EVE SIMMONS on a new woke vocabulary: Chestfeeding, gestational parents and ...

Individuals with a cervix. Pregnant people. Chestfeeding gestational parent. Bodies with vaginas. 

If you’ve not encountered these phrases before, you might think they belong in a science fiction novel.

In fact, they are now used in British medicine as so-called gender neutral inclusive language.

The idea is to make healthcare more welcoming and accessible to those who don’t fit the standard model of being male or female.

For instance, Government figures suggest that roughly 680,000 Britons ‘do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth’.

A transgender man – who was born with female body parts – might still have female anatomy and can become pregnant. It’s one example of why many NHS trusts are adopting a broader approach to gynaecological and obstetric language.

Inclusive language isn’t only meant for gender non-conforming people – ‘co-parent’ may replace ‘father’ for same-sex couples. 

Now listen to the debate - are you a woman, or a body with a vagina? 

Few would dispute that our NHS must be accessible to everyone. But there was an outcry last week at one phrase that was new to me. 

The Lancet, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, tweeted an image of the cover of its latest issue, which displayed a sentence that, in effect, replaced the word ‘women’ with ‘bodies with vaginas’. 

The line was from a review of an exhibition on menstrual health at the Vagina Museum in London. It read: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’

Many women, quite understandably, were furious. Editor Richard Horton was accused of ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘erasing’ women from a conversation that primarily concerns... women.

But I have another concern: That when using phrases like this, a sizeable number of patients won’t have the foggiest idea what you’re on about – a problem if you want to give public health messages that must be understood by everyone.

The use of inclusive language isn’t new. In 2016, the British Medical Association recommended its staff use ‘pregnant people’ instead of pregnant women. 

For anyone who thought that wouldn’t catch on, it’s a phrase that you’ll hear widely used in maternity care now.

Then, in February last year, midwives at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust were told to start using terms such as ‘chest milk’ instead of breast milk.

The idea, I’m told, is that some transgender men who give birth and nurse their children feel profound distress at being reminded they’re doing so with their breasts.

Medically speaking, of course, men have breasts. You don’t call male breast cancer ‘chest cancer’.

‘Breast’ is already a gender- neutral term. In medicine, the chest usually refers to the thorax, which houses the lungs and heart, among other things.

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday’s Medical Minefield podcast this week, Dr Alison Berner, a cancer specialist who also works in gender identity at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, said the idea was to assume nothing, perhaps use a neutral term as a starting point, and if in doubt, ask.

She said a ‘cisgender’ man – one who was assigned male at birth and still identifies as a man – may be fine with the term breast cancer, but added: ‘There might be someone who experiences extreme distress from that term. It’s about checking with each individual person what’s all right for them.’ 

What about ‘bodies with vaginas’ – surely no one wants to be called that? 

But Dr Berner said: ‘I am a cisgender woman and I have a body with a vagina. 

'When I see a term like that I know it’s applicable to me and applicable to my trans male friends, if they have a vagina. It’s an anatomically accurate term.’