Pregnant People
I have two reactions to an article about COVID and “pregnant people.” (It was funny to see that article slip back into “pregnant women,” only to yank itself out of that lapse of attention and get the right words in the display window again. Editorial regression.)
1.) Are there really a lot of non-women “pregnant people,” or are we just scanning the horizon anxiously for offense we might give, inadvertently wounding or excluding a few? White, straight people belling themselves like cats, to walk jangling with warnings, “Here comes a predator”? Of course, probably more than there are pregnant trans men (is that common? what effect do male hormones have on a fetus?), there are people we might call “women” who would call themselves nonbinary “they”s out of “solidarity” (what a solemn, stilted language we speak with a Twitter gun to our heads) with “obligatory” nonbinary people and out of a desire to revolutionize what’s regarded by conservatives as “human nature,” but what is really a jumble of nature, habit, history, custom, prejudice, and inertia. With the latter I have some sympathy, but utopian projects always run up against . . . something. The aforementioned jumble, like the barriers of debris left by a receding flood. Don’t underestimate the power of inertia—thousands of years of it, propelled by no-longer-existent survival conditions—or confuse it with nature. It was a selective shaping of nature to begin with.
“Human nature” is code for “the way we used to do things” when we had much smaller populations under very different threats. There are differences—maybe greater between individuals than between sexes—but we don’t really know what they are, because they’re obscured by what we’ve made out of them. It’s like trying to learn about ore by studying an airplane.
So while I’m turned off by the goose-stepping enforcement and the absolute humorlessness of self-appointed victim-advocate-bullies, the gender revolution has a point—a point which as usual, we’re turning into an intolerant caricature and a new conformity, when it was supposed to increase freedom.
My other reaction is much simpler:
2) Thanks for finally admitting that women are people!
Ambiance 
Melinda Bruno said,
October 11, 2021 at 3:04 pm
I liked Bill Maher’s take on the goose-stepping left: “When what you’re doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop.’
Also, I spent years with that gun to my head before there was Twitter, because I was afraid of the finger-wagging pearl-clutchers of the Upper West Side would send me back to Queens. PS, didn’t fit in there either.
amba12 said,
October 11, 2021 at 3:09 pm
Isn’t it wonderful when you no longer fit where you came from (maybe never did) but don’t exactly fit anywhere else either? There’s a whole tribe of us wandering around, like those planets that have come loose from their solar systems.