A nod to transgender and nonbinary customers
I missed this last October…Always Removes Female Symbol From Sanitary Pads:
In a nod to transgender and nonbinary customers, Procter & Gamble said this week that it was removing the Venus symbol, which has historically been associated with womanhood and the female sex, from the wrappers of Always brand sanitary pads.
Because now we have to pretend that anyone can menstruate, including men.
Steph deNormand, a patient advocate for transgender health at Fenway Health, who uses the pronoun “they,” told NBC that seeing “female-coded” imagery while purchasing menstrual products could create a sense of distress for some customers. “Trans and nonbinary folks are constantly misgendered, and a gesture like this can broaden out the experiences and open up spaces for those who need the products,” they said.
I can think of some more relevant gestures.
Be that as it may, the reality is both that women and girls menstruate and that the fact that women and girls menstruate is one reason they are despised and dominated, and it’s one reason they are persecuted and in fact excluded in the most literal sense. That is far more real, more material, more significant, than a few people’s manufactured angst about being “misgendered” when buying sanitary pads.
The redesign was also sharply criticized on social media by some for kowtowing to a tiny population and giving in to the demands of “crazy liberals.” The skepticism was also reflected in cynical headlines about the announcement.
That just trivializes it. I’m a crazy liberal myself, but I’m also an angry feminist, and I despise this fashion for erasing women.
The redesign was just the latest in a series of actions by companies to be more inclusive of customers who are transgender, genderqueer or nonbinary. In June, the ride-sharing company Lyft began allowing customers to share their pronouns.
Wut??? What can that mean? How could Lyft ever have stopped customers “sharing their pronouns”? Also why would anyone even bother since only the first and second person pronouns will be used anyway, and they’re already gender-neutral. “Hi, my pronouns are she/her.” “Why are you telling me this?”
Whatever. As long as it’s still women who clean the toilets who cares, right?
Back in the day when I was a recording engineer working in studios, sanitary pads affixed with duct tape were just the thing to dampen excessive vibration from drum heads. Even though I am a natal male, I don’t recall ever feeling a sense of distress when purchasing them. I just paid the money and left. I guess that’s my male privilege talking.
The Venus symbol is Greco-Roman, and, of course, names a Roman deity. The woke would have come for it eventually for its association with all the bad things the Roman Empire did.
I can’t stop myself from automatically translating this as “Steph deNormand, a patient advocate for transgender health at Fenway Health, who wants other people to use the pronoun they…”
I also use the pronoun “they.” I use it when talking about other people.
How are trans men excluded? The female symbol indicates their sex, rather than their gender identity. And of course trans women don’t need them at all.
Holms, I think you put your finger on it right there. The reminder of the association between women and menstruation makes it excruciatingly clear to transwomen that they are not women. They do not menstruate. (Neither do women past menopause, or those who have had surgery, but we don’t have any difficulty recognizing ourselves as still women.)
I visualize the transwoman standing in the feminine hygiene aisle at CVS, staring longingly at the tampons, wishing there was a true need for this product. The Venus symbol mocked, reminded, nay, dare I say, abused the poor male-bodied female wanna-be by reminding him he was just a wanna be.
I wouldn’t have thought this once upon a time, until I had the misfortune to encounter a site where the moderators were, apparently in all seriousness, explaining to trans how they could simulate menstrual blood, since they were not fortunate enough to be able to get that with the hormones and the surgery; no matter how many treatments you take, you still do not menstruate.
This, I think, brushes into one of the key issues the gender critical feminist position has when trying to make the case to the larger public.
A comparison–I’m an opponent of cosmetic male infant circumcision. It’s an absurd, unnecessary practice, with some fringe cases where long-term harm is caused, and with no benefit (I’m speaking here of countries where hygiene and condoms are available–there can be some medical benefits in less well-off nations).
However, when discussing the issue online, I have to spend a good three paragraphs distancing myself from MRAs on one side (who invariably try to comare CMIC to FGM, which is beyond moronic and trivializes a brutal issue) and neo-Nazis on the other side, who invariably insist that CMIC as practiced in the US is, of course, a Jewish conspiracy (which is somehow both absurdly vile and yet not as offensive as the bog-standard MRA approach).
Similarly, GCFs who try to critique trans ideology have to choose–spend time and air distancing themselves from religious right culture warriors who also rip into gay rights and so forth, or actually try to make their own points. Ignore the unwanted fellow-travelers, and it’s too easy for TRAs to lump you in with reprehensible assholes.
How strange. I came here fully expecting a post about Bodyform’s new ad, which feels like the perfect antidote to this nonsense. It’s on their website https://www.bodyform.co.uk and also… everywhere, it seems. Not a rollerblading 14-year-old in white hotpants to be seen.
It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? Lots of praise and analysis about it on Spinster. The more you look the more you see, and the more you realise. Someone wrote ‘Bodyform execs read the room.’
8/9:
Wow, that is good.
Huh. Very cool.
Freemage, this is true, but the problem is, no matter how much we distance ourselves from those who hate everybody (except rich white Christian males), they will throw TERF at us, and also lump us with right wing fellow travelers, neo-Nazis, and genocidal monsters. They will continue, because they need that. If they ever try to engage on the issue alone, they have nothing, and the emptiness of shouting “TWAW!” over and over becomes evident. And they also need it to paint us as anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-modern, anti-progressive.
I do think we should distance ourselves, but I don’t believe it will make any difference. Those of us who deal with population problems and the environment have the same issue, being lumped in with the nationalists and white supremacists. Personally, I wouldn’t care a bit if more Mexicans come to the country, but we do need to deal with overpopulation, so my suggestion is that we throw out the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, MRAs, and Trumpistas (who have a nearly circular, but not quite, Venn diagram), and replace them with immigrants who will actually help to turn this country into something greater than it is. But I am still lumped in with nativists.
Freemage
This is just a microcosm of a larger problem: political affiliation is all encompassing. If you are “liberal”, then there is a long list of beliefs that you must hold exactly, many of which are not at all liberal. If you are “conservative”, then there is a long list of beliefs that you must hold exactly, many of which are not at all conservative. These lists encompass nearly every subject conceivable.
This is a major problem, given the human propensity to adjust personal beliefs to conform to avowed group membership. And that’s before considering things like rhetorical difficulties.
iknklast
I saw just this on Twitter earlier today.
But…but…they are always eager to tell us that not all women have ovaries (true). Transwomen do not have ovaries (true). So what’s the problem? The problem is, they KNOW they are not women. They know it to the depth of their being. They do not want to know this, any more than I am eager to know that I cannot sing (but learned over time to deal with this reality, which is, of course, subjective, because people do insist on culturally defining singing talent as something that sounds good to the dominant culture, and in the western world, that leaves me out). It is because they know they are not really women that the ordinary discussions of ordinary life events (or extraordinary life events) of ordinary women threatens them, excludes them. For a woman who has had her ovaries surgically removed, or for some reason was born without ovaries, the mention of ovaries does not feel exclusive, unless you were specifically saying “Only people with ovaries are women”, in which case, yeah, it would exclude those women without them, and unfairly. But to simply mention ovaries is a threat to transwomen because they were born without ovaries AS A NORMAL CONDITION OF BEING BORN MALE and no matter how many times they say they are female, they will not magically grow ovaries, uterus, or expanded mammary glands.
George Lakoff wrote about the fact that although the clusters of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions appear unrelated and unconnected, they do all go back to two ways of conceiving one central metaphor. The book I read about this was I think Moral Politics, but I believe the same book has been reissued as Don’t Think of an Elephans
Yes, the metaphor of the nurturing parent versus the…I forget what the other word was but along the lines of strict, firm, authoritative (not quite authoritarian I think), yes?
Strict father. I thought it was a useful way to understand why it is that if, say, someone says they support abortion rights there’s an almost 100% chance they will also support same-sex marriage, gun control, sustainable development, aid to developing countries, public transport, secularism, higher taxes, food labelling, etc. etc., and that there’s an exact opposite cluster on the other side of the political divide.
Yes, I too find it quite interesting and suggestive.
guest, I do think the problem comes in when someone doesn’t agree with one or another thing on the list. Such as the trans issue, of course. When you disagree with a single item, people want to put you into the other camp if that is their core item. Like the person who declared Ophelia a Trump voter. Couldn’t comprehend a liberal, progressive thinker like Ophelia Benson being a liberal, progressive thinker if there was one area of deviation.
Like my husband. He supports most of the list guest provided, but does not support same sex marriage (we diverge on that point). He doesn’t consider himself a progressive, but an old-fashioned conservative. Conservatives want nothing to do with him because he supports higher taxes, sustainable development, etc. Liberals don’t claim him (or he them) because of other positions that deviate from the list, such as same-sex marriage. He is a complex, nuanced person, and our labels have very little place for that.
I think what I like about this site is that we are all complex, nuanced people here, and we are free to disagree without being disagreeable or demanding total conformity. No one here has ever offered to sodomize me with a porcupine, and for that I am grateful. (In case anyone doesn’t recognize the reference, think about that blog at FTB that will not allow anyone to express a gender critical position.)
Indeed. And those who deviate are worse than those who are avowedly on the other side. It’s the heresy/apostasy effect again. Those in the fold, so to speak, can’t be okay with apostates or heretics, because it would be tantamount to being okay with a position held by the opposite side. The heretic is actually seen as more threatening than the opposite side, because the heretic is in a position to be persuasive to those in the fold.
Isn’t that all of them now?
Partly it’s “those who deviate are worse than those who are avowedly on the other side” but isn’t it also to some extent that those on this side will listen to reason, aka are more persuadable? “You get it about the other stuff, surely you will get it about this.”
Which is how it worked over the second half of the 20th century, for the most part. Civil rights, then feminism, then lesbian and gay rights (all of which could tend to leave out workers’ rights aka class struggle, as Todd Gitlin for one pointed out). But it was a process of accretion, and then…something went badly awry. They think trans rights are just the latest overlooked until now thing, while those of us who disagree think no this is the tiger cub in the litter of kittens.
Yes, exactly! Like, subconsciously people know that the process is as you describe and recognize themselves as more persuadable by those who are ideologically close. (Which is actually just true of all people, really.) I think that’s part of the whole “why is the hate for JKR greater than that for any random conservative” thing, and why your dissent on the trans topic required not just disagreement but instead excommunication. As an insider, you would have had persuasive power; as an outsider, you are just another alt-right Nazi to be ignored or loathed.
And yeah, people think trans rights are just the latest in that historical trend. And there has to be a whole syzygy of factors making that possible, from lack of information to emotional exploitation to linguistic manipulation and so on. Someone should really write a clinically dispassionate book on the subject.
Once again I think cognitive dissonance is a big part of the explanation as well. When the people on the “other side” disagree with us, that doesn’t pose any serious threat to our self-image as representatives of the one and only “right” position. They were always beyond salvation anyway, right. When even people who “get it about the other stuff” disagree with us, that’s much harder to square since it seems to suggest that our conclusions are not the only ones that can be arrived at, even by people who aren’t clueless enough or morally bankrupt enough to support the other side.
Yes. That cuts both ways of course.
Bjarte: Yes, precisely. What out-groupers believe can be dismissed prima facie, but what in-groupers believe cannot.
There’s a good TheraminTrees video on tribalism that’s relevant here. Also this one on how adults get indoctrinated.
I wonder whether using Lakoff’s metaphorical structure can help us understand when and why a particular person ‘doesn’t fit the pattern’. They see the issue in a different metaphorical way, are drawing on different personal experience, or bringing different facts to bear. It’s possible one person might persuade the other, or at least support their position, by explicitly using the metaphor and showing how their ideas relate to it.
iknklast:
I’ve seen that tactic used a thousand times because they think it’s the ideal ‘gotcha’, and it usually comes in the form of a statement such as you say transwomen aren’t women because they don’t have ovaries so you must believe that a woman ceases to be a woman if she has her ovaries removed. They know that this will elicit a denial that possession of ovaries is necessary to make a woman a woman and that’s when they play their ‘killer’ card of so if ovaries aren’t necessary to qualify someone as a woman then why say transwomen aren’t women just because they don’t have them?
They do this with every single female-specific body characteristic, internal and external except for chromosones, but chromosones don’t count because nobody knows what combination they possess and testing is too complicated and so on (yeah, that came from a professor of developmental biology; go figure). It’s what I’d call the argument from #notallwomen. We’ve all seen it deployed and the format is always the same; not all women have x therefore transwomen are women. It is only ever used about a single characteristic at a time, and the trick is that it focuses on what some women do not have.
The tables need to be turned by listing all female-specific characteristics and pointing out that being a woman necessitates having some, but not all of those characteristics, then turning #notallwomen into #notranswomanever. Getting the message out that whilst the lack of some of those characteristics does not discount the possibility of being a woman, the lack of all of them* certainly does put the lie to the TWAW claim. One could go further and list all the male-specific characteristics, the obvious point being that these are qualities that women most certainly do not have.
*Possession of female-specifics (or lack of male ones) through surgical or chemical means does not count. I could have my tongue bifurcated but that wouldn’t make me a Komodo dragon, just as having my arms amputated and legs sewn together wouldn’t allow me to pass as a snake.
Not all people have two legs, but humans are still bipeds.
AoS, now I guess I’ll just have to cancel that tongue bifurcation surgery. Damn. I was so looking forward to being a Komodo dragon, too.
The thing is, women who have their ovaries surgically removed once had them. Women who have their uterus surgically removed once had one. Women who have mastectomy once had breasts (and men do, too, but they are different in size and function). Therefore, I would suggest that having your penis removed does not make you any less a man. Just as Papito suggested that having a leg amputated doesn’t change your status as a human.
I had that discussion with students once; because they once had a three-legged dog, the description of dogs as a quadraped must be wrong, because not all dogs have four legs. Pandas eat bamboo, so how can bears be carnivores? Dogs sometimes eat grass, they must be an omnivore. And on and on and on. No comprehension about a suite of characters that as a group describe a group, but one individual (or quite a few) may deviate in one or more ways without being a non-member of the group. They have most of the characteristics, and in the case of the three-legged dog or the woman born without ovaries, they have some condition in which something fails to develop. They are still what they are.
That’s not the same as being born with an entire suite of male characteristics, no characteristics common only in females, and thinking you are a female. The last is just a delusion.
There’s an unfortunate confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions. People have a hard time with just that basic distinction. Some of the traits listed for “female” are necessary; some, sufficient.
Complicating matters is the existence of one more category: a necessary cluster. That is, there is a set N of conditions. In order to qualify as “female”, an organism must possess n⊆N.