Today on Twitter

[DancelikeEmmaGoldman]

It’s genderwoo whack-a-mole.

Talking about chest-feeding: I always find it an interesting question whose mental suffering is deemed so valid that language must be changed to avoid it and whose mental suffering is utterly and completely trivial and should be dealt with a stiff upper lip and manning up and so on. What gets someone banned on Twitter is a good lesson on this. A woman can be called a cunt and threatened with rape but the mental suffering that causes seems to give someone one week's ban. Misgendering causes a lifelong ban

@Deliriumoftheendless

Wouldn’t “expressed milk” be a better term than “human milk feeding”?

Doesn’t even have to say where it’s expressed from if you can’t bear to hear the word breast.

Well, if you can't even bear to hear the word "breast", which is a normal and healthy part of the human anatomy, I would suggest you seek therapy of some kind because this points to deep psychological problems.

Well there is that.

But it re-enforces what Errol said on another thread. We’ve used the term “expressed milk” for ages. So why change it now? Why invent a whole new term that most women don’t want except to antagonise and upset women, this letting us know how little we matter.

These words exclude the main people they are there for (women) do nothing for transmen but reduce them to body parts and biological functions (which I guess is triggering) and gives sperm producers, however they identify a golden opportunity to criticise and attack women.

And this is what we call inclusive these days.

So keep challenging it, keep rejecting it. Once you try to reverse it the misogyny is blindingly obvious.

Absolutely no one expects men to be referred to in any other way.

Absolutely no one expects transwomen to be referred to by their body parts or biological functions, in fact I’m sure it would be seen as massively transphobic to do so.

The double standard is outrageous.

Deliriumoftheendless you can also see the dehumanisation and objectfication when you notice that they use 'menstruators' and similar terms for the group which was in the past called women. So books about famous women in art would become books about famous menstruators in art.

Though I fear they might go along with that, to be woke.

How people can’t see this for what it is how people can defend the hypocrisy in the name of kindness and inclusion I cannot understand.

I would love one of our cervix haver identifying prostate owners or their bleeding allies to explain what would happen if I use the term “menstruator” on Twitter to describe transmen vs “erection haver” to describe a transwomen.

Because the logic goes “not all transmen take testosterone, so they still have periods so we need a word for them (that apparently isn’t transmen)” but it also goes (at least from our friends* who like to tell us off) “oh I can tell you from experience that once you start on oestrogen erections are a thing of the past! (Except for all those ones on JK Rowling”s twitter feed”.

So can any TRA explain the contradiction? And still maintain it’s not about punishing women for being women?

(That’s a rhetorical question btw)

I think this is the thing that makes me the most angry- being told to chill out, they’re just words from people who want incorrect pronoun usage to be punished 🙄

These companies are taking the path of least resistance.

They have to have a social media presence. They know that gender identity is a MASSIVE hot potato and so they’re tiptoeing around words and language so as not to trigger a boycott.

If I were feeling less cross I’d probably feel sorry for them. As it is it’s up to us to push back and refuse to #bekind

From this point forward I shall not be purchasing products from companies that fail to accept women exist. It’s going to be bloody difficult to follow this through 100%. But where I have a choice I will choose to put money into the pockets of those companies that recognise reality.

they’re tiptoeing around words

In the femcare case, they're not 'tiptoeing'. They seem to have done a global replace of 'woman' by 'menstruator', regardless of context, and in places where a slight rewording could have made the language neutral rather than appalling.
'Riding roughshod', more like - over many of the people the tweets were supposed to be helping.

It is fucking weird that they’ve focused on ‘menstruater’ as a descriptor when so many women don’t menstruate 🤷‍♀️

I’m getting really cheesed off today the more I read on here... I’m fully motivated today by this thread to get out my parchment and quill and begin writing letters to these organisations who are trying to erase me, my mum, my gran, my Nan, my sisters, my nieces, my aunt....

It is fucking weird that they’ve focused on ‘menstruater’ as a descriptor when so many women don’t menstruate.

I think that's precisely why they're doing it.

The FemCare twitter account looks like it's been hijacked by Jessica Yaniv, especially the question "At which age did you start your period journey?" They've been using the 'menstruator' word for the past couple of months and the illustrations look like someone entered 'pink pcos diagrams' in the search bar.

What do you think of the first photo OP as you’ve clicked the “heart”?

Me? I’m pretty sure I didn’t click a like on any of them. I think the use of dehumanising words for women and the functions of female bodies is sinister.

What do you think of the first photo OP as you’ve clicked the “heart”?

Didn't notice that, yes if that is the OP's screenshot it does look like it has been liked by pressing the heart.
To be fair though, I've been known to like things as a way of bookmarking something to read or come back to later, doesn't mean I automatically necessarily agree with something when I do.

So books about famous women in art would become books about famous menstruators in art.

No, in that context it would be women but the author would have to be damn sure to include plenty of 'women' who are actually male to avoid criticism.

This kind of dehumanising language is common in medical and biological contexts because bodies are very upsetting, but in many other contexts it's still socially acceptable to use women as long as you work from the basis that woman doesn't actually mean anything.

I went back to my original screen shot and I’ve pulled the image from a quote tweet from someone critical of the image. I liked and retweeted their tweet, not the original. Although I’m sure I’ve liked things I didn’t agree without out of sheer idiocy.

DC1 couldn’t breastfeed. I expressed milk and bottle-fed him my expressed breastmilk, instead of using formula, until he’d got a good start on weaning. I wouldn’t have called that breastfeeding. I suppose it would fall under a “human milk feeding” umbrella, although that’s a term I’ve not come across before.

I had to do this too with DD. Bad advice after labour led to me bottlefeeding our of fear, then I changed my mind so ended up pumping relentlessly. All day and all night, on a shitload of domperidone, averaging probably 6 hours or so per day trying to pump..got me about 5 oz per day

Its a weird way to describe that though 'human milk feeding'..certainly not what I would use for my experience (mind my wording would be along the lines of utter hell which made me feel my nipples were made of glass and I had turned into a dairy cow overnight, so maybe not the best description!)