In commemoration of “Menstrual Hygiene Day,” whatever that is, the Labor Department offered five suggestions “employers can take to help menstruators thrive at work.” The official recommendations provided by President Joe Biden‘s administration include allowing darker colored uniforms to accommodate “an unexpected period or heavier flow” and educating and training “workers and managers about the symptoms of menstruation and how they can impact employees at work.”
From branding women as “menstruators” and “birthing persons,” the president has persisted in erasing the scientific and syntactical reality that there already exists a term for the biological specimens capable of menstruating. But erasing the mere existence of women with the intention of placating a fringe political interest is perhaps less offensive than how exactly it erases the entire gender. For ostensibly progressive purposes, women are stripped of all the gravity included in that term and instead reduced down to the biological functions of bleeding and breeding. And the man in charge is doing so precisely to include biological men in the word that used to mean “woman.”
Per the data aggregated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last year, women comprise 47% of the nation’s labor force, including a slim majority of our managerial and professional class, three-quarters of our healthcare staff, and nearly all of our school and social service workers. The left-leaning Center for American Progress extrapolated from BLS data that women produced nearly $8 trillion, or about 40% of our annual economic output. That’s excluding the unpaid labor of child care and elder care, which women spend nearly twice as much time performing as men on average.
And yet, in the attempt to broaden the definition of “women” to include the biological men who identify as women, the Labor Department dilutes the term to relegate and reduce the female sex to menstrual cycles. To include biological females who identify as men, will Biden be fine with us replacing “men” and reducing them to “wankers” or “ejaculators”?
Of course, the infantilizing advice offered by the Labor Department gives the game away. Behind every proclamation that women are special girl bosses is the real assumption that we are such fragile and hormonal crybabies that we can’t remember to replace our tampons on time and must be accommodated by emotional support bosses who learn to track when we’re PMSing. Rather than an annoying but mostly innocuous biological function that we learned to deal with privately when we were 12 like any other call of nature, the Labor Department’s lamentation that “the taboo nature of menstruation has likely contributed to the lack of understanding” seems to fetishize the commonplace and suggest we turn a universal but private experience into a public but somehow exotic and privileged one. Take it from any female ranging from a middle school girl to your great-grandma: it’s really not anything worth talking about.
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I am positive that there are plenty of transgender folks who abhor this nonsense and simply wish to cope with their gender dysphoria by calling themselves Karen instead of Kevin. But even if they’re the majority, they’re not the vociferous and controlling muscle of the movement that seems more interested in transing the children and erasing women than securing the right for grown adults to dress and name themselves as they please. This activist faction’s obsession with reducing women to “menstruators,” locking biological women up in prisons with male rapists, and pretending trans women also PMS is better understood as its desire to fetishize and appropriate womanhood rather than join some sort of sisterhood.
Women, like literally all of God’s creatures, are capable of remarkable things. Bleeding for five days and not dying? It might be the least of our achievements.