Paid professional dismissal of women
Amnesty International has an inspiring inspirational aspirational empowermenting inspiringational tweet for us:
Trans rights are women’s rights.
Queer rights are women’s rights.
Disability rights are women’s rights.
Abortion rights are women’s rights.
Migrant rights are women’s rights.And women’s rights are human rights.
11:01 AM · Oct 22, 2019· Falcon Social Media Management
Sic. Yes really.
Note the very last item: Falcon Social Media Management. We’ll come back to that.
But first, what is this garbage? What is their point? To remind women that we alone of non-dominant groups don’t get to have our own struggles, our own rights, our own campaigns, our own petitions for redress of grievances? That we alone need constant reminding to Think Of Others instead of ourselves? That we alone are expected to budge up and move over and share? That we alone are constantly harangued about intersectionality and inclusion while other non-dominant groups aren’t? That we alone are constantly interrupted with “Yes yes yes but trans people queer people disabled people migrants so stop talking about yourselves you selfish bitches”?
Well fuck that noise.
And that obnoxious “stfu ladeez” doesn’t even come from Amnesty but from a paid social media marketing firm. That’s what Falcon Social Media Management is.
Talk about adding insult to injury…
They forgot, “Men’s rights are women’s rights”.
/s
I read it as a list of the types of women: trans women, queer women, disabled women, abortion-needing women; migrant women.
But your interpretation also works, because in both cases there’s the message “trans women are women” — and I suspect that’s the real point.
That’s a possible reading, but cutting against it is the fact that similar messages are not sent to other non-dominant groups. It could be an example of a wider message delivered to all social justice movements, but in reality it isn’t – it’s only women who appear in these ads.
I find the idea that all trans rights are women’s rights disturbing. This implies that not only are the rights of biological women who pretend to be men (aka transmen) women’s rights, but the rights of biological men who pretend to be women (aka transwomen) are women’s rights too.
Does that mean that both these groups are excluded from the category of men? Does the speaker believe there is a defect to both groups that makes their rights not men’s rights?
I’ve never been fond of the idea of women as defective men.
I’ve spent my entire life fighting against that. It’s a thankless fight. I’m sure I don’t have to tell any of you here that.
When I was told as a little girl that I couldn’t do something because I was a girl, my immediate response was “Why not?” My mother felt sure that, in reality, I could do it, but I shouldn’t do it, because girls didn’t do that. We needed to let the boys/men do those things, because it wasn’t ladylike for us to try to be men.
Telling women how they should feel sounds a lot like garden variety mansplaining so it doesn’t help the cause. When you bully and brow beat women to get what you want that invites comparisons to the group most often associated with that kind of behavior – ie men. Lacking empathy? -again kinda man-like. Feeling entitled to everything on your Christmas list – again kinda (white) manly.
I take a dim view of any PR firm that gets involved in this sort of thing. I mean I remember Bell Pottinger and how they basically encouraged racial hate – trolling both sides of the aisle – in order to distract South Africans from the corruption going on in Jacob Zuma’s cabinet.