Bloody good period writes a painfully woke letter to JKRowling

[Clymene]

The charity which buys menstruation products to refugee WOMEN has written an open letter to JKR telling her to read some munroe Bergdorf. And no I'm not joking. It's an absolutely dreadful embarrassing letter, with arguments you'd expect in a gcse essay.

Signed by a load of misogynists like jolyon Maughan and some some that should know better like Jack monroe and that stupid guilty feminist woman.

docs.google.com/document/d/1EEbzyncbkIy27j8gAEQ03JNz0nla6EHZRU_Ng8zUuEY/edit

For shame.

@Heartlake

I got as far as 'cis white women' :-/

Same here

As soon as I hear/read 'do better' I get the image of a patronising as fuck head tilt!

Can you imagine a similar letter to a rich, influential man of JK Rowling's standing?
A penis does not maketh the man?
They wouldn't dare.

When you can't afford to eat or you're traumatised from escaping from an oppressive regime, worrying about your pronouns is going to be pretty low down on your priorities.

Quite. I donated a bag labelled "women's sanitary products" to the foodbank recently. Nobody pitched a fit about recognising special gender feelings or doing better then.

It's like those women who followed suffragettes around berating them and physically attacking them for not devoting themselves properly to their husbands and children in a properly feminine way. Plus ca change.

FGS. How dare they go through a list of women who aren’t bleeding as if JKR needs it explaining to her that ‘Only half the female population is of reproductive age so half do not menstruate’ HOLD THE FUCKING FRONT PAGE!!

What a totally patronising and insulting letter. I can’t imagine what JKR will think reading that (I can imagine)

And yeah JKR is going to learn so much reading the output of Munroe Bergdorf, Jamie Windust and Juno Dawson - like they know fuck all about bleeding through your protection, staining bedsheets and seats and lying on your bed doubled up with period cramps. Five out of the 7 people JKR was advised to listen to were born with penises. I despair. I utterly despair.

I get it must be awkward to have a period when you are trying to live as a man. It must be an awful ‘bubble bursting’ event. And if you’re non-binary, again it’s a monthly reminder that no matter how hard you wish not to be a woman, or what document gets administratively altered, or how big a beard or six-pack you’ve cultivated, there is a REALITY to your body and condition of birth that can’t be escaped (without a full hysterectomy)

But that’s something you just need to learn to cope with surely. You’ve been brave enough to do this huge physical and societal transition - get your family to collectively disappear the person they brought into the world, get society to dismiss the evidence of the sex they may see before them - then why not just put up with the minor detail that a product designed to absorb the blood that is released by a uterus every month because it’s ovary has released an egg that did not get fertilised by a sperm, has been designed, funnily enough, for use by WOMEN. It might be in an aisle in a supermarket called ‘feminine products’.

Why not do that? Why not do that instead of getting the world to dismiss a fundamental, biological truth and rewrite the definition of Woman?

Can people not see the utter insulting, absurdity of it?

But that’s something you just need to learn to cope with surely.

It's something we all have to cope with.

Anyone who tells me to Do Better can shove it up their (non / reproductive) hole TBH

Another who stopped reading when they said cis women.

I wonder if JK has stopped laughing yet?

"Does not maketh a women"???? what sort of clunky attempt at sounding self important is that!
(maybe they didn't want to say 'doth not' in case we just thought they had a lisp).
I like lisps though.

@MittensTheSerpent

Their "open-minded justice-focused space" sounds like the self-criticism "struggle sessions" during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.

This is exactly what it reminded me of too. I read a tweet under one of J.K's (after she refused to back down) that began "people have graciously tried to educate you..." it's utterly chilling. Exactly the same language used by Mao et al.

I'm still boggling at "when we as a society were woefully uneducated, there used to be a word for people who menstruate, and that word was “women”". The sheer audacity of that letter is breathtaking not to mention that it really needed proofreading. To nick a MN phrase, they're cheeky fuckers of the highest order.

I've never commented on the feminist boards before (have NC, am a long time lurker) but this is ridiculous. I don't want to be silent about it.

@Furx

Anyone who tells me to Do Better can shove it up their (non / reproductive) hole TBH

I pinched this off Twitter. There didn’t seem to be a name attached, but thank you unknown artists for a most excellent Venn diagram.

Surely most women who, due to body dysphoria, want to be thought of as men, want to present as male etc etc, would attempt to stop their periods, probably by use of a contraceptive of some type.

So few would actually need menstrual products.

All this changing of language for a minority of a minority (those women who want to be men but who still have periods).

And yeah JKR is going to learn so much reading the output of Munroe Bergdorf, Jamie Windust and Juno Dawson - like they know fuck all about bleeding through your protection, staining bedsheets and seats and lying on your bed doubled up with period cramps. Five out of the 7 people JKR was advised to listen to were born with penises. I despair. I utterly despair.

This.

Why not do that? Why not do that instead of getting the world to dismiss a fundamental, biological truth and rewrite the definition of Woman?

As I said on the other thread, I genuinely don't believe it's intended for their benefit primarily. It's about males.

They don't know how to read and process information. Tweets screaming that she said that if you don't have periods you are not a woman. No she bloody didn't.

Maybe should have paid more attention when grammar was being taught.

I’m reminded of the Month Python sketch on logic fails “all of Alma Cogan is dead, but not all dead people are Alma Cogan”.

I just ignore these painfully woke children- they are so self important and so ridiculous

The letter tries to make a connection between trans men being shamed for menstruating and a trans man being killed by the police in the US. A teensy bit of research will show that trans man Tony McDade stabbed a neighbour to death and then (apparently deliberately) threatened police in the expectation that they would open fire. They did.

What the fuck does that have to do with periods?

These people are mindless.

How dare they go through a list of women who aren’t bleeding as if JKR needs it explaining to her that ‘Only half the female population is of reproductive age so half do not menstruate’ HOLD THE FUCKING FRONT PAGE!!

It's as though they didn't read, or didn't understand what she said. Here's what she actually said:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

People who menstruate are women. She didn't say 'only people who menstruate are women' or 'someone who doesn't menstruate is not a woman'. It's a failure of comprehension or logic to interpret what she said as excluding anyone who is an adult female human from the definition of woman.

And as for an actual woman being "educated" about menstruation by males...

Are we sure this isn't a parody? It sounds exactly like something Titania McGrath would write.

I never know with these people whether they are terminally thick or whether they are deliberately misrepresenting what she said. As a PP said, there's a fairly simple, easy-to-understand difference between saying "All of Alma Cogan is dead" and "All dead people are Alma Cogan". Jolyon Maugham is a lawyer, so you'd assume that he can cope with simple logic. I therefore conclude that he would prefer to put his name to something that is clearly fallacious than to take the risk of appearing un-woke. What times we live in.