"Just say this/don't say that. It's not asking much!"

We need clear language to talk about women's rights.

I’ve been writing a lot about abortion lately—find me an American feminist who hasn’t—and every time I sit down and start to type, I think about a conversation I had with a friend of mine who identifies as trans. This friend expressed feeling hurt when I had referred to abortion as a women’s rights issue and when I’d objected to language like ‘uterus-havers' and ‘birthing bodies.’

I explained why I use the language I do: that I’ve thought a lot about the words I choose and that, for me, clarity about sex comes first, that I won’t use gender-neutral language to talk about sex, and that I find neologisms for sex dehumanizing to women since this language inevitably reduces human beings to functions and ‘services,’ language that I think is at odds with recognizing the personhood of women and the ways that access to reproductive healthcare reverberates across a woman’s whole life. I said I don’t see how progressive people can argue for women’s rights by talking about us as walking wombs. At the end of the conversation, my friend expressed the hope that I’d change the way I wrote about abortion going forward. I reiterated that I respected my friend’s point of view but that we don’t have the same perspectives or priorities and therefore we won’t use the same language to express ourselves, and that I hoped that my friend understood my reasons and didn’t interpret my language as an attack on their beliefs and values but an assertion of my own.

I was supposed to say: yes, of course, I’m so sorry, you’re right, it’s not a big deal at all, I can totally do that, I didn’t even think about it.

Instead, I said: I understand your perspective but I don’t share it. I’ve thought about it a lot and I came to a different conclusion. I’m not going to change the way I talk about this.

Yet every time I write about abortion now, I know that the language I use will be experienced by someone I love—and in a way by me, myself, every time I use these contested words—as a callous act, a form of rejection. It would be so easy—wouldn’t it?—for me to avoid the word ‘woman’ or ‘female’ (my friend also objected to that). There are nearly 200,000 words in the English dictionary. Surely, I can part company with two of those words. Why would I persist in hurting my friend after I’ve been shown the pain those two words cause and pointed down the right path? How perverse of me. Who puts a word over a friend?

But, of course, it’s not just a word or two here and there. I’m being asked to subscribe to a belief system that I don’t share: that what makes someone a man or a woman isn’t their sex but some inner sense of self, that speaking clearly about sex is once again taboo. For my friend, there’s some meaningful sense in which a female person can identify as or live as a man, but that concept has no substance for me. I don’t buy into the idea that there’s a right or a wrong way to be female that makes someone not a woman. I don’t think the belief that there’s a wrong way to be a woman has served my friend well. I am not going to make a habit of saying things I don’t believe, no matter how much other people want me to believe in those things.

Not only do I not share my friend’s belief system, but I see the harms that trail in its wake: that we suggest to children who for whatever reason don’t fit in that perhaps they were born in the wrong bodies, that in settings where sex matters—prisons, refuges, sports—we’re being asked to pretend it doesn’t, that women’s realities become unspeakable, that women who dissent—women like me—should be hounded out of public life.

I can feel the pull, though: no one wants to cause a loved one pain. Drop one person like this in a circle of friends and a vast silence settles around certain topics. No one wants to break this silence. I understand why so many people go along. But everything to do with being female falls into this dead zone of inconvenient facts and unspeakable truths because everything to do with the material reality of sex difference threatens the concept of gender identity.

This post was first published on Writing Behavior by Eliza Mondegreen.