Menstruators of reproductive age
Erase erase erase erase.
There’s a Twitter account named FemCare Community Health Initiative. It’s a puzzle that it hasn’t done something about that “Fem” yet, because elsewhere they’ve been scrubbing dutifully.
A menstruator doesn’t menstruate during pregnancy, so is it still virtuous to call her a menstruator?
Stupid menstruator. They’re so incompetent, having all these miscarriages all over the place. Clearly FemCare is the wrong name altogether, it should be MenCare.
“FemCare: We put the ‘Men’ in Menstruation!”
I suppose the most hopeful reading of women’s health organizations declining to use the word “women” is that everyone doing so thinks Transmen are more than a little bit dim.
“Since this pamphlet says ‘women’ get PCOS, I’m obviously immune,” thinks “Bob” (born “Emily,”) who is planning on getting pregnant soon.
Given that there’s plenty of confusion around transgenderism, and plenty of sexually naive young people, this might even be a legitimate concern.
Really don’t get it. If “dysphoria” is this apparently huge deal, how does it help to be described by the exact bodily functions they’re so revolted by and trying to escape?
I know I know. Pointing out contradictions is only worthwhile if consistency is valued as a principle, which to gender ideologists it’s clearly not. But the cognitive dissonance must be exhausting!
Min, that was my thought exactly when I heard for the first time about how “men” can get pregnant. Why would they? If they want to be men, why in the world would they decide to gestate a child? Because of the inconsistency and silliness of these positions, we now have to agree that men can, in fact, gestate children, menstruate, and all the other things only women can actually do. If we don’t, we will remind them that they are not actually men (and by the reverse, remind transwomen that they are not really women, because none of them can do these things…it isn’t like older women, who pass the age of childbearing, or infertile women, who have all the equipment but cannot get pregnant; it is the case that no transwoman has what is required to bear a child, never did have, and it isn’t because they are infertile, it’s because they are men).
I don’t think all this talk about “menstruators” is for the sake of biological females who prefer to think of themselves as male* though. I’m pretty sure it’s to appease biological males who prefer to think of themselves as female (as usual…) by purging the language of any hint that being a “woman” has anything to do with physical traits like menstruation.
*Indeed I suspect the only reason these people are ever mentioned at all, is to preserve some minimal appearance of consistency.
Yeah, Bjarte, I suspect that is a lot of it, too, but most of my personal experience has been with transmen, and I find they are just as capable of getting unpleasant about things like women and women’s things. I suspect many of them are taking their cue from the TW, though, and believing at some point that TRAs give a damn about transmen.
@Bjarte;
I can think of at least one change initiated by a trans-identified female (and her mother): the “female” symbol on Always pads and tampons. The heartfelt letter regarding the pain felt by the non-woman when forced to buy a product aimed only at women was widely shared on social media — as was the response from Always, which immediately removed the offending symbol and made a big stink about how they’d never make a mistake like that again. Once one company or organization gets credited for enlightened sensitivity, others will — and did — follow.
iknklast #6, Sastra #7
“only ever” may have been putting it a bit strongly. I still have to wonder, though: Would the thing about the female symbol on the pads/tampons have gotten the same reactions if not for the fact that it seems to imply that being “female” does indeed have something to do with physical traits and when the TIMs catch on there will be hell to pay? Furthermore would gender ideology itself (including the idea that “gender identity” is a valid concept and even trumps biological sex, that everyone else is obligated to validate people’s “gender identity” etc.) have been granted such legitimacy in the first place if TIMs had not made it clear what happens to anyone who dares to disagree?
No, it would NOT.
And yet, when presumed suicide statistics are trotted out in order to clarify what’s at stake — that without validation people die — it is often TIFs who are used as examples. I suspect the hatred directed towards disagreement with gender identity theory has as much to do with “you’re hurting vulnerable people” as “you’re pretty vulnerable there, yourself.”
The TIFs are the stalking horses/useful idiots of the trans movement; they’re useful to wheel out when the dudes need to pretend it’s not a men’s rights movement, and often they can pass better than the men can (facial hair will do that), but they’re no closer to getting their official Man Card than any other women, when even natal men can get theirs withdrawn for such offences as, idk, recycling, or not being able to kick a ball well, or wearing a T-shirt with a weird neckline.
I know they’re victims of the ideology, by getting caught up in the TRA beliefs that woman=fragile sex object so therefore they MUST be something else, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy when they’re busy throwing the rest of us under the bus to appease their handlers and save their own skins. Do it to Julia!
Or being a librarian. Yeah, my husband got to deal with that. Especially before me…once he got married, and to a woman, he at least got to be seen as Not Gay, but still assumed not fully man. It probably doesn’t help that he married a woman who is a scientist, can do math, understand statistics, and is the one who has to fix things when they break and put together any furniture or hang any shelves.
Gee, sounds exactly like the sort of wife I need … :-)
I am fantastic with computers, useless with hammers.
I can bash you out a website in an afternoon, but can’t paint a house in a year.
Back on topic, two women close to me have died of ovarian cancer, one of the truly nasty cancers.
No man wearing woman face will ever have to go through this ordeal.
How awful; sorry to hear that, Roj. My condolences.
Only a ready aptitude for violence prevented me from having my man card revoked as a child. I was a bookish sort, didn’t like sports (especially watching them), and liked to talk about feelings and poetry and stuff like that.
My mother gave me my own sewing machine when I was thirteen because it was my only request. I still have it, and I was using it yesterday to sew my daughter’s and my halloween costumes.
I wonder how many TIFs have had their man card revoked / been accused of gayness / earned deprecating nicknames because of an air of womanliness about them.
I’m so past that sort of foolishness, but there’s a period in everybody’s life where it seems to matter. I found my place in life as a house-husband, raising two kids and taking care of the yard, the gardens, the contractors, the cooking, the halloween costumes, etc. People sometimes can’t figure me out, but I leave them in their confusion – it’s their problem, not mine.
I’m so very sorry, Roj. Ovarian cancer is a dreadful cancer. It isn’t known as the ‘silent killer’ for nothing; so few of us get symptoms early enough to escape with nothing worse than a few missing internal organs. My aunt and a great-aunt died from it. In my generation, so far, I’m the only one of us to have been visited by it (in my thirties – I had symptoms very early, so I got away) and the doctors are keeping a careful eye on my daughter, who is the same age I was when I got it.
These bloody men will never, ever know what it is like to be a woman, and they are imposing their fantasy of what women are onto society; patriarchal society (of course), which is very happy to have an excuse to replace women with men in business (“Look! We have more than filled our quota of women on the board! What? Those are LADY penises. TERF!”) and by taking away private, women-only facilities, deprive women of the freedom to be in public ever again.