The United Kingdom government has urged the United Nations to adopt gender-neutral pregnancy terms to be more inclusive of the transgender community, .
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has made a submission to amend the wording in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that refers to the protection of pregnant women.
"We requested that the UN human rights committee made it clear that the same right [to life for pregnant women] extends to pregnant transgender people," an FCO statement said.
The submission has caused outcry online from anti-transgender and feminist critics, including from writer Sarah Ditum.
“This is making women unmentionable. Having a female body and knowing what that means for reproduction doesn’t make you ‘exclusionary’. Forcing us to decorously scrub out any reference to our sex on pain of being called bigots is an insult.”
The news comes as UK Prime Minister Theresa May has the advancement of transgender rights and to improve the process of obtaining legal gender recognition.
“We’ve set out plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act, streamlining and de-medicalising the process for changing gender, because being trans is not an illness and it shouldn’t be treated as such,” she said at the Pink News Awards last week.
