"Pregnant women"

I have nothing to say here about pregnant women. My title refers to the words “pregnant women,” a phrase not henceforth to be uttered in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. The permissible phrase is “pregnant people,” so as to include, for example, trans men carrying unborn babies.  

If you think I am writing parody or have launched on some outlandish extrapolation from a more plausible scenario, I am not. Harvard’s Dr. Carole Hooven was interviewed by Fox News; the Daily Mail reprised that interview in this report, and the story was subsequently picked up by the NY Post. Hooven, Lecturer on Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, argued for retaining use of terms such as “male,” “female,” and “pregnant women” as having scientific meaning. An individual identifying herself as “Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force” in the same department tweeted some responses. That person seems to be a graduate student; as I have no doubt she is just doing her job in the role with which she introduces herself, I will identify her only as DDITF.

Here are a few direct quotations from the interview and responding tweets. Hooven had just published a book about (T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us), which has gotten some good press. The lead-in was about resistance to using those old terms such as “male” and “female” in teaching biology.

Hooven: 

I've been feeling pretty frustrated over the last five years or so. It's been gradual. … This kind of ideology has been infiltrating science. It's infiltrating my classroom, to some extent. … Part of that science is teaching the facts. And the facts are that there are in fact two sexes - there are male and female - and those sexes are designated by the kind of gametes we produce. Do we make eggs, big sex cells, or little sex cells, sperm. And that's how we know whether someone is male or female. And the ideology seems to be that biology really isn't as important as how somebody feels about themselves, or feels their sex to be.

… You know, we can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns. So understanding the facts about biology doesn't prevent us from treating people with respect.

[It is wrong for professors and the media to] start backing away from using certain terms that they are afraid people will find offensive. And that fear is based in reality. People do find these terms offensive; they do complain on social media; they do shame people and even threaten to get people fired. So it's no wonder that a lot of people are caving and yielding to the social pressure But we are doing students and the public a great disservice, and dividing the populace.

DDITF:

As the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force for my dept @HarvardHEB, I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept in this interview with Fox and Friends.

Let’s be clear: if you respect diverse gender identities & aim to use correct pronouns, then you would know that people with diverse genders/sexes can be pregnant incl Trans men, intersex people & gender nonconforming people. That isn't too hard for medical students to understand. Inclusive language like “pregnant people” demonstrates respect for EVERYONE who has the ability to get pregnant, not just cis women. It is vital to teach med students gender inclusive language, as they will certainly interact with people that identify outside the gender binary.  This dangerous language perpetuates a system of discrimination against non-cis people within the med system.

This back and forth seems so absurd that my first instinct is that these two people are simply talking past each other. That the now generally accepted notion of gender as something more complicated than biological sex is agreed to by both, but seen differently. And that while they may disagree about the risk-reward balance of using certain language, Dr. Hooven does not reject the notion of gender identity, and presumably the DDITF would not want (say) a trans woman to be scheduled for a hysterectomy to remove uterus she does not have, no matter how strongly that person identifies as female. 

Such disputes about tone and category are the daily life of academia. As individual academics, both parties are entitled to their opinio