In any grocery store, the strong prevalence of #gendered products is hard to miss. Most of the time, this gendering is completely unnecessary: soaps, deodorant, hair color, razors, clothing, and birthday cards (generally) all provide the same function regardless of who’s using them, and there is no reason why the smell, the images used, and so on should be cause for restricting items to only men or only women. This takes a particularly heavy toll on #trans and #nonbinary people, and I can speak from personal experience how difficult it is having to misgender myself, simply because I need to use a product where every option has some binary gender attached to it. Issues may arise for binary trans people as well, for example, if they have to buy something like vitamins which are specific to their sex coercively assigned at birth, but which instead make reference to gender in conflict with their actual gender identity. What is ultimatley at issue is that under the #consumerism and #capitalism -based culture that we live in, we are forced through our purchases to participate in, support, and perpetuate a system which forces everyone to be categorized by binary gender as early as birth (gendered birth cards, gender reveal parties, etc.), which reinforces #stereotypes of the images, colors, smells, and activities that people in those gender categories are required to conform to, and which lacks—or rather does not make the effort to offer—a trans-inclusive language of talking about the products that do have to be particular to different types of bodies and to different physiologies based on the sex assigned at birth, the current bodily sex, and so on.
SB