Postpartum University® Podcast

The War on Women's Language with Milli Hill EP 243

• Maranda Bower, Postpartum Nutrition Specialist

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If you feel like you & your clients are losing a battle, you need to listen. Journalist and activist Milli Hill  connects the dots on how the industrialized assault on female health is a unified war on women's autonomy. Milli connects the industrialized assault on female health to the rise of PPD and birth trauma. We expose the truth your perinatal mental health clients face: how ultra-processed food, profit-driven medicalization of childbirth, and sex-based language erasure attack the biological reality of motherhood. 

Check out the episode on the blog HERE: https://postpartumu.com/podcast/the-war-on-womens-language-with-milli-hill-ep-243/

Key time stamps: 

  • 02:20 Ultra-Processed Women Why changing diet is a radical act of resistance
  • 04:45 Disconnection from nature and the body as a systemic issues
  • 09:06 The link between industrialization, profit, and the patriarchal control over women's bodies
  • 12:11 Why the saying "all that matters is a healthy baby" minimizes the woman's birth experience and value
  • 14:15 Moms and babies are not fine/ moving away from normalization of struggle
  • 16:16 Navigating the debate around sex-based language and cancel culture 
  • 25:00 Distinguishing between individual inclusion/pronoun respect and population-level language erasure
  • 26:37 The erasure of women in politics and publications creates a new form of censorship
  • 28:58 Language war is a men's rights movement aiming to decouple womanhood from female biology
  • 31:00 "What About Women?"

Connect with Milli

Milli Hill is a best-selling author, feminist journalist, and advocate known for reframing the narrative around women's bodies and autonomy in health. She is the author of The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth like a Feminist, and the critically acclaimed Ultra Processed Women. She founded and ran the Positive Birth Movement (2012-2021), a global network focused on improving birth experiences. A leading voice in the debate around sex-based language in maternity care, she writes the popular Substack, WHAT ABOUT WOMEN, which focuses on feminism, sex/gender issues, and the erasure of women from language, alongside her Substack Unprocess (exploring a less processed plate and life). She lives in Somerset with her family.

Website | IG | Substack 

NEXT STEPS:

SPEAKER_01:

The postpartum care system is failing, leaving countless mothers struggling with depression, anxiety, and autoimmune conditions. I'm Miranda Bauer, and I've helped thousands of providers use holistic care practices to heal their clients at the root. Subscribe now and join us in addressing what modern medicine overlooks so that you can give your clients real lasting solutions for lifelong well-being. She's very passionate about reframing the narrative around women's bodies. She's the author of four books, including the Positive Birth book, Give Birth Like a Feminist, and her latest ultra-processed women. Absolutely incredible. She exposes how industrialized food specifically harms female health. She also founded and ran the positive birth movement. Many of you might know her work from uh 2012 to 2021. She had a global network aimed at improving birth experiences and giving women better access to information. And she actually ended this work partly due to the online abuse that she received for advocating for sex-based language and maternity care, which we're going to talk about today. She's a journalist. She's written for major publications, and she's very, very much focused on feminism and issues around sex and gender and uh living this processed life. And so I am so, so thrilled to have her here on the podcast because we know we talk about all things related to birth, postpartum, and feminism. So welcome. I'm so glad that you're here.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you for that amazing introduction. I feel like she was a mouthful. Like you are so accomplished. Oh, thank you very much. Now that you've read all that out, I feel very accomplished.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so you have a brand new book, Ultra Processed Women, which really argues that changing how we eat is a radical act of resistance to an ultra-processed world. Like bam, that is massive. Can you unpack that? Like, what do you mean by that? What are what are we resisting?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think I think how I got to that is through writing a book, which uh, at least superficially, is focused on the relationship between diet and women's health, like and and in particular what these uh very new ultra-processed products are doing to the female body. But through exploring the topic um and completely immersing myself in it when I was writing, I started to have like a series of light bulb moments, I suppose, and just think, wow, this isn't actually just about food. I mean, you can go into a supermarket and you can flip a packet over and you can look at the ingredients and you can make a decision whether or not to eat that product. And that's a very valid activity. But it's more, we also need to think about the bigger picture and like where I think how food is such a fundamentally human thing and it really reflects um our values. And so, you know, there's a chapter in the book about the environmental impact of multi-processed food, you know, on Mother Earth. Um, and you know, just you know, the more you think about it, this whole like disconnection from nature that we're really experiencing at the moment, disconnection from our bodies, disconnection from our the reality of our mortality, disconnection from giving birth, um, and that physical process, disconnection from each other and the lack of eye contact. You know, eye contact is actually going down in humans because we're looking at our phones so much. Um, so I guess, yeah, I mean, whilst ostensibly it's a book about diet and food and the body, it's also, I just thought it becomes more interesting, certainly it does to me, when you sort of widen it out and think about how that fits into the bigger picture. So, yeah, that's what that, you know, that is really.

SPEAKER_01:

Did you discover that theme a little later in in writing the book, or was that something that you came right into headfirst? Like you knew that that was going to be a huge part of what you were writing.

SPEAKER_00:

No, I think I sort of, like I say, it was kind of light bulbs that went on for me as I was writing. And what I normally do when I when I write is I write the introduction last, if that makes sense, and also the conclusion. So yeah, it was when I sort of, because in the introduction, you're really kind of summing up the book. And I think when I sort of sat down, I I had I had a month off between writing the kind of main body of the book and then coming back to do the introduction, the conclusion. And I guess it just percolated in me during that time. And when I came to sit down to kind of try and sum up what is this book actually about? Like, not what what's it about, as in, of course it's about old processed food and women's health, but what is it actually about? Do you know what I mean? I think that's when it sort of like came to me. And and also I'd been reading a really brilliant book around that time. I don't know if anyone listening to this has read it called Brading Sweetgrass. Fabulous book. Yeah. It's an incredible book. And I was just, I wasn't reading it necessarily for research for the book that I was writing, but just out of hum, you know, my own personal interest. But, you know, a lot of what she said really resonated with me about, you know, the way, um, for example, people in from her um culture would in the book, she still does it. She thanks the plants. It's a very important part of harvest is to make an offering of tobacco to the plant and to thank the plant and never to take all of it. And all of these things she was talking about. And I was thinking, you know, just how that relates to our kind of like connection with nature and our connection with food and our respect for nature. And I just think there's so many interesting themes emerged because when you think about how often people go on about like gratitude and mindfulness all the time, really. It's such a thing. Oh, we must do more of that, you know, and people have gratitude journals and they go on mindfulness, you know, seminars and stuff. And you know, you think when you're pushing your trolley around the supermarket and you're flipping over your packets to look at the ingredients, you know, there is in a way that those two things, gratitude and mindfulness, are kind of missing from the weekly shop, if you know what I mean, because we've forgotten how to say thank you to nature for what we're you know, putting in our trolley and putting in our fridge and putting into our bodies. And we've forgotten that we have that relationship with nature and that, you know, that it's a reciprocal relationship. Um, you know, and you know, we've we've stopped being mindful about what we're eating as well and what we're purchasing and what we're throwing away and all of those things. So I just think there's a lot of bigger themes, and I think that makes I think that makes the book more interesting and and the topic more interesting because it's it's like a like you say, it's a revolution to to change what you put in your trolley and what you put put in your fridge and eat is kind of a way of resisting this world that we're that many of us feel unhappy in, I think.

SPEAKER_01:

There's there's also like this theme with your work, I feel like, and this, you know, women reclaiming autonomy over their bodies and this connection between our bodies and the earth, and how even you know, as you're speaking, the food industry has targeted women and how the medical system has treated women's bodies, like all of these things have kind of emerged under the same umbrella. Like, what do you feel like is the link between those? Like, why is that, you know, obviously a huge focus for you, but like why is that? Like, why do we have to be here in this in this place, focusing our attention on this? Because this is huge.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that's a really good question. It's a really difficult and big question. But I guess that some of the links are again this kind of disconnection from nature and from our bodies. That's been a kind of gradual shift, hasn't it? You know, I think about death as well, you know, and like how death used to be at like birth, death used to be much more of a part of our day-to-day lives, you know, like our dead, uh, you know, the people in our lives who died, we took care of them ourselves, whereas now we're very distanced from death and we're very distanced from birth. And I guess it's just like um, you know, another answer to your question is money and profit and industrialization and capitalism, all of that has you know, built these huge industries that that's put um profit before everything else. Um and certainly, you know, in some parts of the world, like America, you know, the medicalization of childbirth is very much, you know, a profit-making affair. In the UK, we have the NHS, so it's slightly different, but still, I don't know. It's like, is it is it also just a patriarchal system of this idea of like patriarchy being power over, whereas matriarchy or the female energy is more about power within, you know, and it's like it's everything is to do with control and power and profit. So true. It's just such a big question though.

SPEAKER_01:

It it really is. And I and I ask that because I feel very similar in in the work that I'm doing, like focusing on the feminine energy and uh this movement of when you take care of women, you really take care of the world. Like this is the foundation. And we see it so frequently in in our world, and I think it's it's something that's very much known, right? You go to anthropological studies, you go to people who work with women uh uh cultures around the world, especially those who are in developing countries. And what's the first thing they say? Oh, you have to educate and work with the women because when the women know, they're going to pass it along to their children. They're going to hold that within their community, and that's how things are going to change. You don't hand that knowledge over to men, you hand it over to women who are going to make the big difference. And even our countries, we base the entire health of a country on women's bodies, particularly in childbirth, right? We have the um uh mortality rate of women, right? And that is the basis of health of an entire country. Uh and that in itself, I think both of those together just kind of speak to this idea of how insanely important it is for women's bodies to be nourished and cared for and loved in this way. And when we do that, then we every it becomes a ripple effect through everything that we've done. And so much of what we've created in this world is not supportive of that in the least bit.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And listening to what you're saying, I can't help remember, like when I was more involved in the childbirth discussion, and how I would say something along the lines of what you just said, and how threatening people would find that. And I was that always took me by surprise. I mean, not everybody would find it threatening, but I think there was a certain contingence of um people involved in birth, like maybe campaigning for better birth safety. Maybe they were obstetricians who were very deep into the medical model. And when I spoke about birth in that way, they it made them uncomfortable, it made them anxious, and it made them feel like I was advocating for something less safe than their what they wanted. So I think, you know, that, and for me, that was like very much the sort of uh feminine energy versus the masculine energy. I'm not saying they were all male, many of them were, but um, but I think this idea of women having a positive experience of birth, even that in some ways rankled certain people because they felt like, you know, why does this matter? You know, I mean that's saying, you know, I've written and talked about it an awful lot, but the saying all that all that matters is a healthy baby. You know, in in in this country, anyway, people say, you know, to pregnant women, you know, don't worry too much about the birth, you know, at the end of the day, all that matters is a healthy baby. And it's kind of like a well-meaning phrase. But underneath that phrase, I think, is this sort of message that as you know, as long as everyone survives, then that then nothing else is important. And and maybe even that women aren't important. Um so yeah, I think it's really interesting how just saying that that women deserve better and that women deserve this kind of nurturing, holistic experience of childbirth sometimes really either makes people mock you or makes people sort of twitchy.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that's still that's still a huge thing, but I I think what we're there's a shift that's happening where people are realizing, you know what, if it's okay as long as mom and baby are fine, but we're recognizing that mom and baby are not fine. Like, yeah, you know, moms and and babies are dying at higher rates than they have ever died in in our modern world. Um, we're experiencing high rates of trauma, high rates of depression and anxiety. Like, I think we're coming to this realization of like, wait a second, we're actually not okay. Uh and and in a part of that, we've normalized this whole idea of like, oh, this is just part of motherhood and we're not okay. And I think we're finally moving out of this very slowly, but it's it's shifting and changing. And I'm grateful to be a part of that. But like you said, like sometimes it's very difficult to have those conversations. And I still have difficulties having these conversations, particularly, and I wanted to talk with you about this because this is a huge challenge for me. Like I use the words mother and woman in my work because I believe these are important biological realities. And I've lost a lot of potential students, uh, collaborations because I don't have transgender modules and in my work or whatever. And we just we don't have research on that. Like there's barely women's research, uh, women's health research, let alone this like intersection, right? And so you have ended the positive birth movement and you partly due to that, and and just based on what little I know about this over this sex-based language. Like, how do we navigate this? And and wanting to be kind and supportive, but also protecting this ability to speak about female biology.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I mean, it's it's really, really hard. Uh, I have been sort of in the trenches of that situation for about five years now. Um, it was in November 2020 that I was cancelled, um, as some people call it. I mean, I'm obviously not cancelled, am I, because I'm still here talking to you, much to some people's dismay, I'm sure. But um, you know, I just I was very, very involved in childbirth at that time. Um, and I'd just written my second book, Give Birth like a Feminist, had just come out. And uh I was aware that there were conversations happening around saying things like women and birthing people. Um, and I was just curious about it. I mean, I think at my heart, I'm a writer, I'm interested in words, and so I just wanted to know where these words were coming from and who had chosen them and what they signified. And so I learned quite quickly. I mean, things have changed a lot in five years, but five years ago, you couldn't question anything without getting immediately into a lot of trouble, and that's what happened to me. Um, and I really did get absolutely annihilated, and it was actually quite a horrible experience. I mean, I can laugh about it now, but it was during the pandemic as well. Um, so I was kind of already, I mean, like everybody was struggling, I think at that time a little bit because life had been completely turned on its head, hadn't it? So, you know, and all of all of my plans for that year 2020 had gone out the window, just like everybody else has had, you know, the travel I was planning and the, you know, my second book had just come out and everything was going really well. And then suddenly we're all locked in our houses trying to teach our kids how to do trigonometry. I mean, who wants to do that? Anyway, so yeah, it was already like a bit dystopian, and then this other dystopian thing happened, and um, and it will it was really quite horrible. But um through that experience, I think it just helped me the way that I was treated kind of helped me to think more about why what I believed and what I thought and to go deeper into it, really, because at that point I didn't really have anything to lose. Um, so I have stuck to my guns, I have explored the topic a lot more in the last five years. I think I'm a fairly moderate person, you know, in my politics and in my views. And I'm I do like to engage and listen, and I'm not an extremist. Um, I think there is unfortunately now mixed in this quite a sort of strong right-wing element that's coming that's come into this debate as well, which makes it even more complicated. As soon as you say that's my view, people assume you have a lot of other views that go along with it, which I don't. Um, but yeah, I mean, maybe I should stop talking and let you speak.

SPEAKER_01:

No, I I'm I'm loving all of this. I'm, you know, I'm first off, so sorry that happened to you. I think we live in a world that it's so sad that those kinds of things happened. And I right when you said like I was canceled, but I'm still here. I think that was so huge. Like, I just I wanted to take a moment to just really honor that because that is like our biggest fear. I know for myself, like that would be the worst thing to happen to feel like my my work would be taken away, but it's it's not in reality. Like you're still here, you're still doing this.

SPEAKER_00:

And I think that has to be your greatest revenge is to not, you know, we don't live in times anymore where you can literally burn women.

SPEAKER_01:

So um I'm oh my gosh, is this like the burning of women?

SPEAKER_00:

Like, or wow, I just got like a whole nother like I tell you, when I when I really started to recover from the experience of what happened to me was when I started to join the dots up and and hear the stories of other women from completely different fields to whom exactly the same thing had happened. And up until that point, for several months, I think I thought I am a really awful person. And what's happened here is that I've gone through my life thinking that I was actually, you know, fairly standard average person, maybe even quite a good person. And actually, I I've sort of been keeping a secret from myself. And as they have exposed me, and it was very public exposing, you know, all over social media. Um, they have exposed me for the person I truly am. And I really felt like horrifically bad about myself for a long time. Like, maybe, you know, all of it's very hard. I mean, you think about it sort of as if it was actually real. Imagine you're standing in a huge auditorium on a stage, and there's like 10,000 seats in the auditorium, and every single person in that auditorium is shouting at you, bigot, you know, turf, you know, evil, transphobic, nasty, hateful, you know, and they're they're all shouting that at you. How do you sustain your self-confidence and your self-belief through an experience like that and and not believe that I, one person, I'm the am right, and though they, all those thousands of people shouting those horrible things at me are wrong? It's really, really hard to do that. But yeah, like I say, what then happened was I um, you know, heard other women's stories that of similar things that happened to them. And I was like, oh my god, this is like a phenomenon. That's why I'm comparing it to witch burning, because I think it is a witch hunt. And it has been mainly women that this has happened to. I mean, there's a whole book about it now, a book called Hounded by Jenny Lindsay, um, about all the different women that this has happened to. And it happened to Jenny, who wrote the book. She was a poet. It happened to another friend of mine now called Justin DeWalls, who is an embroiderer. It happened to another friend of mine. We're all friends because of this experience. Rosie Kaye, who's a choreographer and a ballet dancer. Um, you know, it's happened to so many different women from so many different walks of life. Um, so the common denominator isn't that we're all bad women, it's that the common denominator is this very strange, extreme ideology that says you must not question. And if you do question, you will be punished. That's how it operates.

SPEAKER_01:

With so many things, not just this conversation about women and women's bodies. But I think, you know, the US right now is experiencing so much in terms of like the medical, the medical field, right? Where people are actually questioning COVID and vaccines and you know, all of the thing Tylenol is you know the new thing now, right? But yeah, the very question of it, right, is bringing up so much anger and so much uh fear, right? And and there's there's no in-between, and that's really scary that we don't have this in between to have these conversations. It's an immediate name-calling and you know, burning at the stake. Uh do you feel like you'll ever get back into the positive birth movement?

SPEAKER_00:

No, I think I've moved on from that now. I mean, to be fair, I think the experience that I had was kind of like the final nail in the coffin for for me with that work. But the the pandemic was another nail. It was very difficult, you know, um, because obviously it was it was a network of real life groups which all had to stop. Um, and it was terribly terrible. I I ran it for nearly 10 years, and it was really just a grassroots movement, me, my laptop, no funding. And it was hard and it took over my life, really. And I'm very proud of it. But but yeah, I mean, I think that was the last straw. I just thought I'm doing all this and I've been treated like that. I just know, I'm sorry, I can't do this anymore. Um, but to kind of go back to your original question about like what to do, you know, I think it's really important to say that I don't think that we shouldn't have any inclusive language um in maternity care or anywhere else. I think it's really important um to, I mean, ever everything that I've written about in terms of childbirth anyway, and campaign for in the positive birth movement is all about, you know, woman-centered care, but I mean the the person in the room who's having the baby being the most important and the most powerful and the most honored person in the room. And if that person wants to be called something or have particular pronouns used for them, etc., of course, my view is that that should be honored and respected because that's their choice. And there may be a conversation to be had about that choice, and you may have an opinion about that choice, and they may, you know, their path to that choice may be complicated, etc. But that at that point, when they're having a baby, that's really none of the care provider's business. Really, their business is just to listen to them and take their lead and respect them. So, of course, I would never advocate for not um, you know, respecting somebody's identity if they have a particular identity, et cetera. But what I've been writing about about language since all this happened is more to do with language at population level. And I think that's when it becomes a different phenomenon. Um, you know, changing words um in policy documents, change taking the word woman out of policy documents, out of advertising, out of newspaper articles, out of social media posts, almost always around um female biology, interestingly, um, is uh is eroding the concept of and the meaning uh of the word woman. And we have, you know, words for a reason, we have sex categories for a reason, and and in some situations sex matters, you know, it's relevant, not all, but in some.

SPEAKER_01:

It's the erasure of of women in our language. And I hear this so often as a comeback. Well, we're not erasing women, but when you when you speak of it in this way, when we're taking that word out of politics, when we're taking it out of social media and all of publication, really, like what it what does that do? What what happens when we can't clearly name the female biological realities?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's bizarre, isn't it? Because I mean, for a long time, like even my grandmother's generation, talking about female biological reality was very taboo. You know, and it was not something that you would sit and do a podcast about if there had been podcasts then, or have discussed on the radio, or even perhaps you maybe maybe talked about it with your close friends, but it was much more, there were many more taboos around, you know, childbirth, pregnancy, even the clothes you had to wear, even I mean, I can even remember the 1980s, like women, pregnant women had to wear these kind of dresses that so that you couldn't really see that they were pregnant until Demi Moore was on the cover of whatever that magazine was. And that was like so shocking, you know, because she was flaunting her pregnant body, nobody'd ever seen a pregnant body like that. So, you know, we had all these taboos around female biology and and and words, and and then we just had this kind of like little blip of time where that was being challenged. And people like me and other women were kind of like going on social media and sharing images of breastfeeding and sharing images of childbirth and sharing, you know, posts about it. And then suddenly, before you could blink, in comes this new form of censorship and kind of shuts down that discussion again and creates a whole new set of taboos. I just think that's really interesting and maybe not a coincidence.

SPEAKER_01:

It is interesting. Yeah, yeah. I don't see the same happening for men, like the word men or man or anything male related. You know, I it's very, you know, women-centered.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I I have a uh theory uh why that is. Um, I don't know if you want me to share.

SPEAKER_01:

Please share. Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think it's because this is basically a men's rights movement. Um, it is the right of men to become to declare themselves to be women and to be treated as women. That is the dominant force in this movement. But there is a barrier to that, and the barrier to that is female biology. Because a man can dress however he likes, he can have whatever surgeries and cosmetic surgeries and anything he wants, but he's never ever gonna have some of those you know, female experiences of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding. So I think the the uh drive is to kind of decouple uh the word woman from the reality of female biology, because then the word woman is easier to claim by man. Uh I hope that makes sense. I've been thinking about it.

SPEAKER_01:

Right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So a woman is any, and now the answer, many people's answer to that would be a woman is anyone who says they are a woman. It would be like a circular definition. So because biology gets removed. So then you literally are getting breastfeeding organizations and and menstruation organizations making social media posts that says, say things literally, literally say it's it's not only women that menstruate, it's not only women that are pregnant. They actually put that in the post. So I just think it's like it's just it's eroding the concept so that it's easier to lay to lay claim to. Just like you might go to if you wanted to like colonize an island, you might go and deplete its resources for a while before you moved in and put your flag in, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Um but yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

It's such an interesting conversation. And I and I feel like your work is it's so expansive, right? You you've got positive birth and you're talking about nutrition. And defending women's language and like they all almost seem like separate issues, but there is this common thread.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. There is, I think. It's well, my my sub stack is called What About Women? So for me, that like sums up my common thread. It's like trying to like always bring everyone's attention back to that question. Like, what about women? What about women?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, while we're on that thread, tell people where they can find you. Where do you want people to go? And of course, we're going to have this in the show notes as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so um I I my main place that I hang out is on Substack, and I have a Substack called What About Women. Um, and I think it's just Millyhill.substack.com. Um, I have a new Substack called Unprocessed, which I'm kind of experimenting with. But if you're really interested in the food angle, then that's where I'm for that stuff. Because it didn't quite fit in with my, I think a lot of people on my What About Women one were just like, why should you keep going on about food? So I split those two. And yeah, I'm on Instagram. Um, and that that's about it, really. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Beautiful. Uh well, if if you haven't connected with Millie's work and you've haven't read her books or or gone to her Substack, I highly, highly recommend it. I love everything that she puts out into the world, which is why she's here on the podcast. We invited her to be here, and I'm just so grateful that she said yes and that you are here sharing all of your wisdom. So thank you so much for that.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's appreciated.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks so much for being a part of this crucial conversation. I know you're dedicated to advancing postpartum care. And if you're ready to dig deeper, come join us on our newsletter where I share exclusive insights, resources, and the latest tools to help you make a lasting impact on postpartum health. Sign up at postpartum you the letter you.com, which is in the show notes. And if you found today's episode valuable, please leave a review to help us reach more providers like you. Together, we're building a future where mothers are fully supported and thriving.

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Maranda Bower

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