Margaret Atwood Faces Backlash, Slammed as Transphobic for Sharing Article Hitting at Gender-Neutral Language

Leia IdlibyOct 19th, 2021, 2:30 pm
 
Margaret Atwood at 2019 NYWIFT Muse Awards

Lars Niki/Getty Images

Margaret Atwood is facing quite the backlash for sharing a Toronto Star column titled, “Why can’t we say ‘woman’ anymore?”

In the piece, columnist Rosie DiManno, argued that the adoption of gender-neutral language creates an “erasure of women,” which leaves “well-meaning people tongue-tied, lest they be attacked as transphobic or otherwise insensitive to the increasingly complex constructs of gender.”

DiManno claimed that woman was “in danger of becoming a dirty word,” adding, “struck from the lexicon of officialdom, eradicated from medical vocabulary and expunged from conversation.”

DiManno begins her article by mocking gender-neutral language, imagining certain song titles without the word “woman” in them, and cracking, “Apologies to Aretha Franklin, Shania Twain and Roy Orbison, but this appears to be where we’re heading if language radicals get their way.”

Atwood was quickly compared to J.K. Rowling for sharing the piece, as the Harry Potter author faced a similar backlash after taking issue with an article that used gender-neutral language to discuss the menstrual cycle.

Many noted the irony that Atwood would share the piece, as she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, which imagines a dystopian theocracy that reduces fertile women to their ability to bear children, essentially subjecting them to a form slavery.

“‘Birthing people’ is not just inclusive to trans and non-binary people, but also surrogates and those who give their babies up for adoption,” noted Katelyn Burns, the United States’ first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter. “Giving birth is not the only reason for women to exist (as your own work clearly stresses!)”

Others noted that her work often critiques the essentialism of gender roles, while others slammed her as a TERF —  the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist:

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