As Kidsleepy noted in an earlier article headlined Wokevertising for fun and profit, advertising has a way of jumping onto the cause du jour head first when it's trendy, but forgetting the issue as soon as a new shiny toy comes along. Netflix's current fascination with transgender issues is an example of exactly this. Today, Netflix invited a trans person to head up the Social media account for them, and they did so by "stanning" Netflix shows that have transgender characters, such as the Babysitters club.
Hi, I’m @rosedommu — a writer, trans woman, and former baby-sitter (those Evanescence CDs weren’t going to pay for themselves!) who NEEDS to talk about episode four of The Baby-Sitters Club and why its depiction of a young trans girl made me cry happy tears ? ? ?
The short answer is money. The long answer is that companies who want to stand out in a world where consumers are very vocal about social justice causes dear to their heart, displaying progressive values is a cheap branding tool. And by cheap I mean all the brand needs to do is let someone take over their twitter account, and that's enough to align themselves with the most recent cause. All board members may still be white men, but if the Twitter account is run by a one-armed unicorn, they score their woke-points. In a capitalist world, corporations want to generate money for their stockholders, which makes them naturally gravitate toward the low cost but high attention causevertising of "taking a stand" that can generate tons of free PR and grab social media eyeballs.
It's easier and much cheaper to demand your employees click through a diversity and unconscious bias training website once a year than to set aside money for higher starting salaries, or junior training, which would go a long way in rectifying the diversity problem as the potential employee pool that could afford to take the job would be greater. It's cheaper for a company to send some C-level employees to a bunch of seminars about women in advertising than it is to set aside money for a daycare service and longer parental leave which would likely keep more women in advertising. It's really cheap to change your company logo to a rainbow flag on all social media, and companies didn't object to hiring openly gay people as their salaries are just the same as straight people's.
Sometimes appeasing the social justice audience with a logo change or Instagram post works to keep the crowd at bay. But not always. People are wising up to this being nothing but cheap actions. All talk and no walk. A lot of companies that showed support for BLM on social media were quickly reminded that their boards and c-suite were all white men. And in the case of this series of tweets, the responses show that the audience isn't receptive to regressive sex stereotypes enforced on kids. Particularly not a child who is in a hospital where his biology is a necessary bit of data when diagnosing what his issue may be and how to treat it. Here are some of the replies to this tweet;
When Bailey comes down with a fever, Mary Anne rushes her to the hospital, where two doctors misgender her. Mary Anne firmly corrects them.
Misgendering is traumatic. This is one of the baseline ways cisgender people can show up for the trans people in their life pic.twitter.com/EyrenC5QDK
"I know you guys are busy, but I want to thank you for looking at Baily's chart & not jumping to conclusions based on Baily's hairstyle or clothing. By doing so, you protect kids who don't conform to so-called norms from a world that says they're incorrectly male/female
— JD Ghassan Robertson جوليا ديانا (@JuliaDRobertson) July 26, 2020
The girl in the blue jumper asks the woman in the blue scrubs for a non-blue hospital gown for the kid, because of course girls can't wear blue.
The kid needs therapy, not having his delusions supported by people he needs to be in authority. Do parents let their sons climb up buildings because they think they're Spiderman? Get tattoos? Sign contracts? Stop going to school because they don't like the teacher? Stop this! pic.twitter.com/4SXucrXrTb
This is regressive. Physicians are tasked to treat our symptoms based on actual biology, not what we would like our biology to be. If a female has abdominal pain, an entirely different set of questions & tests are run.
The fact that this needs to be explained is terrifying.
Some may wonder why the T has become such a big issue it supersedes the rest of the LGB, but again this is about money. Once gay marriage was deemed legal by the supreme court of the United States, and the same in the UK, LGB charities needed another thing to campaign for or they'd lose their donation money. If everyone is gay-friendly now, there is no need for a gay charity. Add to this that drugs like gonadotropin-releasing hormones (GnRH) agonists have lost its original patient market in many European countries, due to severe side-effects, and they're seeking a new market of lifelong users and you have the perfect storm. Originally for prostate cancer sufferers, then prescribed short-term for women like myself who suffered from endometriosis, they're now prescribed to children as "puberty blockers", with unknown future effects on developing brains. There is big money in pharma, big enough to nudge the programming of a streaming channel to expand the market.
