This is the waves.

This is the waves.

This is the waves.

This is the waves.

Welcome to the waves.

Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and potentially banned phrases.

Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds.

And today you got me, Susan Matthews, Slates News Director and the Editorial Director of this podcast.

And me, Evan Irkhardt, writer on trans issues as well as Slates Community Manager for our commenting community.

And today we are here to talk about the rise of the use of the phrase pregnant people.

I wanted to talk about this because for me this has been something that has really infiltrated into my world in the past few months specifically.

I would say that that's because I've been writing and editing a lot of stories about Texas's SB8, which is a law that bans abortion after six weeks in the summer.

And this may be late that this is the main time that I've been thinking about it.

But for me, I've definitely done this before, but it's been during the past few months that basically every time that I'm writing or editing, I'm making a choice and thinking about if we're using the phrase pregnant people or pregnant women and why.

And so to me that feels current and new.

And as I've started thinking about that, I've kind of looked out into the world and realized that there is an entire conversation happening about this right now.

And it really is quite a conversation.

And I'm very excited to talk about it because I think that a lot of what I've seen feels really overblown and kind of beyond what the conversation should be for what we're talking about.

And if you kind of dig through all that, you can get to a few concerns that are actually really worth talking about and thinking about.

So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, Evan, because I hope that we can kind of talk through what you don't have to pay attention to about this conversation and what you should.

But Evan, why did you want to talk about this topic?

This is a really personal topic for me because while I've never been pregnant, I am a man with vagina. I'm a man who went through puberty where I got my period and developed breasts as an adolescence.

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