Queeriods. "How to talk inclusively about periods."

[Lamahaha]

I saw this on a Twitter thread of Glinner, in which he said I'd better be careful. I'm extremely drunk and might tweet something like "Women menstruate".

I followed a few of the tweets and found this website :

periodpositive.wordpress.com/

This is where apparently media & menstrual product companies now working from and get the language. All about "inclusive" language. The words "woman", "feminine", "female" are taboo.

Grovelling apologies offered; I would have thought this was satire had I seen it anywhere else:
rubycup.com/blogs/news/we-need-to-apologize

I demand that adverts for Lynx, viagra and Gillette start using women.

Oh they do, as prizes for men's use of the above products.

Actually it would be nice to see more trans women in that role. Surely TWAW so why aren't they more represented as love interests for successful men in Male-targeted advertising?

For all the menstruators here, past, present and future:

Transwomen: "stop talking about our genitals"

Yet at the same time menstruators, cervix havers, vagina owners.

Ruby cups could have solved all their woes by just asking what sex the survey-taker was. Why do they want mens opinions on period cups anyway? For a company that sells products purely for women they sure care about mens opinions a lot!

Its becoming harder and harder to buy menstrual products, will end up making my own at this rate

I remembered Mother's day and thought I wonder how they tried to make that inclusive. This is what I found on twitter " I’m disgusted by your transinternationalphobic comments, Titania. We, here in the American continent, celebrate all peoples of mother on May 12th of this year, 2019"

Just wow. Peoples of mother!!!!

Actually they can just fuck off. Men are ok to be called men, but women can't be called women because the men who want to be women won't allow it?

Live and let live applies to trans women as well.

What's wrong with 'women' and 'trans women' as terms?

I have been really confused by some of the terms used to describe where a baby's sex is "assigned" or "observed" at birth, when in reality, the sex of a baby can be observed by ultrasound at around 14 weeks of gestation, and generally happens at around 7 weeks when the expression of a gene on the "Y" chromosome starts the little journey to the development of testes.
When I was finding more linkable information on this, it was rather sad to see the number of sites which used "gender" instead of "sex".
Sex begins in the womb - the biology of sex.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222286/

You're not wrong, Andy, but most fetuses don't have any chromosomal checks performed on them and so sex is 'observed at birth' - sometimes earlier in the risibly misnamed 'gender scans' but they're not 100% reliable and so it's the observation at birth which is recorded as definitive I believe.

I had an amnio because of my age, so they did check which type as well as count them, so I knew for sure I had a girl at ~20 weeks (I've forgotten exactly when). That the exception rather than the rule,

What you're absolutely right about is that sex isn't 'assigned' at birth - it's an inherent (in the most literal way possible!) characteristic.

I don't think we're going to resolve this until everyone starts calling men "penis-havers".

Here are some organisations that send menstrual products to girls in need, here and abroad. Disclaimer: I don't know any of them, just found the by searching online. there are probably lots of others too.

www.thecup.org

www.thecupeffect.org

uk.lunette.com/pages/giving-back

bintiperiod.org

www.actionaid.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/womens-economic-empowerment/period-poverty

www.mooncup.co.uk/blog/period-poverty-uk-can-mooncup-help/ -- interesting article about donating cups here

Very sad that Rubycup has an ethical side. Erasing women is unethical so I won't be supporting it. I'll donate to one of the charities instead.

Its becoming harder and harder to buy menstrual products, will end up making my own at this rate

I’m getting loads of adverts popping up now for different products. Even though I don’t have periods regularly and when I do I use reusables I’m still looking at the brands to see if the mention women.
General avoidance of using women or girls - fine
Period havers - not fine.

Its becoming harder and harder to buy menstrual products, will end up making my own at this rate

Go for it. Reusable pads and pants. A one off buy and the difference is great, no harsh chemicals, no ruddy 'perfume'.

I'm now thinking about natural and reusable alternatives to tampons, since that's another expense I'd like shot of, and I hate the amount of debris that ends up in the bin. Piss off women customers, and they will go elsewhere and find other options.

Back in my hippy past I used natural sea sponge with a long double tail of dental floss looped through the sponge and itself, IYSWIM. Push a loop of floss through fairly well into the body of the sponge, pass the ends through the loop and pull. Wet and squeeze the sponge before use, rinse out afterwards and make a fresh one each month.

@Lamahaha

“The automatic association between menstruation and women that almost everybody makes seems impossible to break. Whenever an ad comes up for a menstrual product, it shows young women.”

Jesus truly wept.

Sorry, but now I really want to see an ad with bearded woke blokes poncing around on roller blades and having their bottoms scrutinised for blue liquid leakage.

I use a menstrual cup and never had any issues. I now wonder if they mention women in their marketing. I’m going to have to go and look.

I was astonished to find out that my daughter never uses anything but toilet paper. It seems to work for her. I would have been terrified - I had some embarrassing accidents as it is!

So I’ve just looked through their website and see no mention of women. They’ve managed to write all the blurb without needing to call us anything so I guess that’s quite clever. However I did notice that when you clicked to all the charities they support overseas, they then refer to those menstruators as women. So there you go! We’re no sex in the uk but women do exist in developing countries.

@PumbaasCucumbas

What are they coming for next....

“do these trainers come in women’s sizes?”

Shop assistant (trying to contain the shock that particular offensive word is actually used in public)

“Yes customer of undetermined gender until you tell me your preferred pronouns, the shoes for adult people who typically (but not always) have smaller feet are over there”

I took my daughter to Clarks, before lockdown, I asked to see the display of girls school shoes (complete waste of money, but that's another thread). Boys and girls shoes all mixed in together, quote 'we cannot tell you who they are for, they are for children and any child can wear any shoe'. Ffs seriously?

The shoe thing is really stupid too. I'm a tall woman with quite big feet but not shaped like men's.

Boys and girls shoes all mixed in together, quote 'we cannot tell you who they are for, they are for children and any child can wear any shoe'. Ffs seriously?

Yes, seriously. And as it should be.

Children do not need gendered clothing, because their body shapes are not different. Besides, when shoe ranges are designed specifically for girls, the girls generally lose out: the shoes are flimsier and more open than the shoes designed specifically for boys. Why?

Dd used to chose all of her school shoes from the boys' ranges. She wanted to have warm, dry feet!

I would agree over clothing, my dd will often wear oversized jumpers, my son would be happy wearing something from a women's range, apart from the cut, it wouldn't matter. However, my dd, who happens to have asd, is very particular about shoes, and if she believed they were to be boys, she wouldn't wear them. I agree the flimsy crap is unsuitable, and fortunately she got a very good pair that she wore all of 2 weeks before lockdown.

Beware the woke people in school who've had the training and who, unlike Clarks, firmly believe in gendered clothing and will be suggesting a girl in sturdy, comfy shoes might need to transition! 😳

I've just had a reply from Rubycup:

thanks for taking the time to write to us.

Gender inclusive language doesn’t mean that we don’t ever use the terms women or girls, instead it means that we acknowledge that not only women and girls have periods. Just as saying “black lives matter” doesn’t mean that no other lives matter.

By trying to be more inclusive and gender neutral in our language, we’re not harming anybody, but simply trying to include all types of ways of how menstruation is experienced.

However, when we talk about our donation program we use words as "women" and "girls".
We work closely with locally based partners in order to create a donation program that is tailored to serve each community’s needs. It is through listening carefully to what they want that we can support them to deliver sound education on reproductive health and menstrual care so everyone can live their periods with dignity, free of shame. This listening includes adapting the language we use to talk about our donation program.

We/our partners work primarily with students in schools where using a like term menstruator will be more confusing than helpful. The objective is to help them understand and know their own basic anatomy and how periods work - this is already a lot to cover and grasp.

Moreover, it took a lot of time for our local partners and organisations (like Golden Girl Foundation or Femme International) to sensitise the society to invest effort in girls and women (meaning, convincing parents and schools that it is worth it to spend money on their education, uniforms etc and allow them to do homework instead of helping out at home etc). So in this context, using the word “girls” is very important.

Gender identity is beyond the scope of our expertise right now. Though we don’t exclude it as a part of our menstrual health education program in the future.

Menstruation is a topic that is evolving as beliefs and values change. We are working to do our part to change attitudes about periods and look forward to a day where we can be more inclusive in our language wherever we are in the world.

Thanks again for your message.

Kind regards,

I don't think that this is about erasing women. Many people, who decide to switch from being female to male (since it is not biologically possible, they still have periods generally) need to use tampons and pads, they feel mightily self-conscious buying feminine health care products because of course, they are not feminine they are masculine now. In their minds, they are being devalued and de-humanised. I just don't understand how men have managed to buy them all these years for their OHs without feeling similarly emasculated. I don't understand it. I don't try to understand it. I don't want to understand it.

I don't think that this is about erasing women.

The clue to this would be removing the word 'woman' from all packaging instead of including additional terms as wanted, and that a petition by females about 'don't call us menstruators' has been taken down on grounds of 'transphobia'.

Female people are feeling very erased thanks. And getting increasingly angry about it. This is the behaviour this lobby whinges endless about suffering themselves, but they inflict it joyfully on females.

If having periods makes you feel de-humanised, you clearly don't see women and girls as human, surely? That's a problem that cannot be solved by transitioning, though I can see why a person who felt they'd been born into a sub-human class might aspire to escape it.

Couldn't we work at helping girls and women find their value if they have lost or struggle to internalise it, rather than resorting to artificial hormones, surgery and all the upheaval of transitioning?