Tampon Company Uses Transphobia To Market Their Product

A guest post from Renee of Womanist Musings, my fave mommy blogger.

I know that I am late to this, and that many of you may have already seen this commercial, or read commentary about it, but in good conscience, I felt that I had to throw in my two cents as it were.

Description

Two women are standing at the mirror of a public bathroom. The trans woman on the left is heavily made up, while the cis woman on the right's make is very understated. They both begin to apply mascara with each taking turns looking at each other. They then proceed to both apply lip gloss with negative looks being exchanged.  The cis woman on the right pushes up her breasts and then the trans woman on the right does the same, with her clearly larger bosom. The cis woman is clearly frustrated by what appear to be her inability to compete and so she smiles and pulls a tampon out of her purse and waves it at the trans woman.  The trans woman gives her a dirty look, throws her purse over her shoulder and leaves.  The tag line there appears: Libra gets girls, love libra.

***

This ad is so blatantly transphobic and sexist that it's disgusting. Let's start with the most obvious suggestion, the idea that menstruating defines you as a woman.  I am so sick and tired of this ridiculous suggestion.  First, not all cis women menstruate.  There are plenty of women who have to take medication in order to have a period to get pregnant, and of course those of us who do menstruate regularly will eventually reach menopause. The idea of menstruating defining womanhood means that plenty of cis women would be excluded.  Menstruation as the determinant of womanhood is a fallacious argument at best.

This argument is further sexist because it reduces woman to the ability to bleed once a month.  Seriously?  Is that all there is to say about women?  It is extremely reductive and offensive. I also think it is worth mentioning that the idea that women are always looking for opportunities to compete with each other is sexist.  Who stands in a bathroom and compares themselves to another woman so blatantly? From my experiences, most people simply want to do their business, clean up and leave as fast as possible. 

In an effort to make a profit, what Libra did was engage in the age old strategy of divide and conquer.  Libra knew damn well that there are plenty of cis women who are actively engaged in maintaining cis supremacy. Feminism itself has a long history of excluding trans women and labeling them everything from men in dresses to frankenstinian.  What Libra did was depend on transphobia to sell their product to women and in the process encourage cis women to continue to defend their privilege.

No one wins in the battle of more woman than thou.  These artificial divisions only serve to benefit patriarchy because they keep us distracted from the real issues facing women today.  Trans women and Cis women share many of the same issues, but in the case of trans women they have the extra added bonus of being forced to negotiate transphobia and cissexism.  Anyone not seeing this commercial for exactly what it is, really needs to give consideration to the idea that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Most of us exist with some sort of privilege and one thing can be certain, if we embrace the idea that oppressing someone to maintain our privilege is natural or a sort of social good, then we don't have a single leg to stand on, when someone else comes to this same determination to justify their oppression of us.  We don't need an institutional other, what we need to do is come to the understanding that oppression is big freaking circle jerk.  The only way to truly win our own personal freedom, is to fight not only against our own oppression, but the oppression of others.  As marginalized people, we have far more in common that we do in difference.

Obviously, I am not an Australian and so I cannot boycott this product, but I did some research and found some contact information for those who are interested in letting Libra know that what they did was offensive.


Libra website: http://www.lovelibra.co.nz/about-libra/contact-us/
Libra FB: http://www.facebook.com/Libra?sk=wall

Please be forewarned that the facebook site is a cess pool of transphobia.  

Editors Note: I have been made aware that the commercial has been yanked however Libra is still allowing transphobic commentary about this commercial on their facebook page.

'Detroit 187's' Cissexist Trans/Cross Dresser Murder Episode

TransGriot Note: Nice post from Renee of Womanist Musings about a recent problematic episode of the ABC- TV show Detroit 187
I have stayed away from writing about cis-sexism and transphobia, because I ave hmade so many fails in the last year, that it became obvious to me, that I need to take my own advice and STFU and learn.  As part of this learning, I have been doing a lot of reading and trying to understand the ways in which society perpetuates cissexism.


I recorded this week's episode of Detroit 187, and just got around to watching it last night.  What I saw was a complete disregard of some very basic human decency aimed at what were potentially trans women or cross dressers.  What troubled me as I viewed the episode, was how normalized the approach was. It made me wonder how many people saw the episode and did not pick up on the "othering," because we have privileged not only cisgender status, but a specific form of performing gender.

At the beginning of the show, the detectives are called to a murder seen with a dead woman.  As they begin discussing the body, the coroner lifts up her skirt and announces, "hold the presses folks, yup dude looks like a lady. It looks like we've got ourselves a dead drag queen."  This was quickly followed by Special Agent Jess Harkins saying, "well if there's one thing they taught us at Quantico, it was always check for suspicious packages."

This happened within the first three minutes of this week's episode. Genitalia does not equal gender and assuming that the victim identified as male, before for ascertaining hir preference, is without a doubt cis sexist. 

In the very next scene, the detectives are at what looks to be a drag club.  Again, I feel it necessary to point out that just because the club appears to be a drag club, in no way means that there aren't trans women in attendance. The following is a bit of the dialogue from this scene.

Det Aman Mahajan: So how does one refer to a drag queen anyway? Is it he or she or what?
Agent Jess Harkins: She in when in drag, he when not.
Sgt Jesse Longford: I'm using he.  The one thing I can't overlook on a woman is a penis.

When Mahajan at least had the presence of mind to ask about pronouns, I thought that the producers and writers where trying to redeem themselves from the terrible "dude looks like a lady" commentary in the last scene.  It seems that once again, making sure that a strict gender binary was enforced, was the driving force behind this episode.

Would you say that is enough transphobia and cissexism for one episode?  Well guess again. Here is what happens when the detective sat down to talk to Christina (a woman at the club) and her boss about Detroit, the murdered woman in the alley.

Christina: That's her. I could recognize those Tina Turner legs anywhere. 
Det Aman Mahajan: What was her name?
Boss: Detroit like Detroit but French
Sgt Jesse Longford:We need the real name
Boss: That is her real name
Agent Jess Harkins: Sorry girls, what does her W2 say?
Boss: Donald Tucker
Sgt Jesse Longford: Was Mr. Tucker here tonight?
Det Aman Mahajan: Was uh Detroit here tonight?
Boss: She was on stage about 11, she was supposed to a private party in Troy later so she rushed out to catch the bus
Christina: D works all the time; she's a superstar. When she does it's raining men, you literally feel like it's raining men. 
Sgt Jesse Longford:She have problems with any of the other performers?
Boss: We're a family. Civilians don't always get us. 

It was left to these women to defend themselves against the cissexism of Sgt Jesse Longford.  No one called him out for his bigoted language, and when he did finally decide to use a feminine pronoun, he did so grudgingly. Proving that his transformation was temporary, the first suspect that Longford questioned, he accused of being gay, for being attracted to Detroit.  So, now not only do we have a cissexist hot mess, we can add homophobia to the list of wrongs with this episode.  Clearly he felt that anyone with a penis was absolutely gay, if they had a relationship with a trans woman or a crossdresser.  This ignored the gender like sexuality is absolutely fluid, and that genitals do not determine gender.

In the second interview they spoke to Detroit's boyfriend.  He insisted on calling her Don and referred to her with a masculine pronoun.  If that wasn't bad enough, he added that he believed that the ladies in the club weren't really ladies, because some of them were pushing 200 pounds.  I seriously could not fill out a bingo card fast enough to keep up with the fails.  In his commentary, we have a touch of sexism, cis sexism laced together with a lovely bit of fat phobia.  Yeah for isms Detroit 187.

In the end, Detroit was killed by his stalkers wife.  She called  Detroit a man in a dress, and blamed her for ruining her marriage.  I think that this ending was problematic, because it played upon the stereotype of deceptive trans women, latching on to unsuspecting men.  How many times have we seen this sort of thing as a defense in murder trials? Trans women face an inordinate amount of violence and usually it happens out of a desire to support and maintain cis supremacy. Trans women are hated simply for existing and no action is necessary on their part to end up dead.  The ending used by Detroit 187 heavily implied that Detroit was responsible for her own murder, because she didn't do enough to stop a man from stalking her.

I know that Detroit 187 is a crime/cop show, but honestly, I am tired of seeing these portrayals.  There are trans women and cross dressers living perfectly happy lives.  The meme of the murdered trans women/cross dresser is the only angle that the media wants to pay attention to.  Would it really have been that hard to just weave a trans character into the plot without relying on so many cis sexist memes? In the end, the viewer was left  with the belief that the victim (trans woman/ cross dresser) was still an "other," who had played a part in the violence aimed at her?  I wonder if the producers thought they did a good job, because they had a character who transgressed the gender binary?  Sometimes, no representation, is better than bad representation.