Recently, a LGBT retailer called OUT!Wear came under fire for selling “Womyn Born Womyn” gear– if you aren’t aware, WBW is a
transphobic slogan meant to exclude trans women from women’s only events on the basis of that male privilege they were supposedly allowed to keep despite all evidence to the contrary… yeah.
Anyway, the owner of the store finally posted a response. I’m a little less than satisfied, as apparently “I didn’t know” absolves one of the damage they caused by not doing the research. And there’s no comment about the number of people who reported being banned from the page and having their complaints about the shirt removed– but as her single “pre-response response” suggests, maybe they were all just too mean to bother with.
But yeah. So I’ve been thinking about this, and some very basic criteria for determining whether a slogan is discriminatory– ’cause even if you don’t know the history of a slogan, you can still look for clues in the words staring you in the face.
For instance, does this slogan…
_ Celebrate the fact that the wearer belongs to a privileged group over a marginalized one?
_ Promote the exclusion of a marginalized group from a larger group in which they also hold membership?
_ Draw complaints from members of a marginalized group who state that the slogan is demeaning or promotes exclusion/inequality?
In this case, if the first two hadn’t set off alarm bells, the third should have– instead, trans folks and allies were given the boot from the page during the first round of complaints, while comments that were left contain the type of anti-trans speech Christian Extremists would be proud of.
So, question time: what else would you add to the checklist?
