Watching Criminal Minds and there’s this one episode, probably from 2007/8, in which the murderer refers to his victims as ‘bleeders’ and they take a second to work out that he’s referring to periods (as opposed to like these women bleeding because he cuts them open and shit) and specifically call the term bleeder misogynistic.
Can we go back to when bleeder was a creepy term that misogynistic men and incels used and not a common replacement for the term woman and female in the name of being inclusive?
“Even as the class of ‘women’ becomes ‘some males and some females, with no objective traits in common’, female bodies continue to exist. But when they need to be mentioned, there is no word for them. The result is that the very people who berate opponents of gender-identity ideology for ‘reducing people to their genitals’ insist that females are referred to as body parts and reproductive functions. Governments, companies, charities and media outlets now talk of ‘people who menstruate’, ‘pregnant people’, ‘abortion seekers’ and ‘birthing parents’, where they would once simply have said ‘women’…
…This language carves women up into pieces to be used for sexual and reproductive services. It is reminiscent of porn sites, where visitors are invited to search according to body part and activity of interest, or the surrogacy industry, where children are bought in bits – eggs from an ovary-haver, gestational services from a uterus owner and nutrition from a human milk feeder. Women become orifices, providers of genetic material, vessels for growing offspring and milch cows.”
Helen Joyce, from “Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality”
