People who menstruate
The author of the article, Jo Faragher, is careful to avoid saying “women,” but the people she he they quotes not so much.
Broadcaster Channel 4 has launched a period policy with the support of its gender equality employee network, 4Womxn.
The company said the policy would help employees who experience difficulties with their periods, particularly those who experience health conditions such as endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and may be struggling to manage their symptoms at work.
As part of the policy, employees will be able to access flexible working arrangements, a working environment assessment, free period products in the office, and a microwaveable wheat bag to ease painful symptoms. It will also offer a quiet room where employees can take time out, and free hormone and fertility tests through women’s health company Hertility.
Oops a slip-up in that last sentence. They was doing so well with “employees” and “those who” but then at the very end they said “women’s health company.” Ouch.
Channel 4 is working with period-proof underwear brand WUKA, and will offer employees the chance to trial its products as a more sustainable alternative to tampons or pads.
The company cited research suggesting that 89% of people who menstruate have experienced stress or anxiety at work due to their period.
Back on track! Well done! (Are we quite sure “menstruate” shouldn’t be “peoplestruate”? Have we researched it?)
But the chief exec isn’t playing.
Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon said: “Most women will have 12 periods a year for 40 years. That is a huge amount of time, yet we don’t talk about women’s health much or what impact it might have on equity.
Women? What are “women”? We don’t know this word.
The launch of the new policy saw employees attend a panel discussion on people’s experience of periods, hosted by the company’s Equity and Inclusion team.
That’s better. Highly insulting, just as it should be.
You jest, but I recently saw a campaign poster for the city state of Bremen with the Social Democrats campaigning “für Bremen und Brewomen”. I’m sure it won’t be long before the party is reeducated to add more nonsense to the slogan. Perhaps in the next election they’ll be “für Bremenschen”, which would at least be a fully German pun (unless of course they fear being seen as right-wing extremists for using German wordplay in Germany).
In the meantime, you can rest assured that in Germany, we’re allowed to use the word “woman” — indeed we may soon be required to, as long as the “woman” in question is a biological male who feels he really is a woman on the inside and asserts his hurt feelings in a court of law. A court in Frankfurt recently decided to forbid the host of a blog from allowing a specific trans women to be called a man with no qualifications in the articles he publishes. The linked story is in German and I cannot find any English sources who’ve covered it yet, but I will provide a summary:
Writer Judith Sevinc Basad published a piece discussing the trans journalist Janka Kluge in which the former referred to the latter first as a “trans woman”, then a “biological man”, and lastly without qualification as a man. Kluge took the blog’s parent company, Rome Media GmbH, to court in order to force that parent company to remove the offensive “misgendering” — and though the linked article does not specify potential remedial actions, I have seen rumours that a refusal to comply could come with a punishment of 250 thousand Euros and/or six months imprisonment for the owner of the company. The case is not over, thankfully, and Rome Media are appealing the decision…but if they lose, this could well be the beginning of a lot of nonsense in this country.
The plaintiff’s lawyer is hopeful. He (I am assuming, based on his name and the picture at the bottom of his own summary of his victory) says that “…though the state court made a decision in this specific case, the decision will nevertheless have a signalling effect.”
The linked article has some other typical German-isms worth mentioning, such as hiding the fact that the actual author if the piece is a liberal feminist with a Turkish background while taking pains to point out that the head of Rome Media was the former chief editor of the widely-publicized Bild magazine and also by the way did you know he has a YouTube channel entirely unrelated to this at all but it has been deemed “right-populist”. (Though to be fair, Basad’s ethnic background is eminently inferrable from her name…on the other hand, the whole issue is about a certain totalitarian refusal to make eminent inferences in the first place.)
Germany has always had a different relationship to freedom of speech (and to freedom in general) than the English-speaking world. The inequality doesn’t always go in one direction, either — for example, German trespass law is much more lenient than American or Canadian law, with hikers being able to walk through unfenced fields and orchards and woodlands without having to give a thought to whether the land is public or private, as long as they don’t have to manipulate a barrier and as long as they don’t damage anything. (If a hiker does damage something, like a row of crops, he’ll be expected to reimburse the farmer but won’t face criminal penalties unless he refuses.)
But Germany doesn’t have “free speech” as Americans know it. We have “freedom of thought”, and this freedom (as with most freedoms guaranteed with the Basic Law) has escape-hatch provisions that tend to render it less and less effective over time. To be specific, Article 5 of the German Basic Law guarantees that:
“Everyone has the right to freely express and to distribute his opinions in word, in writing, and in images; and to educate himself from generally accessible sources without hindrance. The freedom of the press and the freedom to report through the airwaves and via film are guaranteed. Censorship will not occur.”
That sounds great! In theory it is even more comprehensive than the First Amendment (noting that Article 4 of the Basic Law also covers religious freedom). But, as with most articles, there is a catch. This catch reads “These rights find their limits in the regulations of the general laws, in the legal provisions for the protection of children, and in the right of personal honour.” That means that any law limiting the above-enumerated freedoms can be justified by just about anything as long as the law is generally applicable, or as long as it can be said to protect children or the “right to personal honour”. (There is a further exception to this exception, wherein art and science and research and teaching are affirmed to be “free”, but in the same clause there is a double-bluff exception that “the freedom of teaching does not absolve [one] from adhering to the constitution”.)
The plaintiff’s lawyer says “Nobody should have to accept being assigned to the wrong gender”, and further that “misgendering is a grievous encroachment into general personal rights, and can have legal consequences”. During the proceedings, the lawyer claimed that several studies proved negative outcomes from being “misgendered”. And while the linked article does not mention what “legal consequences” Rome Media will face should it lose its appeal and refuse to abide by the censorship the Frankfurt court has laid down (despite the German Basic Law promising no censorship will take place), the company could face hundreds of thousands of Euros in fines and its owner may face an actual prison term.
This is all happening before Germany passes its upcoming self-ID law, which the government may or may not actually be competent enough to do; that law would, if passed with the provisions its supporters insist upon, explicitly add “misgendering” to the catalogue of civil offenses for which individual citizens can be fined. It would also allow children as young as fourteen years old to change their registered sex once per year and to pursue publicly-funded “gender medicine” without the approval, or even the knowledge, of their parents.
In short, Germany is on the cusp of instantiating the gender cult as an official state religion, with compulsory adherence and legal penalties for heresy and blasphemy. My leftist friends in Berlin assure me this country is far too conservative for such a thing to come to pass, and it is true that the average German has no idea this is even happening, but the elites have very nearly made it a fait accompli. I am very curious what will happen next.
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I wonder if that is because hormone tests are potentially used by trans women? Failing to call a trans woman a woman is inexcusable.