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Campaign Featuring Transgender Men Draws Ire Toward Trans Women
“Why do all these men so desperately want to be women?” A Facebook user asked.
The campaign launched by Luteal, a company selling products to promote menstrual health and symptom relief, appeared last month and has since gone viral. In an image released on the official website prefacing Luteal’s mission to promote education and inclusivity when approaching the topic of periods, ten transgender men and gender non-binary people stand in their white underwear marked with a red blood stain. The caption reads “People Have Periods.”
Since the image from the powerful Bleeding Beyond The Binary campaign appeared, conservatives and religious zealots alike have re-posted the image and proceeded to ridicule the subjects. Many of those who have taken to social media to lampoon the photo have, awkwardly, presumed that the subjects photographed are transgender women… or “Biological men cosplaying as women!”
A post on Facebook from Sheologians, with over 31,000 followers, lamented that “Women are being erased;” A common, baseless argument often leveraged by gender critics to attack the identity of Transgender women they accuse of co-opting womanhood. The page goes on to default, once again, to yet another all-to-familiar tactic to incite fear- that of transgender women using public bathrooms.
Falsely believing the photo is representing transgender women who are “pretending” to have periods, many launched public attacks on transgender women, often citing the absence of Fathers or strong male figures that allowed their sons to be feminized. Another said “Show me one man who could have a period and survive 2 minutes without crying for his mama. THEN let’s see if they still think “people” have periods.”
The founder of Luteal, Alexa Perry, a queer, non-binary person themself, made it clear in their statement that the focus of the effort is to resist minimizing and normalizing the pain presented by those who experience menstruation and instead listening with compassion, understanding and awareness. It reads;
“It is for this reason that I feel a deep obligation to honouring the gift of this knowledge by including queer and trans people in everything we do. Our People Have Periods campaign is our way of capturing…
