Costa Coffee, the world's second-largest coffee chain after Starbucks, is facing a boycott over its effort to normalize transsexuality...
Costa Coffee, the world's second-largest coffee chain after Starbucks, is facing a boycott over its effort to normalize transsexuality and the elective mutilation of women. The hashtag #BoycottCostaCoffee is now trending on Twitter.
Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola, recently rolled out a mobile store featuring a mural of a cartoon woman sporting double mastectomy scars.
Maya Forstater, co-founder and executive director of the British nonprofit Sex Matters, told the Telegraph, "The cartoon-like picture of a young woman who has had her breasts surgically removed is shocking and irresponsible."
"Young women are being sold a lie that if they have their breasts removed and take hormones they can become men, or at least avoid being women," added Forstater.
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, added, "It’s disgustingly irresponsible of Costa to suggest - sell - even glorify - mental distress, bodily dissociation and self-harm among teenage girls. ... Costa presumably thinks it’s being ‘inclusive’ with this messaging; in fact it’s helping to fuel a social contagion and medical scandal masquerading as a social justice movement."
James Esses, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists, a U.K.-based advocacy group of counselors, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists "with a shared concern about the impact of gender identity ideology on children and young people," similarly took the company to task over the graphic.
Esses wrote to Costa Coffee Monday, asking, "Could you kindly explain why you are glorifying irreversible surgery performed on healthy breasts of women for a mental health condition?"
Women's rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen suggested that the company is making light of a traumatic procedure that women with breast cancer often undergo as a means to save their lives.
"For those women, it's extraordinarily painful," said Keen. "And to promote [cosmetic mastectomies] and celebrate it as if it's some sort of brave and courageous journey as opposed to a journey into never-ending self-loathing, I think, absolutely, it's a real insult to women who, through no fault of their own, have ended up having to have their breasts removed."
Laurence Fox, leader of the U.K.'s populist-right Reclaim Party, tweeted, "Coffee sellers and high priests in the celebration of child mutilation. Anyone I see with that blood red cup is encouraging children to irreversibly destroy their healthy bodies. Pure evil."
In another tweet, Fox wrote, "Voluntarily cutting off healthy breast tissue, or worse being manipulated into doing so, doesn’t make you a 'Trans man[.]' It makes you a permanently mutilated woman. The use of terms like 'trans man' is just social engineering. Language matters."
Canadian clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson wrote, "How now @CostaCoffee? Time for a @Budweiser moment?"
Peterson was referencing the successful boycott of Bud Light over its partnership with transvestite Dylan Mulvaney — a boycott that has led to corporate layoffs, an estimated market-value drop of over $10 billion at Anheuser-Busch, a decline in Bud Light sales exceeding 26%, and the brand's loss of top 10 beer status.
The Daily Mail reported that groups that seek to protect children from the irreversible mutilations, such as those promoted by LGBT activists, have similarly lashed out against the chain.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, director of Transgender Trend, suggested that "teenage girls are the target" of this particular work of corporate agitprop.
"It's caught up under the Pride flag, being inclusive and celebrating diversity, but actually, you are encouraging children to think they need to undergo unnecessary medical treatment affecting them for the rest of their lives," Davies-Arai told the Mail. "This is being pushed on children as if having a major operation is just the same as changing your clothes."
Tanya Carter, spokesman for the Safe Schools Alliance, told the Mail, "It's almost unbelievable that Costa would do something so crass and irresponsible as to use this image."
The company has confirmed the existence of the mural and stands by its choice, telling GB News in a statement, "At Costa Coffee we celebrate the diversity of our customers, team members and partners. ... We want everyone that interacts with us to experience the inclusive environment that we create, to encourage people to feel welcomed, free and unashamedly proud to be themselves."
Costa Coffee added, "The mural in its entirety, showcases and celebrates inclusivity."
Malcolm Richard Clark, documentarian and co-founder of the British advocacy group LGB Alliance, suggested that the coffee chain had jumped into the deep end of LGBT pandering to "try to deflect from previous bad publicity. Costa was recently accused of treating its staff so badly it had to agree to an independent audit."
Notwithstanding the company's rhetoric about generating a feeling of welcome, in 2019, workers complained of mistreatment, with one indicating they "were not treated like human beings," reported the Sunday Times.
Clark concluded, "One day maybe dysfunctional corporations will try not to tap into such pathological well-springs in search of profits. Instead they could encourage their young customers to accept themselves and their bodies as they already are. I'd drink to that."
Coca-Cola's coffee peddler is hardly alone in the promotion of female mutilation surgeries.
TheBlaze previously reported that footwear company Dr. Martens has similarly come under fire for advertising shoes featuring a gender-dysphoric woman with double mastectomy scars.
While Costa Coffee presently has a far greater presence in the U.K. than it does in the U.S., the company reportedly seeks to steadily expand in America. In addition to automatic Costa Coffee Smart Café machines and the beans it pushes in various locations, the chain began opening physical locations last year, starting in Atlanta.
Since the company has yet to blossom in the U.S., an American Bud Light-style boycott could prove consequential.
Costa Coffee trans mural featuring mastectomy 'an insult to women who have had breast cancer'
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