Washington Post Changes Style Guide to Erase Pregnant Women

The Washington Post's Instagram editor Travis Lyles announced on Friday the newspaper has changed its style guide to be more "inclusive" on how they will refer to those who are pregnant in stories.

While the term "pregnant woman" and "pregnant women" will still be used in cases where the person's gender identity is known, but the Post noted "we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary. However, we must take care that our efforts to be more inclusive do not come at the expense of other marginalized groups, such as women, and add to feelings of exclusion."

. @washingtonpost officially updated its stylebook guidance on how we reference pregnancy and pregnant individuals in our writing to be more inclusive ???? pic.twitter.com/uUW80HUGXI

— Travis Lyles (@travislylesnews) October 1, 2021
The note adds, "In other situations, to be more inclusive, use pregnant women and other pregnant individuals. Yes, this is a bit of a mouthful, but it has the benefit of being the most inclusive way to phrase it in a story."

Other terms that are now acceptable at the Post include, but are not limited to: pregnant patients, the pregnant population, those who are pregnant, and pregnant individuals.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2021/10/01/washington-post-changes-style-guide-to-erase-pregnant-women-n2596832

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Now "wilderness" is a wrong word

What image does the word "wilderness" conjure in your mind?

Maybe it's damp moss encircling a giant myrtle-beech in takayna/Tarkine, or dry red earth and rocky outcrops deep in the centre of the continent. Or it might conjure nothing at all.

We don't all perceive wilderness the same way, and for Wardandi and Bibbulmun woman Chontarle Bellottie, it's a totally foreign concept. "Wilderness is not in my language. It's not in the way that I communicate," she says.

"Because for me, my interpretation of [wilderness] is untouched, whereas we know as traditional owners that we've cultivated and gathered and hunted for so many thousands of years ... in a way where we've been able to live off the land in a very sustainable way."

While some people might not associate wilderness with a complete absence of people, many do, and that's a problem, according to Wiradjuri scientist Michael Fletcher.

Dr Fletcher, a palaeoecologist and geographer at the University of Melbourne, started exploring the idea when investigating the formation of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area landscape. "I found it was people who were responsible for its present form and its form over the past 40,000 years," Dr Fletcher says.

His analysis of sediment layers suggest that the lush temperate rainforest that we see today was, until colonisation, eucalypt savannah and grassland actively managed by Aboriginal people.

"So the term wilderness is not only inaccurate, the notion that wilderness carries, which is the absence of people, is dehumanising really to Aboriginal people."

It's time to strike terms like "wilderness" from our lexicon, he adds. "While they're just words, they're actually very powerful."

The prevalence of the wilderness concept means global conservation policy and public perception still often overlook how biodiverse landscapes have been shaped by Indigenous people, Dr Fletcher argues in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

"Globally, many places that are called 'wilderness' are either current home to Indigenous people who actively manage the landscape, or are former landscapes which Indigenous people were the managers of, and are still trying to get recognition and agency back into their territories," he says.

"And they're being inhibited by this notion of wilderness, which underpins many conservation efforts."

Dr Fletcher says excluding Indigenous people from places, whether under the guise of wilderness protection or not, has degraded the health of those ecosystems — especially in Australia.

But there is disagreement over use of the term "wilderness" in conservation science, and it comes down to how you define it, according to James Watson, a conservation biologist at the University of Queensland, who was not involved in the study.

Although Dr Watson agrees with most of what the paper suggests about the need to include Indigenous people in conservation efforts, he says the idea that scientists still use the term wilderness to imply an absence of people was "nonsense".

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-10-02/wilderness-conservation-indigenous-science/100500954

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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