Waitrose, a high-end grocery store chain in the United Kingdom, is going “gender neutral” for Mother’s Day (known there as “Mothering Sunday”), offering a series of cards that are “gender neutral,” just in case your mum happens to be your dad, or she prefers to be known by a series of unconventional pronouns.
The purpose of the shift, Waitrose says, is to make the holiday more “transgender friendly,” reports The Times UK. Since gender is just a fluid concept, why use an archaic word like, “mother” to represent a specific relationship a child has with its primary caregiver (or, in the case of families who don’t abide by traditional gender norms, its secondary caregiver)?
Waitrose says it’s “broadening out who the cards can go to, whether it’s grandmas or transgender mums.”
The collection includes several “mum” options for non-traditional families, including cards for kids who have two mothers, cards for kids whose dads are their mothers, and cards for people who are simply mother-like to other individuals but who may not be their actual mothers.
Trans activists in the United Kingdom are overjoyed, and even compared their progress at naming the day “Mothering Sunday” to that of the United States, which insists on maintaining a backwards embrace of “Mother’s Day.” Some, though, feel the holiday’s un-gendering has not gone far enough. Schools in the U.K., The Times reports, have changed “Mothering Sunday” to “Parenting Day” or “Special Persons’ Day” to avoid any offense.
In the U.S., there is a similar push for more inclusive Mother’s Day cards, however that’s been driven largely by the breakdown of the nuclear family rather than the emergence of transgenderism as a cultural phenomenon.