'Menstruators' isn't inclusivity, it's market segmentation
'Menstruators' isn't inclusivity, it's market segmentation
New York Times: Fight period stigma!
Also New York Times: “New menstruators”
Of course, actually fighting period stigma would mean not reducing women and girls to our bodily functions every time our experiences and needs deviate from the default male (who, you'll notice, never end up reduced to prostate-havers or ejaculators).
And it's surreal to read about menstruation as though "people" froze to death in menstrual huts or were forced to drop out of school. These "people"—half the population—have something very important in common that we don't share with the other half of humanity. When we talk about half the population as "menstruators," "uterus-havers," "people with vaginas," "gestators," "lactators" or "human-milk feeders" (yes, really) etc., this language makes it sound like we're talking about five distinct groups of people, rather than a single class whose shared experiences, needs, and, yes, political interests, are being denied.
This is a disconnected, consumption-oriented way of thinking and talking about women and girls. Instead of 'woman,' I might mean "someone I want to fuck" ("one body with vagina, please!") or "someone whose sexual services" I want to purchase. A "uterus-haver" or "gestator" is someone I might contract as a surrogate (and maybe I'd rather not think about the implications of outsourcing the burden and risks of pregnancy and childbirth to poor women, so being able to fence off that reality with an inhuman word like "gestator" suits me just fine). "Person with breasts" might as well be a mixed-sex category of pornography content, or a candidate for cosmetic surgery of various kinds (reduction, removal, enhancement, or creation). In any case, we're slicing women and girls into market segments by what we consume and who wants to consume us.
Treating words like 'women' and 'girls' and even 'female'—the obvious fallback if we're really after inclusivity, but absolutely forbidden if we're really after something else—as provocations right-thinking people should avoid is bonkers. If you think this is a boon for women's rights, you've got your head so far up your ass you should start an OnlyFans (I hear head-up-your-ass is a popular porn category, too!).
This isn't inclusivity, it's market segmentation.
What strikes me about it is how it disconnects female experience across time. Classifying a woman as a "menstruator" severs her from her pre-adolescent and post-menopausal selves, denying the continuity of the individual. Why exactly the "vertically integrated messaging apparatus" (as Wesley Yang dubs it) would want to do this I'm not sure, but I do notice the similarity in thinking in trans ideology, re things like "dead names" and other taboos around acknowledging that a trans woman used to be a man (and is still male). In wokese there is only the eternal present, which lasts forever until it changes again and becomes what it always was and will be, until another change rolls around the palimpsest is rewritten again.
The impression I'm left with is that there's an entire activist class who lack object permanence, as through a whole generation missed out on a crucial developmental milestone from infancy. Perhaps this explains their loathing of and antipathy towards women, and the reduction of female reproductive capacity to a list of atomized traits?
Calling a 'trans woman' sir is a crime similar to murder but labelling women by body parts or functions is inclusive.
Are we meant to take these fools seriously?