman is an adult female. Intersex, non-binary, transgender men—whatever people want to be, they can be, but they should not, in their language, in finger-pointing and rule changing for ideological means, remove the precious and important terms of ‘mother’, ‘woman’ or ‘female’. Men, equally, should be called men, fathers or male. The slippery slope of gender activism fails us all, and the action I seek is for the minister to stand up for women against this rubbish.