British singer Paloma Faith has said she’ll let her third baby decide whether it’s a boy or a girl. In an Instagram video earlier this month, she prances around, cradling her bump, insisting it’s 2026 and her child will decide his or her or ‘their’ gender when they’re old enough. Anyone who disagrees is, apparently, a ‘transphobic, homophobic prick’. ‘It’s 2026 – do we even give a shit about gender anymore?’, Faith says. ‘It will be whatever it wants to be whenever it is old enough to decide its own identity.’
I watched the video thinking: God, I’d hate to be pregnant now. Not because pregnancy has changed. It hasn’t. Women still carry babies. Babies are still born male or female. The reason I’d hate to be pregnant is because expectant mothers have to contend with numpties on social media, telling them their baby can choose its own sex – and risk being labelled a bigot if they point out, truthfully, that this is not possible.
Two decades may have passed, but I still remember the anticipation before our baby was born. We chose not to find out the sex – we wanted the surprise. Granted, ‘boy or girl’ isn’t exactly a plot twist. But after slogging through labour, there’s something joyful about calling your friends to say: ‘It’s a girl!’
Now, in certain circles, even saying ‘it’s a girl!’ can be treated as an act of political aggression. Which says something about the moment we’re living in – that acknowledging a basic biological fact is now framed as bigotry.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, girls with short hair who preferred trousers were just tomboys. Boys who gravitated towards the girls’ dressing-up box might get teased – but they weren’t told that they were born in the wrong body and sent to a gender clinic for treatment. Self-expression wasn’t treated as a potential clinical condition. And when pop stars like Boy George and Marilyn Manson appeared on Top of the Pops in dresses and make-up, they were exciting because they blurred fashion boundaries – not because anyone thought they were literally women, or expected us to pretend they were.
Paloma Faith is not the only celebrity besotted with gender-identity ideology. Other public figures have echoed similar sentiments – from Olivia Colman describing herself as ‘sort of nonbinary’ and a ‘gay man’ to Coronation Street’s Shobna Gulati announcing, at the age of 58, that she is neither male nor female.
If it were just eccentric celebrity behaviour, perhaps we could shrug it off. Artists have always been dramatic about identity. But the language – and the ideology that goes with it – has filtered far beyond celebrity cliques. NHS trusts have adopted terms such as ‘pregnant people’, ‘birthing people’ and ‘chest feeding’ to describe women and breastfeeding. The stated aim is inclusion. Yet for many women the effect feels oddly diminishing – like being ‘cancelled from motherhood’, as one friend put it to me.
There is a great risk attached to this manipulation of language and denial of truth. Last year’s independent Sullivan Review warned that blurring sex categories risks missed screenings for sex-specific conditions, such as breast and prostate cancer, due to the confusion supposedly ‘gender inclusive’ language causes.
Last year, health secretary Wes Streeting said that NHS language should use plain English and that women should not be ‘excluded or erased’ in attempts to be ‘inclusive’. The Supreme Court has clarified that ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refer to biological sex. Yet hardly a week passes without a fresh attempt to undermine biology in favour of trans dogma. Only last week, 38 biologists and doctors wrote to equalities minister Bridget Phillipson under the banner ‘Biology is not binary’. They argued that ‘biological sex’ is political rather than scientific and should be understood as ‘bimodal’ instead of binary.
Which makes Faith’s recent announcement feel less like quirky celebrity behaviour and more like a symptom of something deeper: a discomfort with the basic fact that reproduction is sexed – and that only women get pregnant. And once that is negotiable, everything built on it becomes contested, too.
So when I say I’d hate to be pregnant now, I’m not talking about morning sickness or overstretched maternity wards. I’m talking about the political noise that now surrounds something as simple – and natural – as birth. Quite frankly, it sucks the joy out of it. Would ‘it’s a boy!’ sound like a political statement? Would a pink blanket invite commentary? Would I be corrected for calling myself a mother?
Pregnancy and birth are demanding enough without treading on eggshells about the language you use about your own body. Paloma Faith may believe she’s liberating her child from labels. But a baby’s sex is not a label. It’s a fact.
Janet Murray is a journalist writing on women, culture and public policy.
