Plain English, Gender and compromise

but if I were post-menopausal I would have no idea how to interpret the statement "women and other people who menstruate". That isn't me being deliberately difficult, I would genuinely not know for sure if I was supposed to be including myself or not.

If you were post menopausal you would know it you needed to use tampons or not (presumably). So I think if you saw that phrase on san pro you would know exactly what it meant

It’s a simple question, where is the compromise between women and a world that includes trans people? And for a lot of people, the answer seems to be ‘there isn’t one’.

You are basically trying to suggest that unless we compromise and change the language that we find acceptable (and as already noted it will be impossible to find a solution that suits everyone as some trans people don't want to be referred to as menstruators etc), we don't want to include trans people in the world, which isn't true.

Far more women on any given day are grieving after a miscarriage, but we don't hide all evidence of babies from the baby aisle in the supermarket just so that those women don't have to see the reality of other women buying nappies or baby milk & feel 'triggered'.

On average 250,000 women a year. Add to that women who have a stillborn and women who abort a much wanted baby for medical reasons.

Contrary to my assumption that pregnancy loss was rare, at Christmas dinner in 2000 in my mother and toddler group (20+ women) the subject came up and it turned out that all but two women had experienced a pregnancy loss. 9 months later it was all of us. Navigating a world full of happy baby adverts, full of baby stuff, in August 2001, I cannot describe how painful that was at first. But it never occurred to me to see this as a slight to me, a non-acknowledgement of my suffering, a denial of my loss. Baby stuff, babies, pregnant women is part of the human condition. As is loss. I didn't think my neighbour who fell pregnant at the same time as me was continuing to be pregnant at ne, walking around with her huge belly just to spite me. Of course it was painful seeing her, but I kept that to myself and willed her to have a healthy baby.

And even though many, many more women have experienced pregnancy loss than identify as trans, there is little appetite to change our world to make life less painful afterwards. We certainly don't support a woman who has experienced a pregnancy loss by pretending babies don't exist. We support her by acknowledging her loss is real, and that her grief is normal. And then we grieve and learn to live with our loss as best we can.

I am confident that female transgender individuals have the ability to learn to manage their unwanted female biology without forcing this language change on all of us. And many of those I know and know of say that the language change doesn't help with their dysphoria, so I would honestly question who really benefits from uncoupling the word woman from female biology.

Following on from that, I am still having periods, but if I were post-menopausal I would have no idea how to interpret the statement "women and other people who menstruate". That isn't me being deliberately difficult, I would genuinely not know for sure if I was supposed to be including myself or not.

@lazylinguist you're right, I know you are. I think I'm just so tired of things still being so shit for women and girls that I start to lack patience with people having a problem with tampons being marketed at women or whatever. The nature of my work gives an awareness (sorry for being vague but don't want to be outing) on a regular basis about life for women and girls in developing countries and I guess it affects my responses to things like this, rightly or wrongly.

I wasn't being hostile.
If you have trouble understanding the meaning of comments in plain English, can you now see why less plain language is an issue?

@lazylinguist I think we're on the same page though?

Sorry - you're quite right, we are! Although I stand by what I said about headspace. I see the 'You're lucky if that's all you've got to worry about" angle on MN a lot, and I don't buy it. Being concerned about one thing doesn't mean that you're not also concerned about other, possibly bigger, things. And I therefore have to assume that just because a trans person might think it's important to have different wording (which I may not agree with) on a product, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't care about girls and women in period poverty.

Outside of that though, language does evolve. So off the top of my head, I can see a situation where some marketing exec might decide to include more words like ‘bae’ ‘idgaf’ ‘tldr’ might help attract a younger audience. It’s the same issue.

Interesting that you've given the example of marketing execs using language to target a particular audience, when what the thread is discussing is changing the accepted language that has been used for sanitary products for decades- the language that refers to the vast vast majority of the product's consumers- WOMEN.

Is this hostility really necessary?

If you have trouble understanding the comments on this thread, surely now you can understand why plain English is necessary?

'There should be no compromise' is quite clear, I thought.

[quote StrawberryLipstickStateOfMind]@Pumperthepumper you've done this on the other thread too- why do you keep asking individual people what their line in the sand is when they've made it quite clear what their thoughts are?[/quote]
I’m just making sure I’ve understood properly. That’s all.

Outside of that though, language does evolve. So off the top of my head, I can see a situation where some marketing exec might decide to include more words like ‘bae’ ‘idgaf’ ‘tldr’ might help attract a younger audience. It’s the same issue.

@Snugglepumpkin I agree with your post btw.

@Pumperthepumper you've done this on the other thread too- why do you keep asking individual people what their line in the sand is when they've made it quite clear what their thoughts are?

@Pumperthepumper I was replying to lazylinguist as thought she may have misinterpreted my post.

As for trans inclusion? No I wouldn't include anything specifically. These are products aimed at biological women- females- which includes a very very small number of trans men.

So my choice would be for the language to remain 'by women for women' as per the lil lets leaflet.