War of the noses

Last week, a small group of self-proclaimed gender critical feminists on Twitter blew up over a change to the logo for Women’s March, the organization that put together several nationwide marches since Donald Trump was elected in 2016.

The new logo still features the organization’s trademark three right-facing facial profiles, but the design has been simplified, removing the prominent eyelashes on all three figures, and the short hair on the third face. It also adds a prominent aquiline nose on the first face.

It was this nose that set off the gender criticals, who claimed that the face was meant to be male, decrying that an organization called “Women’s March” would “center males.”

Much of the reaction was driven by discourse from the week before when the Women’s March Twitter account clapped back at gender critical critics, leading the more conspiracy-minded Twitter TERFs to claim that the logo redesign was meant as a poke at them personally.

This claim, of course, is ridiculous. Women’s March is a very large organization, and it would take much longer than just a week to commission, design, and release a new logo. The paperwork alone in getting the trademark would take longer than a week.

There’s also a much simpler explanation for the new design. The original founders of Women’s March were criticized for associating with a wildly antisemitic public figure in the past. And though those founders are no longer associated with the March, the new logo could just as easily be meant to represent semitic faces. After all, not every woman has lush eyelashes and upturned pixie noses, and it shouldn’t be controversial to say so.

Loads of cisgender women (cue the angry replies telling me cis is a slur that always come when I say this in a Medium article), pointed out that their own noses resembled the one shown in the new logo.

The hilariously unhinged gender critical reply was to claim the face has an Adam’s apple. When it was pointed out that there is no Adam’s apple in the image, they claimed it was deliberately cropped out.

A screenwriter would reject this dialogue as too insane for a film or show, but this is the obsessive little world that this anti-trans bigots inhabit.

Much of Twitter, as Twitter is wont to do, took the piss out of these people, obviously, because they’re unserious and overly self-important, while lacking perspective.

But there is a more insidious side to this discourse that should be worrying to the general population. These people are projecting their own gender biases onto inanimate pictures. These people seek to make the rules of society, in order to stamp out the trans people they find uncomfortable to be around, but their policing will apply to everybody.

When they say that long, or prominent, or hooked noses mean the person owning such a nose, is male, that is a major problem. They want to create laws and rules of society where the gender and sex of all women are constantly policed in the name of “protecting women.” It’s a short leap from claiming the Women’s March logo has a long nosed male face to women with long noses getting violently thrown out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, or rape support centers.

There is no one right way to look as a woman, the new logo represents that. That TERFs take issue with that should worry everyone.