Women's Health
The Issue: The medical system has historically discriminated against women
The medical system has historically discriminated against women leaving them, misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed. Over time, the limitations of a biomedical view of health as well as the concepts of sex and gender became central to advance our knowledge of women’s health, improve how research is conducted and make health research more impactful on the quality of life of women.
Definitions of Sex and Gender
Sex is defined as “biological and physiological characteristics that distinguish females from males” CIHR, 2010.
Gender, on the other hand, describes “socially constructed roles, relationships, behaviours, relative power, and other traits that society ascribe to women and men.”
The current gender ideology denies the biological reality of women, human adult females, by using language that deliberately creates confusion between sex and gender, as if they were interchangeable. This is harmful to women and girls in an alarming and growing number of ways.
Why does women's health matter?
By replacing sex with gender, the biological reality of women disappears as well as the social reality of being born women in a patriarchy and living our lives in societies designed and organized by men for men.
Erasing biological sex, erasing women: language identifying female anatomy and biology no longer reflects the specific experience of women. We are menstruators, chest-feeders, uterus-havers, people who get pregnant and people who give birth. More and more health care institutions are using this language to signal “inclusion” when in fact they are promoting the gender ideology agenda that dehumanizes women.
Replacing sex with gender, a concept, not a measurable and observable element, means that gathering and analyzing data will become impossible. Medical research is already biased against women, and now that anyone can identify with any gender they feel males will be able to participate in medical research and surveys as women. Without scientific rigor, based on biological realities, the physical well-being of women can be compromised and many of the gains made in the last decades in women’s health may be lost. Funding for women’s health research has always been lagging and will probably suffer more with the current push by governments and pharmaceutical companies to fund “inclusive” research.
As women are gradually punished and chastised for using language describing their biological reality and for expecting female-centered care, the health care system is determined to impose the new policies and protocols. Women are expected to accept to share spaces with males who identify as women, or to accept intimate care from them.
What can we do about women's health?
Refuse language that dehumanizes us and takes away our biological reality. We are women, not menstruators or uterus-havers.
Refer to yourself as a woman – not a cis-woman or a cisgender woman. We are not a sub-category, we are one of the two sexes, women (adult female human) or men (adult male human). We were not “assigned a sex at birth” our sex is observed and recorded.
Read up on the differences between sex and gender to feel comfortable with the terms and be attentive to the ways that they are being used in society.
Speak up and let people know how you feel about these issue – you can do it through discussion or by writing on social media, writing to politicians, newspapers, etc.
Resources