Gillette’s latest advertisement sympathetically shows a woman “transitioning” to be a man with the help of male shaving products.
The risky advert echoes the feminist campaign to blur the biological differences between men and women by suggesting that women can become men with the help of some Gillette shaving products.
The main character says:
Growing up, I was always trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted to become, and I’m still trying to figure out what kind of man that I want to become … I’m glad I’m at the point where I’m able to shave … I’m at the point in my manhood where I’m actually happy. It is not just myself transitioning, it is everybody around me transitioning.
The ad fades out, showing the corporate endorsement of the transgender claim: “Whenever, wherever, however, it happens your first shave is special.”
The advertisement tries to marginalize the public’s view that men should live up to their natural biology-based masculinity as a natural complement to women’s natural biology-based femininity.
Instead of associating their shaving products with the valued idea of masculinity, Gillette’s managers associate their products with the feminist claim that men’s masculinity is unrelated to biology and is instead “socially constructed” by vague forces in society.
This feminist claim that the two male and female sexes are “socially constructed” is a vital political foundation for the transgender movement, which is now urging many teenage girls and boys — including depressed girls and gay boys — to reconstruct their bodies with the aid of surgeries, drugs, and hormones.
But these teenage decisions have lifetime consequences. For example, teenage girls who start taking the male hormone testosterone quickly and irreversibly change the tone of their voice. A small but significant number of girls remove their breasts, despite the risk of pain and regret.
A growing number of “detransitioned” women are reversing their claim to have switched sex, and are protesting the lack of caution within the medical industry. “There is a rush to get hormones … even if you are not 100 percent sure you are trans,” one young woman argues in her Twitter channel, @gnc_centric:
The Democrat Party fully backs this ideological claim and says that federal laws should help people liberate themselves from their bodies to choose the “gender identity” which they prefer.
Polls show the public opposes this transgender trend and also opposes the feminist demand to blur the two different, equal, and complementary sexes.
The Gillette advertisement does not explain why it wishes to associate its products with the unpopular idea, but the idea may be popular among leaders in the advertising profession. If so, the ad may win awards for the company’s advertising staff while also reducing the company’s economic value to its shareholders.
The pro-transgender ad follows a 2019 Super Bowl ad by Gillette which suggested that men are violent and reckless.
The company’s financial reports after the Super Bowl advertisement showed minimal growth in revenue from the company’s shaving products.
Background Facts and Figures on Transgender Ideology:
In general, the transgender ideology says a person’s sex is determined by their “gender identity,” not by their biology.
The ideology insists that men and women’s bodies are more or less identical, and it objects to the public’s view of the two sexes as simultaneously different, complementary, and equal. The transgender advocates want to impose their ideology on Americans by establishing “transgender rights” laws, which would require the Department of Justice to penalize individuals and groups that insist that women and girls are biologically different — and have different priorities — than men and boys.
Transgender advocates claim that two million Americans say they are transgender to a greater or lesser extent.
But very few people who describe themselves as transgender undergo transition surgery of the genitals. Only about 4,118 Americans surgically altered their bodies in hospitals from 2000 to 2014 to appear like members of the opposite sex, according to a pro-transgender medical study. A 2018 Pentagon report commissioned by former Defense Secretary James Mattis said that “rates for genital surgery are exceedingly low- 2% of transgender men and 10% of transgender women.”
The transgender movement is diverse, so the different factions have competing goals and priorities.
It includes feminists who wish to blur distinctions between the two sexes, people who glamorize the distinctions between the two sexes, masculine autogynephile men who demand sex from lesbians, as well as revenue-seeking drug companies and medical service providers. It includes wealthy donors, ambitious politicians, and professional advocates. The movement also includes sexual liberationists and many progressives who are eager to liberate people from their bodies, non-political people who are trying to live as members of the opposite sex, high-profile children, troubled teenage girls trying to flee teenage turmoil, and people trying to “de-transition” back to their sex, plus some parents who are eager or willing to endorse transgender claims.
Polls show the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents. In 2017, former President Barack Obama told NPR that his promotion of the transgender ideology made it easier for Donald Trump to win the presidency.
Multiple polls show that most Americans wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that people’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by biology. A U.K. survey shows a similar mix of sympathy for people who say they are transgender alongside lopsided opposition to the ideology.
Yet the gender ideology is rapidly gaining power, aided by huge donations from wealthy individuals and medical companies. In Ohio, for example, in February 2018, a judge forced parents of a teenage girl to give up custody so she can begin a lifetime of drug treatments and surgery that will allow her to appear as a male.
The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender identity” has already attacked and cracked many of the popular social rules that help Americans manage the cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different, and equal men and women.
These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, children’s safety, practices to help teenagers, health outcomes, women’s ideals of beauty, culture and civil society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, military culture, and children’s sexual privacy.