I spent over 35 years working as a policeman and during that time, I have encountered lots of strange and wonderful things. Because of these experiences, I think I am a broad-minded person.
I am your ‘average man in the street’ with my opinions on most issues and those of you who know me would probably agree that I am a tolerant character. My usual mantra is to live and let live, as long as you don’t interfere with me.
But even I have my limits.
My brother in law sent me an email from Scotland recently concerning an article he read in his local paper. Pat is a retired marine engineer and he has spent a large part of his life travelling around the world, working and living in many different countries. He has experienced many diverse cultures and he too has seen many strange and wonderful things. But this was too much even for him so he contacted me to see if, maybe, he was being a bit too insensitive.
The story reported that the British Medical Association had suggested that pregnant women should not be called “expectant mothers” as it could offend transgender people. Instead, they should refer to them as “pregnant people” so as not to upset intersex and transgender men.
They suggested that the majority of people that have been pregnant or have given birth identify as women but they could include intersex men and transmen who may get pregnant by saying ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘expectant mothers’.
It seems that this has come about after someone in the UK was born a girl but now wants to become a man but that person has decided to defer surgery so they can have a baby first. This person who was once female, is now legally male and has had hormone treatment but has not yet had sex-change surgery.
It seems to me that this person wants everything and everybody else must fall into line to facilitate him/her and we must change the English language to avoid upsetting them even more.
This person has made choices. She was born a girl but decided to become a man. She decided to have surgery and then she decided to put that off because she decided to have a baby first. Then, she decided that she will have her sex -change operation.
No matter how hard I try to normalise that situation, I am struggling. I have no idea how many more people have found themselves in that specific situation but I can’t imagine the number being very high. It is not common, at least not in the piece of Planet Earth I inhabit. So, let’s stop pretending that this is run of the mill stuff and call it what it is and don’t expect the rest of us to turn cart wheels to facilitate the few.
I don’t want to deliberately cause offence to any minority group and I don’t want to insult anyone. But I’m not going to spend my life walking on egg shells for fear of unintentionally offending someone because they happen to be a little different.
So instead of the majority changing for the few, why don’t we turn this around a bit. Let’s educate the few to accept that we will speak the same way we’ve always spoken and we will act as we have always acted and there is no intention on our behalf to upset anyone and any offence given is purely accidental.
This politically correct terminology is getting very complicated and I’m sure that some issues are being raised for the sake of being controversial or getting noticed. We seem to have reached a stage where every time someone jumps up and down and screams about not being valued because they are different, the rest of us must scurry off to see what we can change to make it all better. We try to stick a politically correct plaster on the problem when maybe we should be telling them to get a grip on themselves instead.
There was a guy in the States who was in the real estate business and he was instructed to stop using the term ‘master bedroom’ because it denotes slavery and could be offensive to some people. Referring to a house or piece of property as a ‘place with a view’ is no longer acceptable since some people are visually impaired and could be offended.
Would visually impaired people really be offended or is it the case that someone is creating a problem that doesn’t actually exist?
I worked with the United Nations for a year and during that time I toiled side by side with men and women of all nationalities. They represented all religions and none, various sexual orientations and colours and despite all that, everyone got on for the simple reason that there was an underlying understanding that we respected each other. That eliminated the need to be walking around all day in fear of dropping a clanger.
I recently heard a story about a town in Germany that has stopped playing a popular children’s song about a fox who steals a goose, after receiving a complaint from a vegan. Limburg’s town spokesman, Johannes Laubach, said a local woman had asked the mayor to remove the tune from the town hall’s mechanical carillon.
He said the mayor had temporarily granted her request. The carillon, which is a series of bells, has a repertoire of 33 tunes, including 15 German children’s songs, that are played several times a day.
The Frankfurter Neue Presse newspaper reported that the woman was upset by being reminded of the song’s words — “the hunter’s going to get you with his gun,” rather than by the fox’s theft of the goose.
I rest my case.