Transmasc Life Under Attack as GOP Taunts Tim Walz as “Tampon Tim”
There’s an opportunity here to normalize trans men and boys.
by Evan Urquhart
When it comes to attacking Kamala Harris’ running mate the GOP is falling back on their one play: Transphobic panic. Right-wing creeps such as LibsofTikTok and Megyn Kelly have united in mocking Minnesota governor and VP candidate Tim Walz as “Tampon Tim,” and are claiming (falsely, it turns out) that Minnesota law mandates placing menstrual products in boys bathrooms at public schools. The gambit creates a risk, but also an opportunity, for the transmasculine community, who are often rendered invisible when discussions of trans issues take place.
Walz’s nasty menstrual moniker is a reference to a 2023 law, advocated by students, passed by the legislature with bipartisan support, and signed by Walz, that mandates the provision of menstrual products free of charge for students in grades 4 through 12. The law’s language is gender neutral, which is something student advocates fought for to ensure trans boys and nonbinary youth would not be forced to use girls’ bathrooms in order to benefit from it. The neutral language is the sticking point for the right, who claim it means schools are putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms.
This does not actually seem to be the case. In an editorial supporting the law, the Minnesota Star Tribune quotes school administrators and their representatives who pushed back on the caricature of tampons in the boys’ room. They say the law is flexible, and in practice hygiene products have not typically been placed in “traditional male-only” bathrooms but in unisex bathrooms, nurses offices, and girls’ rooms.
So, it seems like tampons and pads aren’t actually being placed in boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota public schools, but here’s a thought: They should be, and one day they will.
There are trans boys who use boys’ bathrooms and get their periods. They should be able to access and use menstrual products in those bathrooms without fear.
Obviously, this is not the case today, in Minnesota or most public schools. While there are states that do mandate the provision of menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms, incidents of vandalism and rage by cisgender boys place the safety of the boys who need these products in jeopardy. Shame and gender dysphoria are another factor that make trans boys unlikely to feel comfortable accessing menstrual products from dispensers at communal restrooms in school. Many such boys are stealth, meaning that their peers won’t know that they are trans.
Media stories about “Tampon Tim” have focused on period poverty and the rightness of providing access to menstrual products for teenage girls, or else they’ve focused on debunking the false claim that Minnesota has put tampon dispensers in bathrooms for boys. The one thing no story has focused on is the needs of transgender boys, not even inclusive outlets such as 19th news or Pink News. Trans boys in these stories are an afterthought at best, their needs and experiences treated as an inconvenient distraction from the main point of the stories, which is generally defending Tim Walz.
It should go without saying, but Tim Walz, a governor of a whole ass state and the Democratic candidate for VP, is not as vulnerable or powerless as transgender boys.
Just as same-sex marriage went from unthinkable to a punchline to an accepted reality in a few decades, tampons in boys’ bathrooms can too, and they should. But in order to get from here to there, trans boys need recognition, not as a thought experiment, an afterthought, an inconvenience to pay lip service to, but as real young people who have to get up in the morning and go to public schools where other boys are liable to rip tampon dispensers off the bathroom wall in rage.
Jokes and anger and vandalism exist in context, alongside endless misgendering calls to “protect” teenage girls from becoming trans boys. Taken together, all of this stuff has the same goal: To stop trans boys from being accepted for who they are, to prevent them being recognized as having the same right to safety and acceptance as everybody else.
These young men are not freaks, they’re not girls, they do exist. Sometimes they bleed. Monthly bleeding as a bodily function is not an issue until someone decides to make it one. For trans boys to thrive, we need to allow them space to exist. We can’t do that while we’re running scared from talking about the specific group of people tampons in boys’ bathrooms would be for.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.