Republicans are on the offensive, and ‘Tampon Tim’ Walz is to the rescue | Arwa Mahdawi

Watch out world, Republicans are on the offensive. Still smarting from being called "weird", it looks like a bunch of GOP strategists got in a room this week to workshop devastating nicknames for Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. After combining their dozen or so braincells, they came up with a winner: Tampon Tim. The name has been trending on social media as people on the right desperately try to make #TamponTim stick.

Apart from the fact that it alliterates, what prompted this moniker? Well, in 2023 Walz signed a wide-ranging Minnesota education bill that, along with a number of other provisions, mandated public schools offer free menstruation products in their bathrooms.

To anyone with an ounce of common sense, this sounds like a great thing to do. Tampons are expensive! And "period poverty" - the inability to afford menstruation supplies - is a serious problem in the US. According to a 2021 study commissioned by Thinx, a period product company, 38% of US teenage students who menstruate said that they "often or sometimes cannot do their best schoolwork due to lack of access to period products". A 2019 edition of the same study also found that more 84% of students in the US have either missed class time or know someone who missed class time because they did not have access to period products.

For a long time, period poverty was an overlooked problem; in recent years, however, there has been a wave of legislating to address it. According to the Alliance for Period Supplies, 28 states and Washington DC have passed legislation to help students have free access to period products while in school. So, while the bill Walz signed was commendable, it wasn't radical in any way - it was part of a nationwide trend to combat a serious problem.

I've got to hand it to the Republicans, it's quite difficult to turn "implemented a mainstream policy making kids' lives easier and helping them stay in school" into something negative, but it seems they are always happy to try. Predictably the right has been using the bill as a way to attack, not just Walz, but trans people.

"As a woman there is no greater threat to a woman's health than leaders ... who support putting tampons in men's bathrooms in public schools. Those are radical policies Tim Walz supports," a Trump campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt,told Fox News on Tuesday.

The actual legislation, I should be clear, does not explicitly state that tampons should be put in men's bathrooms. It says that free menstrual products "must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades four to 12". But the very idea that a policy might be inclusive and help trans students seems to drive Republicans up the wall.