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.

@CharlieParley

You can do it! I have been handing out FPFW leaflets everywhere I go. I went to my childs school too, and met with the Head. You should have seen the look on her face when I patiently explained what Stonewall are all about. She even took some of my leaflets to hand out at the staff meeting after school that day.
I have had so many conversations with people in the street. Nobody has a clue about this, and everybody cares about it once it is explained to them. I have had no harrassment, no pushback, no intimidation from anyone at all.
We can do this.

I asked why Ocado think the dictionary definition of woman is offensive and hate speech and they asked me for a source attributing this comment to Ocado. FUCKS SAKE.

I emailed Ocado and its media team yesterday asking for their response but still have yet to hear. It's a pretty clear "fuck off; we don't care what you think" message from Ocado. Not a good look.

I will just have to email again and again until I get a satisfactory response.

Here are the two tweets in question:

Might want to ask them if they didn't express anything questionable there why they deleted those tweets.

Rude zebra. I think women have rights of some kind in all patriarchal societies. We have been slowly gaining legal rights since the 1870s each one hard won. Some v recent like Charlie points out. We now have legal parity here (I think) but the bulk of the power, economic, political, soft powers of influence etc is in the hands of men even though much less than before, and much less than in some countries. So it is still 'rule by the fathers' in many respects in my view.

CharlieParleg amazing post. It is unbelievable what is happening at the moment, mostly at the behest of a very few, very vocal transmen.

So sick of this agenda. It’s deeply disturbing.

Trans women i mean

Good luck CharlieParley, you can do it. You are clear, convincing and eloquent in your argument. Thank you.

Down with this sort of thing.

Did Ocado put out a statement today?

Or are they hoping this will all blow over?

ShovingLeopard

They appear to be privately phoning people and sending plants to the boards to tell us all who wonderful they are

Thanks Repeal, I just saw that on the other thread.

Cowards trying to cover up, without having anything in writing that the TRAs can jump on.

Not. Good. Enough.

So they make a public statement of support of MRAs and then want to whisper a mealy mouth apology? Their contempt for the women who comprise their core customer base is disgusting. They don't see women as Adult Humans. They see us as playthings or cash cows.

Putting that on a billboard is unnecessarily aggressive. Ocado will gain a customer here. I don’t dispute that you lot have a point with some of your concerns, but the way you go about it is beyond ridiculous and nasty. It just makes me more sympathetic to the other side of the argument

Agree with you, I feel the same. It's alienating more and more people.
Comes across to me as just put up to shit stir, inciting hatred and creating more division towards transpeople.

Wake the fuck up and fight
Not inciting fear and hatred with comments like this at all
There seems to only be one way you're "allowed" to think as a woman on these boards and if you comment with a differing opinion the name calling starts.

What on earth is "aggressive" about putting up a dictionary definition of women on a billboard? How about if I put up the definition of "child" or "cat", would they be aggressive too.

Woman be in silence, eh?

What on earth is "aggressive" about putting up a dictionary definition of women on a billboard?

I think if we actually unpick this, we will find that the "act of aggression" is not really the putting up of the billboard per se, but the unfathomable refusal of (gasp!) some women to just passively melt away, submit and accept what they're told. Any woman not metaphorically bowing and scraping and being nice - now that is the real act of aggression.

I’ve done some research on this & I think it’s more a case of ‘who’ Put it up there, being the reason why it’s taken down. She has come out with comments such as women who identify as men should be sterilised. I just think it’s unnecessary.

Our concerns should be addressed without the attempted isolation of transgender women. My concerns are:
Females are discriminated against (especially in the job market) for biological reasons. Companies don’t want to spend money and time on female employees of a child bearing age, because they are likely to cost them more money than their Male counterparts through pregnancy, mat leave etc.
Not only is this not being addressed, but TRAs deny this is true through their mockery of our concerns of statistics being skewered through transgender women being given the same privilege as men because of their biology.
My other concern is any progression TRAs make/want is solely to benefit m2f Transgender women. Transgender men’s breasts are still treated as female sexuality & being told to cover up in places where transgender women are invited to use female changing rooms.
It just seems to me, time & time again, people with vaginas are oppressed, whilst people with penises dominate & stick up for other people with penises.

Time and time again you hear about how all TRAs want is to be treated as equal women, but when they deny the oppression of people with vaginas, how can that ever be? They will always have a biological privilege, but refuse to recognise this or campaign to help people with vaginas.

Whatever your opinions, remember that the GRA consultation closes soon so make your voice count.

I’d like to see the dictionary definition of ‘Misogyny’ on a billboard.

tilly

You finding the dictionary definition of woman offensive is clearly all kinds of wrong.

You digging for a reason for this is comprehensively explained with the quote

"In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Anti women activists are very keen to say it's not about the dictionary definition, it's about the reasons behind it. Harrop was intent on finding a hidden agenda that he thought Posie would be too chickenshit to say. What he doesn't realise is that her agenda is not hidden. She is shouting it from the rooftops. The entire point is that the dictionary definition of woman is under threat.

As she says, it's black-and-white. A woman is an adult human female. That IS the point.

She has come out with comments such as women who identify as men should be sterilised. I just think it’s unnecessary.

She has also commented on this. She was goaded beyond endurance by men using women who identify as men as cannon fodder for their own agenda.

Using women who identify as men in terms of having to walk on eggshells around them, change language and call women mentruators, chest feeders and calling vaginas front holes, so as to not cause offence.

Posie lost her temper and said that perhaps they shouldn't be having children at all then, hence the sterilised comment. She has since clarified that she wouldn't dream of considering eugenics as any kind of solution to any kind of problem.

Posie is a normal woman, with four children. She is not an academic feminist.

And it's why so many women relate to her.

Take a look at the Ocado reviews on Trust Pilot! - scores of adult human females airing their views - brilliant

Thank you Datun. I was going to respond to that comment as I was actually reading that Twitter thread live while this was going on.

Many countries still insist that to be legally recognised as the opposite sex to the one they were born in, people have to be fully post-op (and therefore sterile, some countries even spell this out). Posie was not arguing for that kind of condition to legal recognition.

Her point was that if transmen were that offended at their own biology they would surely want to be sterilised not should be sterilised. (And when it comes to transmen that doesn't mean having your tubes tied, it means the removal of ovaries and fellopian tubes which is indeed one of the most frequent surgeries transmen have because those who do so reject their female biology, they don't want to keep it.)

Posie is wrong here, but not just for the reason you may think. I've actually read quite a bit of research about transmen having children and for many of them pregnancy alleviates their gender dysphoria.

This is quite an important point - this reconciliation with our female body also happens to many non-transidentified women who have body dysmorphic or eating disorders or other body hatred issues. So a treatment approach that seeks to preserve this chance to as many transmen as possible is what I would favour. Which is why I disagreed with Posie.

But Posie has no hidden agenda. She wants women's sex-based rights to be defended and she wants everyone to see how far down the rabbit hole the gender identity madness has gone already.

And it's working. I had a testy discussion with a policeman yesterday, because my local police force has once again encouraged people to report hate crime. I challenged them by asking if this included hate crime against women - which it doesn't of course. I know because the same police force gave posters to my kid's school to teach all of the pupils about hate crime. Sex is the only protected characteristic left off these posters.

Anyway, so this policeman was outraged at my claim and told me he would not even entertain talking to me about this anymore as I was clearly wrong and obviously hateful (not telling me who I was hating).

So I showed him the Sky News interview about the poster. To cut a long story short, he has now contacted someone to explore if women actually have a legal case to make against all of these recent developments based on violating the Equalities Act. It may come to nothing. But he went from denying there was a problem to taking action to fight against the problem. Thanks to that one billboard.

Is is aggressive? Let me put it another way:

My middle child was being bullied. Badly. The school was useless but my child was getting more and more distressed. In the end, after months of misery, we held a family meeting at which my father (who taught at high schools for 35 years) said he had to start fighting back.

I was outvoted.
And I was wrong.

It turned out that the only thing that helped was my child taking on every single bully who tormented him. And boy, did he do that. To the applause of the entire school.

My youngest will go to the same high school soon. Bullying is still a big problem. The school is still useless. Is it overly aggressive if I now tell my youngest that the only way to deal with it is to take on anyone who tries to bully him straight away? And will that make you take the side of the bully?

VerbenaBeeks if you honestly think urging people to wake up and fight is inciting hatred and violence that says more about you and me. Especially since immediately after that sentence I urged people to fill in an online form to share their view on self-id with the government.

If you think women raising their voices in defence of their rights is inciting hatred and violence then something has gone very wrong in our country.

But I am glad to say that I will fight for your rights, too, and for your daughter, sister, mother, aunt and every other female who means something to you. And if you decide not to avail yourself of these rights, that is fine too. Just don't deny them to all the other women and girls in this country that do want and indeed need them.

Is there another thread on this? I haven't seen one. I emailed Ocado yesterday to tell them i was cancelling my smart pass due to their response to this poster situation. I just had a call back from Ocado apologising for any offence their tweet caused. She (first) said that it was a customer service advisor who shouldn't have got involved in political discussions and she was very sorry if what they had said caused offence. She then explained that Ocado's inclusive values haven't changed and read out a long spiel explaining how they are inclusive and non-discriminatory.

I explained that their tweet did cause offence, and that by tweeting what they did, they are agreeing that the dictionary definition of 'woman' is offensive. I talked briefly about the poster trying to defend women's rights, which were in grave danger of being completely eroded despite having been fought for, for so long. I said I appreciated her call, but her statement hadn't really changed anything noting that Ocado made a public tweet, but expected to smooth over the fallout by making private phone calls. She then said that Ocado wouldn't be making any sort of public apology because the original tweets were nothing to do with Ocado. I pointed out that they were from the official Ocado account, and asked how she could claim that tweets from the official Ocado account weren't anything to do with Ocado. She didn't have any response.

So the whole thing was a bit annoying. I'm more cross with them now than I was yesterday, given how they tried a placatory phone call that was a definite non-apology by a poor customer service adviser who clearly hadn't been briefed at all and hoped that they would keep me happy by reading out a prepared statement that she couldn't answer any questions about.

We left it that I was cancelling my smart pass anyway. I'll try Sainsbury's and Waitrose instead.

Trillis

There's a thread here.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3376466-ocado-boycott-after-support-of-primesight-action?pg=1