And frame it as a “women’s issue”
Woman who calls herself “transmasculine” gets all shaky-like when menstrual products say “for women” on the label. (If they do – I have my doubts that anyone who needs menstrual products also needs to be told at the point of sale that they’re for women.) Narcissism forevaaaaaaaaa!
My period has never triggered feelings of gender dysphoria as a trans masculine person, but the way people talk about menstruation and frame it as a “women’s issue” makes me experience feelings of dread and discomfort.
Really? It makes her do that? Or she does it because she’s conditioned herself to think she’s supposed to, by being exposed to 50 million stupid articles and tweets and videos like this. They’re all conditioning each other, aren’t they, by exaggerating the anguish and bitter injustice of being reminded that only women and girls menstruate. They work each other up, like a slumber party watching a horror movie. This isn’t political, it’s emo-spiral.
Many things can trigger dysphoria for trans people, and the way we’re excluded from conversations around basic bodily functions is one of them.
They’re not excluded though, they just decide to exclude themselves by demanding to be treated as Special Magical Unicorns who don’t have the same boring kind of gender you dreary old slobby boomer slags have.
As a sex and relationships reporter, I get hundreds of pitches a week from companies to review their period products. From period panties to tampons to menstrual cups, my inbox is filled with emails about products marketed as “for her” or “feminine care.”
Job one: immediately stop referring to women’s clothes via diminutives. Adults don’t wear “panties,” we wear underpants. Women aren’t children.
I feel like I want to scream and curl up into a ball, in part due to my own dysphoria, but also because I know gendering periods makes it even harder for trans people to access adequate menstrual care.
No it doesn’t. Men can buy tampons and pads, as can women who claim to be men or “transmasculine.”
While I don’t have dysphoria about my period itself, it’s hard not to feel triggered when I get my period and have to rely on gendered pink products or information. It’s an added stress that makes it even harder for me to take care of myself.
Listen, chum, lots of us generic women without the “transmasculine” trimmings hate the pinkification of everything marketed to us too, not because We’re Not That Gender but because it’s so fucking insulting. The infantilization of all women is more important than anyone’s “transmasculinity.”
Before I found my current trans-inclusive clinic in New York City, I had experiences with gynecologists who would misgender me, deadname me, and use extremely gendered language around menstruation, making it feel unsafe to bring up any actual concerns.
“Making it feel unsafe” in your head maybe, but then you’ve been trained to feel that, or say you feel it, haven’t you. With any luck you’ll be embarrassed by all this in a few years.
How can you complain about “gyne”cologists misgendering you with a straight face?
Good point.
Yes, I suspect so. Which brings up the possibility of performing a social experiment in which people who have recently come out as transgender are put in with a community of trans people saying the opposite. “As a trans boy, I enjoy using products labeled “for girls,” because it reminds me of who I was, and who I am now.” “Me, too!” “Well, I’m a bit different, in that I really never notice such things.”
Let’s see if the conditioning can work the other way.
I get it. You don’t have dysphoria. You don’t feel any discordance or emotional pain from the fact that you menstruate, that your body is female. You feel discomfort only from the word “woman” and the color pink.
Well yes, the association of pink with womanhood is stupid, and if you don’t like pink, that’s totally cool.
And as for the word “woman”, well, that’s just a word in the English language that refers to your sex. If it causes you so much anguish, how about we use a different word, such as the German “Frau” or the Swedish “kvinna”. Problem solved!
Anyway, you don’t have dysphoria. Not one bit.
At the end of the day I’d just really like to know what these people are babbling about when they say the words that they say. WHY is she “masculine”? What is “masculine”?
I can understand “dysphoria.” I understand the sexual aversion of “super-straights” to people of the same-sex and the sexual aversion of gays and lesbians to people of the opposite sex. I suppose there might be people with an aversion to their own bodies. But then there’s the “transwomen” celebrating their “girl d__ks.” And there’s this person who isn’t traumatized by menstruating. And that other transman who deliberately had a baby in the attempt to have a child with no mother (the courts didn’t agree with “him”).
And, anyway, “dysphoria” doesn’t make you the opposite sex. It means you hate your own body’s sex. (Supposedly.) And if it turns out to be the case that “gender” isn’t a real thing (in the same way that “intelligence” or even the “self” aren’t real things) then the first form of treatment for dysphoria should be to try to make people love their own bodies. (Even though some trans people evidently REALLY do.)
I never got the memo that PROVED transpeople are really the “genders” (or whatever) that they say they are.
If it all turns out to be a load of hooey, then we have a bunch of really sad, deluded people working themselves up into lathers and making complete asses of themselves.
Fauxrage.
I saw a FB post about this. The package is blue, not pink. Somebody found images of the front and back of the package. Nowhere does it say “for women,” much less “only for women.” TiMs have no monopoly on trans lying.
Thanks, maddog, I worried I was going crazy, because I remembered blue. But I haven’t used them since my hysterectomy, and everything has been turning pink for the past 20 years, so I could be wrong.
The conditioning is so, so true. I just finished Irreversible Damage and what she describes is a community of people egging each other on, telling each other things about how they should be…and getting that response. I begin to suspect people start having these meltdowns because they’re worried they won’t be accepted by the community if they’re cool with letting women’s things be for women without getting the vapors and feeling suicidal. It’s a self-feeding clique that destroys.
It reminds me of call-and-response in religion. Preacher says X. Congregation says Y. Preacher says X2. Congregation says Y2. It reinforces ridiculous beliefs, especially when everyone is doing it.
‘As a sex and relationships reporter’ Isn’t this person in the wrong job? If she finds things relating to sex so upsetting you’d think she’d steer well clear of them to the best of her ability.
Literally holding a boy-coloured box of tampax in the accompanying photo.
What kind of man needs a lie down on the fainting couch because he’s offended by words?
It reminds me of the trans men who manage to have heterosexual sex, become pregnant, gestate a baby for nine months, give birth and then say their dysphoria is triggered by someone saying only women have pregnancies. I can (just about) see the thread of rationalisation behind this contortion, but I can’t help but imagine that if I were about to bring a life into the world, I’d have a bit more to worry about.
This kind of thing really annoys me. Does she mean that the doctor deliberately and consistently used a name she no longer uses despite being asked not to? Or that they just read it off the fucking form?
Because I’m as close to dammit 100% certain that it’s the latter.
Me:
I can see that she might feel she has traits she describes as being traditionally masculine. “Masculine” is a gender word, after all, and I can see why someone might describe themselves as being more masculine than feminine.
But that just makes the ‘trans’ part all the more redundant, doesn’t it? More making-shit-up-to-seem-special?
Unless she can explain the difference between being masculine and transmasculine, which I know with a similar certainty to the above, from long, bitter experience talking to others with similar notions, that she cannot.
Then again, as Catwhisperer points out, aren’t traditional notions of “masculinity” supposed to imply a certain degree of toughness, thick skin, keeping your cool etc.? Somehow I can’t picture Clint Eastwood talking about wanting to “scream and curl up into a ball”, or being “triggered”, or feeling “unsafe” because of “gendered language”.
Likewise, no one has ever been further from embodying traditional notions of “femininity” than loud, aggressive, entitled, porn-crazed male bullies who revel in violent rhetoric against women, telling them to “die in a fire”, or suck their “lady-cock”, posing with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire etc. As I keep saying, the last thing the TERF-bashers can be accused of is displaying too little toxic masculinity, too little aggression, not enough raging entitlement, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being too nurturing, caring, sensitive, modest, selfless etc.
It just goes to show, once again, that the TWAW / TMAM line fails even by its own criteria.
I can’t. How the hell is it “dysphoria” to have no problem with your body and how it works, but to be “triggered” by the word “woman” and by someone’s statement of the fact that only women’s bodies work like yours?
@12, this is where they’ll say: It’s all about gender identity, which is something that forms in the fetus in utero! That gender has nothing to do with traditional stereotypes, nor with bodies.
“Oh but,” they say, “that’s gender presentation, and we’re talking about gender ___” – I forget what, but it boils down to soul or essence – you know, the kind of thing they insist is not what they’re talking about.
They don’t seem to be complaining about body dysphoria resulting from exposure to “triggering words” but a bruised sense of honor from encounters with “fighting words.” They’re treating phrases like “for women” on menstrual products as personal insults.
Someone with a fear of dogs might find their anxiety provoked by a magazine cover illustrated with photos of dogs, but they don’t write angry letters to the editor. Put a Dalmatian on the same cover under the title “Why Dalmatians Make Lousy Pets” and watch those letters pour in from Dalmatian owners. They feel unfairly targeted. In this case, a pink cover is telling transmen “You’re not really a man” and they don’t want to curl up in a corner — they want to fight back. Because of course they would, that product just got up in their face and screamed at them.
Toxic masculinity is not in conflict with getting even. On the contrary.
Bjarte@12:
I can see how she might feel she has masculine traits.
GW@13:
I can just about see the rationalisation, not the reasoning.
GW #14
…which once again raises the question of what it does have something to do with since we need such words as “man” and “woman” in the first place. Without circular definitions and tautologies (i.e. without using the word “woman” itself in the answer), what exactly is their brain telling them about themselves when it tells them they’re a “woman”? Like the old “what if my red is your blue?” problem, how do they know that their subjective experience of being a “woman” is different from someone else’s subjective experience of being a “man”? Why is it so important to be recognized as a “woman” if the only thing that can be said about women is that they’re called “women”?
@18: They can’t explain it, but they will solemnly proclaim that everyone has a gender identity, including you and me, and therefore we should know exactly what they mean when they say it, because we have it, too.
GW #14 wrote:
They may sincerely believe they’ve found a way to avoid the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of stereotypes in the way they’re using gender, but instead they’ve been sucked into the latter whirlpool. To bring in another metaphor, they may be replacing boxes with yardsticks.
In the essay “Gender Identity Isn’t a Box, It’s a Yardstick” (https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/)
the writer suggests that transgender people believe they’re the opposite sex not because they fit the stereotypes of the opposite sex, but because they feel they ought to be measured by those stereotypes. Thus, the “yardstick:”
See how they’re defying stereotypes? A transwoman can be a gender-nonconforming girl with macho mannerisms and a beard — and a transman could be a sweet little thing in skirts and sparkles. Break the mold!
No, I don’t see that either. They’re still reinforcing stereotypes because they insist on the relevance of the yardstick, require that it exists. They need it in order to be special.
This illustrative metaphor might explain what seems to us like an obvious contradiction, because it offers a more subtle contradiction which can be mistaken for the rejection of sexist stereotypes. A good clue that it isn’t, however, is that in an enlightened society without sexist norms about what’s “boy behavior “ and “girl behavior,” there could not be people who reject their sex because it doesn’t measure up against who they feel they are on the inside.
Poor dear. He will never know the joy of prostate.
This “yardstick” is seriously messed up, in more ways than one. It mixes in a whole bunch of things that wouldn’t be there if the original writer had been careful about crafting their analogy.
Meticulous grooming and use of makeup products introduces class. Not everyone who would like to do thesethings can afford it. So we’re introducing an element of income into this yardstick, aren’t we? Rich, powerful men of the past wore wigs, make-up, silk stockings and high heels.
A person who dates women might be a lesbian. Lesbianism ranks very high on the “woman” yardstick.
Trousers, but not skirts, or dresses. Trousers do not keep a lesbian from being a woman. Nor do kilts or sarongs keep men who date women “low” on the “man” yardstick. So now we’ve lumped in heteronormativity with this yardstick, which is getting fuzzier (or fatter?) all the time.
These “yardsticks” seem to be quite variable in terms of culture, time period, class, etc. This would seem to be more a series of transient, cultural constructs, rather than some sort of universal, objective, standard measure of anything. It’s more like the days when every country would have its own “foot” or “pound” or “acre. ” We’re going to have to keep changing yardsticks from place to place, and from time to time. On the other hand, male and female, man and woman, are about as universal and unchanging as you can get. Even the people who would tell you they believe otherwise know that this is true, or they would not have to keep repeating their all caps mantras on Twitter.
@YNNB:
The person who came up with the “yardstick” metaphor is gender critical, and trying to describe how and why TRAs have come to believe they’re breaking gender stereotypes instead of supporting them. The yardstick is very definitely specific to the culture of the transgender person who wants to be measured by conventional standards of “feminine” (or “masculine”) and revealed to be unconventional. If lesbians break a gender rule about women being attracted to men, then a TRANS woman who is a lesbian is also breaking out of the gender box. Even though a TRANS woman “lesbian” is really just heterosexual.
I have read that some TIMs see themselves as the cool kind of girl they wanted to date — one that was both sexy and had the same stereotypical masculine hobbies and interests which they had. They couldn’t find that quirky tomboy dream girl — so they became her.
I have a simpler hypothesis. “For women” and such triggers anxiety because it’s a reminder of basic facts she’s trying to deny. The fact that her body, which menstruates, is female, for one.
That’s why anyone who questions the dogma must be punished.
It’s denial.
(Get them in a corner and TRAs will insist there is a distinction between sex and gender and they know it, but if they really accepted the distinction their movement would be very different.)