Comment Re: Pregnant people? *eyevroll* (Score 1) 145
Changing a previously well-defined category "MOTHER" from meaning "human with xx chromosomes and a set of more-or-less functional female organs" into a category that also includes "humans with xy chromosomes and no uterus, but wearing skirts and makeup" and "humans with xx chromosomes that have a uterus, but take hormones that healthy xx-chromosomed bodies never produce" and all other sorts of genetic and hormonal status, then the science concerning that becomes LESS precise. It is a generalization to the concept, introduced for political reasons, that either dilute the precision and applicability of the research if they're actually applied and not just used as labels, or dilute scientific precision and objectivity if they're not applied for the entire research, but only labeled.
Science is the formation of categories and assignment of real-world observations - where everything is on a continous spectrum - into these categories. Reality presenting every observable variable as a "spectrum" does not preclude the definition of categories to make sense of it. Defining a set of wavelengths into "Blue" and "Yellow" does not make light not be a spectrum anymore, but it enables human communication to happen about it. And science is the checking, evaluating, re-evaluation and, if needed, re-definition of categories and concepts. And more often than not, sub-division of existing concepts and categories into finer-grained ones with less categorization error.
This categorization error is what statistically-oriented science tries to minimize, without increasing the number of categories too much. Minimize the number of categories while also minimizing the average, median and maximum categorization errors is what makes statistical research "good", because the goal is to make testable predictions from these categories later and that requires a huge reduction from the number of observations to the number of categories. Creating 1 million categories to describe 10 million patients is idiotic, because then there can be no predictions made for any of them, as then there'd only be 10 member of each category and not nearly enough data to make any generalizations about the course of whatever process it is you're trying to describe. Putting all 10 million patients into the same category even if they have huge differences among them is also idiotic, because then generalizations will be too broad to be useful, or more importantly, may be too "wrong" for too many individuals, so a medical treatment developed from it is too risky.
Including men, women, transmen, transwomen, intersex and even more diversely sexualized people in a study relating to pregnancy could be useful, if the actual differences between those categories are the focus of that research or the research is taking care that these categories are not mixed and erased during the analysis. Writing the paper like these categories are all the same or ignoring the differences, despite their hormonal status differing wildly, astronomically, between them - WHILE TALKING ABOUT HORMONES, is complete lunacy.
It is at least as idiotic as talking about the harmful effects of UV-C rays of a very specific wavelenghts on skin cells and then linguistically including yellow and red and blue into the paper and pretending that all "visible light" is identical as far as skin reactions are concerned.
If that is "science", please never produce medicine or safety-related products from the results.