The popular sanitary pad manufacturer Always has requested a parenting website replace terms like ‘women’ and ‘girls’ with gender-neutral language like ‘people’ in articles about periods. The Mail has more.
The words ‘women’, ‘girls’ and ‘females’ should be removed from online articles about periods to avoid offending transgender people, a sanitary pad manufacturer is said to have told a website.
The firm Always reportedly issued the edict to the parenting site Good To Know to make content it sponsored ‘inclusive’.
Writer Milli Hill told the Mail on Sunday she was “outraged” when the website changed all mentions of women or girls in her contribution to a recent article about helping teens with their first periods.
‘Women’ and ‘female’ were replaced with ‘people’ or ‘bodies’ in the piece, entitled How can I help with my daughter’s first period?
When Ms. Hill raised it with an editor at the website, she was told Always wanted it to use “inclusive language” because “not everyone who has periods identifies with the label girl/woman”. …
The author accused Always of “censoring” her to pander to transgender rights activists who claim it is discriminatory to say only women can have periods.
The issue goes to the heart of the row over the erosion of women’s rights in the name of inclusivity. “I was absolutely outraged when I saw the final article, as it was obvious that I had been censored,” said Ms. Hill, author of The Positive Birth Book and My Period: Find Your Flow And Feel Proud Of Your Period!.
“My words had been changed to fit an ideological agenda, which is a rather terrifying thought experiment that I don’t think the people at Always – in their quest for ‘inclusivity’ – have given much thought to.”
In the article, Ms. Hill wrote that periods were “a normal part of the experience of being female”. This was changed to remove the word ‘female’. Meanwhile, a reference to ‘all women’ was also amended so it became ‘all bodies’.
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