What does the trans debate mean for widowers like me?

I once asked a hospice nurse to describe her job and was surprised when she likened it to midwifery. ‘There are two days,’ she said, ‘which aren’t the full 24 hours. The day you are born, and the day you die.’ Uncertainty, fear and waiting. Having been at my late-wife’s deathbed – and at her side as she gave birth to our children – I can see the analogy.

But why, when it comes to the language of inclusivity, is death excluded? Or, as the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, asserted recently ‘there is currently biological essentialism and transphobia present within elements of mainstream birth narratives and discourse’. 

Why stop at births? This is a hospital we’re talking about. Lives don’t just start there. What about death ‘narratives’? If breastfeeding mothers are out, and ‘birthing people’ who ‘chest-feed’ are in, where does that leave widowers like me?

Since the word began appearing in Medieval English, a widower has been a husband deprived by death of a wife.