IWD 2021 - what can we hope for this year?

I expect someone will ask 'Is there an International Men's Day?' to be provocative, and then you can all put them down by telling them there is.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

It's become rather like Black Friday in the UK. Despite frantic publicity it isn't really a thing with any meaning and is largely all about the advertising, and it's much better to ignore it and wait until it goes away.

I am fully expecting to be more "challenged" than inspired come the end of March 8th.

Incidentally, last November, how many International Men's Day events even mentioned transmen, let alone centred them? I remember a truly shocking picture of (I think?!) collated tweets on here from last March where dozens of organisations and prominent people were using IWD as a platform to promote "transwomen are women".

I’m going to take as advantage of the day and discuss the joys of heavy periods, pregnancy issues (piles, stretch marks, sore boobs...), varicose veins (mostly a woman’s thing) and hysterectomies.

Funnily enough the big corporates don't seem to be going with the varicose veins and hysterectomies angle!

And of course we'll just have to gloss over the issues of sexual violence, domestic violence, FGM, prostitution and repeals to abortion laws for another year. Let's also forget about the massive reversal of women's rights we've seen over the last 12 months due to the pandemic. We wouldn't want to put a downer on the day when we could all just be Instagram-ing selfies in rainbow t-shirts.

Actually I may have got the theme wrong there. I just checked on the site and it says "Choose to challenge" which could mean pretty much anything. However, from what I've seen so far it does seem to be being interpreted by most people as "challenge gender stereotyping".

“Challenging gender stereotypes”? Oh lord it’s going to be wall to wall TW isn’t it because let’s not delude ourselves that anywhere is going to have TM front & centre!

Pretty sure it's going to be a total wash out again. The theme for this year is "challenging gender stereotypes" which is all well and good except it's already being morphed into not actually being about women at all. I've been invited to speak on a panel and was just sent the notes. The whole thing is about how gender stereotypes affect men and women ("boys have a lower reading age than girls" etc). One of the other panellists is a gay male talking about how stereotypes affect the LGBTQ community.

Can women not just have one day to talk about issues affecting women? Of course lesbians don't exist anymore (apparently) so we couldn't possibly have a female person talking about the awful stereotyping and erasure of lesbian women. Sigh.

I find the IWD website so uninspiring. It just seems to be about a new pose each year for an Instagram hashtag and that's it.

Yep my expectations are very low. I think we should keep a list of all the IWD events that include TW and all the orgs who centre TW in their activities for the day.

I have very low expectations to be honest. Let's hope I'm surprised.