Ocado siding with misogynists and agreeing that the word "woman" and its dictionary definition is hate speech

[PerverseConverse]

Mumsnetters in their droves are abandoning Ocado after they sided with advertising company, Primesight, for removing Standing for Women's billboard in Liverpool. The billboard was a very simple dictionary definition of the word "woman." This has been declared homophobic and hate speech by Dr. Harrop who demanded the billboard be removed.
Since when did the very word, "woman" equal transphobic hate speech?
Posie Parker, the woman behind Standing for Women, was on Sky News this afternoon with Dr. Harrop defending the rights of women and the right to call ourselves women.
Shares in Ocado have gone down today and the company amidst a torrent of cancellations have said they will issue a statement today. So far they haven't done so but all their tweets saying Primesight reflected their company values have been deleted along with the many comments that followed.
Is it unreasonable to boycott Ocado for publicly showing themselves to be against women, who after all are their target consumer group? Scores of posters on the feminist boards don't think so but I'd love to hear the opinions of those outside of the feminist boards.

I may be stating what everyone already knows but when boycotting any group its important to tell them rather than just stop buying.

Even if as a customer not planning to move its worth complaining about your disappointment and saying you are considering your position based on the next steps.

I've emailed Ocado too. Not a big customer of theirs but do have a smart pass. We'll see what they say - nothing, I expect.

we all live in a lovely, rainbow-coloured, unicorn-friendly, cloud-cuckoo-land, choosing our genders and pronouns etc and constantly waiting to be offended, aren't we going to eventually need words for 'people with ovaries etc' and 'people with sperm'

I think in the perfect woke-world, we would have Real People (formerly known as 'men') and Inanimate Fetal Incubation Pods.

At the risk of being shouted-down, context is everything.

It was a big fuck-off dog-whistle bill-board paid for by someone who has been banned from here for their use of transphobic language and from twitter for similar reasons.

You might want to continue to say that it was the dictionary definition that was problematic, but I suspect that neither the hoarding company nor Occado want to be associated with this person, and that was the reason the poster was removed.

But carry on with your straw-man argument. Although, of course you are using this as an opportunity for publicity for her organisation, and couldn't be more pleased with the outcome.

The billboard was not to offend but to raise awareness.

If important identity defining words are being twisted, redefined and replaced it should be with full public awareness and right of reply - we don't yet live in a totalitarian state!

Why don’t those complaining about the billboard being offensive take out a billboard saying “Man: adult human male” and see what reaction they get?

‘Cos if that passes without a murmur, then it kind of proves the point that the reaction against the original is plain, simple, common or garden misogyny.

Boycotting Ocado is going to be a very effective way for women of getting this critical message across. Companies react first and foremost to their bottom line.

Eh, Gerdaloveslil, So you are saying that Ocada closed down the board not because of the content but simply because they don't want to be associated with someone who has 'been banned' from Twitter?

That isn't usually how large organisations make policies - and if it is, that in itself is very worrying.

Have ocado made a statement, yet?
I'm cancelling my smartpass today if they don't, I emailed yesterday to ask when it was being released. I've already cancelled Saturday's booked order.

If they don't want to be associated with someone banned from Twitter, why don't they issue a statement saying this is their new policy?

Fancy outsourcing all your critical reasoning to Twitter! That would be a mistake.

I don't shop with them but I took pleasure emailing them to say I would be encouraging my daughter (who uses them all the time) to go elsewhere.

YANBU

We are sleepwalking into a women's rights catastrophe. We need to wake up, and fast.

The unions in this great country just voted - unanimously - that a woman is anyone who claims he is and various unions even committed to ACTIVELY ABOLISH all single-sex provisions at work.

This will affect women's access to anything specifically for females like toilets, showers, changing rooms, support groups, career training programs set up for mothers returning to work, breastfeeding-at-work support and so on and so forth.

Whatever WE as FEMALES need at work, these unions (run mostly by men and without ever consulting a single female union member) have decided that MALES now have a right to lay claim on it. That this violates employment law and the Equality Act didn't matter to them.

Three unions abstained, one of which - the firefighters union - is currently actively engaged in fighting sexism on a large scale, so they clearly didn't want to be seen to support it, but even they didn't dare to vote against.

They did this after taking "moving contributions" from the floor from transwomen who waxed lyrical about how empowering it is to be your true self at work (which means access to women's spaces, whether their female colleagues consent to this or not).

Not A SINGLE contribution was taken from rape victims or domestic abuse survivors or BAME women who need single-sex provisions to participate in public and work life or even any women at all, actually. (Transmen also did not feature)

So if your employer discriminates against you because you are female, good luck with trying to get your union to back you up. Coz all but three of them agree there is no difference between you and a biological male in any discernible way that could possibly lead to you being discriminated against because of your sex.

Half the councils in Scotland and a very large number in England and Wales have removed the protected characteristic of sex from their Equality Policies. It's needed as a protected characteristic specifically to protect those of the female sex from being discriminated against. It's now gone and has been replaced by gender.

Schools in the whole country are committing to mixed-sex toilets, changing rooms and showers. Against the law. Just because some entitled males have convinced them that violating the boundaries of girls is perfectly acceptable in the name of inclusiveness. The privacy, dignity and safety of young females is obviously a small price to pay.

So no, this billboard wasn't taken out to offend anyone. The mere suggestion that the dictionary definition of the ontological category of woman as it exists in every dictionary in the world could legitimately offend anyone is a preposterous affront to all those born female in this country.

It was taken out to demonstrate how precarious the situation of females has become, that we no longer have the right to a category of our own in language or in law.

That a demonstrated woman-hater is the one publicly complaining about it and that it took nothing more than this one odious twerp tweeting each of the billboard company's executives once (!) is a serious indication of where we stand.

Once again, men get to decide who we are and what rights we have.

Wake the fuck up and fight.

And please, for the sake of all born female in a male-dominated world take part in the government's public consultation on self-id. It ends on the 19th of October.

Here's a link to an explainer on the Fair Play for Women website.

CharlieParley what an excellent post. You’ve summed it all up far better than I could. I hope this gets read widely, to open the eyes of the naive “woke” brigade who are sleepwalking into a totalitarian nightmare for women.

Well said CharlieParley, thank you for your clarity.

Here's the link for the GRA consultation.

Great post CharlieParley!

If an adult man or woman is genuinely unhappy with their bodies and is willing to undergo the irreversible physical and hormonal treatment to change their appearance accordingly, I will endorse their choice and congratulate them on their courage. From what I can see, 99% of the posters here would agree.

What I will never, ever accept is that a man can put on a dress and makeup, and claim to become a woman so that he can enter women-only spaces like toilets and changing-rooms. That person is not, and never be a woman.

That's why the poster giving the correct definition of a woman is entirely acceptable.

Thank you!

I am so angry! I am also scared. Honestly too scared to fight back against this publicly. It's alright online, but in real life? But I've realised I'm even more scared of what will happen if we do not fight back.

So I just ordered the leaflets and t-shirt from Fair Play for Women and have decided to stand on my own fucking high street where I live and hand them out. Like I said, that scares me. I've never in my life done anything like this before and I don't like being the centre of attention. It makes me feel...itchy...

And if I don't find anyone to go with me, I'm going on my own. I'm just going to think of how my mum was denied the career she'd always dreamed of because she was "just a girl". And how the same thing happened to a girl here recently. After all these decades, this still happens. We still haven't reached equity, or even equality, and now what little we have is being attacked. Might need to psych myself up but as little as it is, this is what I can do.

If I could give you a standing ovation on here CharlieParley I'd be doing it right now.

This shit with the unions is an absolute fucking outrage, and MUST be fought against.

We need to seriously up our game on this. No more must the TRA bullies hold sway. We need to get the word to the ordinary woman and man on the street. The general public will not tolerate this, but only if they know it is happening. That is why the billboard was viewed as so dangerous. Because it brings the issue to the attention of the wider public, and stops councils and other idiotic, craven bodies from enacting the erasure of women's rights by stealth.

ENOUGH. We must all act on this. NOW.

We are women in a patriarchy

Genuine question (not being snarky, it's hard to read tone on a message board) But how do feminists square away the idea that we live in a patriarchy, and the concept of losing hard fought rights? Surely if we were living in a patriarchy there would be no women's rights at all, how can you lose them?

Secondly why would men want to identify as/become women in a patriarchy? I haven't read any accounts of Germans identifying as Jews in the early 40s. No one would willingly swap roles from oppressor to "oppressed."

I’ve read this thread twice svd still don’t really understand....

Where is that billboard?
Who put it there?
What’s the purpose of it?
Why is it offensive?
What have Ocado got to do with it?

I’m baffled....

@RudeZebra patriarchy doesn't mean women have no rights. It means that the rights we have have had to be fought for. We aren't automatically granted the same rights or protection as men, it takes something out of the ordinary for us to get them.

It's women having to fight for the vote, to fight to make marital rape illegal, and now to fight to maintain spaces for our safety and dignity.

The men doing this don't see women as oppressed. They aren't identifying into carrying the mental load at home, or the sexual assaults from a young age based purely on their sex. They aren't identifying into the reality of menstrual flooding through their clothes in school or at work. They aren't identifying into being paid less or refused a job because they 'might leave and have a family' (because despite it being illegal it still fucking happens). They aren't identifying into the fear of someone bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than them pursuing them when they're scared or hurting them, and they aren't identifying into reporting it and being asked what they did to bring it on themselves. They aren't identifying into being murdered at birth or denied vital healthcare based on their sex. They aren't identifying into a world when medicines and lifesaving equipment are tested on the opposite sex to the point that they are significantly more likely to die in certain circumstances because no one understands the symptoms or the impact of physical differences between the sexes. They are either so blind or so narcissistic that they don't acknowledge any of these issues. In fact, if someone is mean to them they can record it as a hate crime. Women can't.

They're identifying into a pornified ideal of what they think womanhood is. They're identifying into the 'privileges' of wearing high heels and make up, into playing a demure, damsel in distress while at the same time aggressively and violently attacking women for daring speak out, just like men. And they're getting off on the whole experience.

These aren't people that have suffered dysphoria from a young age and resorted to invasive procedures so they could bare to live their lives, that keep to themselves and actually care about women and their 'sisters'. They're misogynists, fetishists, and bullies.

women AKA Adult Human Females

I changed my MN username yesterday to exactly that. So fuck off, Ocado, with your woke bullshit.

Well said, Tea.

Where: Liverpool outside of the Labour Party Conference

Who: Standing for Women, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull aka Posie Parker

Purpose:

To defend the right of women to a category of their own - in language and in law - that is separately from males. To demonstrate that we are now denied this right by men. I'm 99.9% sure it was also to use any anti-woman protest to shed light on this misogynist bullshit and thereby inform ever more women in this country of what is going on.

Why is it offensive:

It's not. But as it asserts that men cannot be women because women are adult human females and men are adult human males, men who wish to identify as women but who are not biologically female are thereby exluded from the class of women.

But males who want to identify as women now claim not only to be women but to actually be female even if they change no aspect of their male body. Because the vast majority of these males are really quite keen on using their penis to have penetrative sex with females, the definition of woman based on material reality (ie the sex class of adult females which categorically does not come equipped with a penis), must be made socially unacceptable. And the billboard counteracts that campaign.

What has Ocado to do with it:

Okay, so a notorious woman-hater and men's rights activist who has previously posted personal information of women he disagrees with online, who threatens, insults and harrasses them, complained that this billboard was offensive to transwomen and that the words were making transwomen (ie grown males) feel unsafe.

The billboard company immediately apologised to this man that they should have realised the poster was hateful and transphobic and removed it.

Ocado then applauded that decision, despite the fact that calling the dictionary definition of the word woman offensive is a slap in the face of every woman in this country. And I think the vast majority of Ocado's customers are female. So they've just agreed that we as women and their main customers do not have a right to a name of our own, we don't have a right to proclaim that name and we don't have a right to defend it and by extension all sex-based rights for women.

Pretty shitty thing to do for a company mainly serving women.